How-To Sell in a Shaky Market

Prospects are already tired of hearing from salespeople. They’re even less interested in when budgets are tight - especially if what you’re selling isn’t an absolute necessity.

So, when markets are down and money is under the microscope, how do you capture your prospect’s attention?

Here’s one idea: Break all the rules of Value-Selling

In other words, focus on immediate and long-term cost savings that your service or product will afford your prospect. At this moment in time, that just might be the best hook you have.

A couple tips for selling on price in a professional & respectable way:

  1. Know your numbers: understand how your price matches up against competitors in your space. Know which of those competitors you can beat on price.

  2. Know your prospects: whether it’s through old CRM notes, Klue or another competitive intelligence site, or even by looking at job descriptions - try to get a feel for which of your prospects use the competitors you know you can beat on price.

  3. Leverage your Sales/CS team: do some quick interviews. Which companies have we saved the most money, and how did that happen? These are great stories to tell right now.

  4. Tap into collateral: you likely have a repository of sales collateral which include case studies. Go find the instances where you save companies a lot of money. Share & tell those stories.

Once you (hopefully) identify which of your competition a prospect is using and as long as it’s honest - try capturing their attention with “Typically we see that when customers switch from (Competitor) to us, they save X amount of dollars. That might not be the case for you, but would it be a bad idea to find out?”

Talking about price early in the conversation goes against everything I typically coach towards. But, we’re in pressing times right now and as salespeople, we are responsible for being aware of and tapping into what our prospects and customers care about most.

Right now - that’s saving money.

Agree or Disagree? Let’s hear it in the comments.

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