brand marketing blog

Every salesperson has faced this objection at some stage of their career. As a young Xerox photocopier sales rep back in the early 80's I would hear this on almost every sales call. Unfortunately, neither my sales manager nor the pricing manager seemed to take much notice of this valuable market intelligence I kept feeding back to them.

The truth was (is), the only 2 reasons a prospect can throw this objection at you is that:

a) They genuinely can't afford it i.e. don't have adequate funds
b) You haven't given them enough unique benefits over your competitors product for them to value your price premium

At Xerox we were usually around 30% to 40% dearer than our Japanese rivals, yet we sold truckloads of copiers in a very competitive and price sensitive (supposedly) market (and during several recessions). The reason we were able to command a premium price was that we had identified a set of unique value propositions that our prospects valued and were prepared to pay for (and that our competitors were unable to match). Sure we lost some deals, but we still had a great hit rate.

The moral of this story is that you CAN command a price premium, even in a recession, so long as you can show your prospect enough additional value over your competitor. It may not be that easy to develop a unique value proposition, but if you don't/can't you won't be around for very long.

The best starting point is to understand exactly what it is your prospect values (their buying criteria) and to craft your offer to satisfy THEIR needs, not yours. Let your prospect define your offering, don't force your favourite feature onto them (that's like forcing a square peg into a round hole). If you don't have a round peg you'd better find one soon.