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Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. And did I say - Wrong!
If your attitude and mindset about your products and services before you start the day is:
"Well it's a commodity marketplace and everyone buys on price"
Then you have lost all chance of making any valuable sale before the day has even started.
If you are the company owner or senior sales manager then this is nothing short of criminal. This is the attitude that you feed back to your staff and employees. How on earth can you expect staff to sell at healthy profit margins and sell on value if your whole company mindset is built on price.
This is an attitude that says - "we are rubbish - get out there and sell on price!"
This type of thinking is a terminal cancer that will eat right through the core of the business. Eliminate it and you will prosper.
As a starting point take 10 minutes to write out ten purchase you have made recently and indicate if you can, hand on heart, say they were the cheapest. If not can you rationalize why?
Come on - do it!
How did you do?
Are you eating Lidl own brand baked beans, driving a Skoda, writing with a pencil, dressed in 'George' from Tesco's, making calls on a 5 year old Nokia 'brick' phone, holidaying in Butlins, sitting on a sofa from the local 'seconds' sofa workshop and running your business customer database on some cut up old inbound faxes to save paper?
My guess is a resounding NO.
In one or two cases I might have been close but very rarely do people uniformly buy on price.
Various research regularly points to the fact that around:
20% of people will always buy the cheapest price no matter what.
3-5% will invariably buy the most expensive
75% of people, like you and me, will occasionally buy on price if we have no other reason to base our purchase decision on.
Give people a reason to buy from you other than price. Do not leave them to come to their own conclusions because if they have to it will be price!
Develop a strong understanding of the value you bring to people by:
1) Interviewing your past customers/clients and finding out how they have benefited by working with you. For added impact make sure you can quantify it in money terms, cost saving terms, labour saving e.t.c. If you can clearly demonstrate that your service will come at a fraction of the extra profit made then the purchasing decision comes easier.
2) Clearly articulating your value proposition.
3) Developing a strong guarantee for your services.
Good luck and remember, selling on price is a short term position in the market. Unless you have extremely deep pockets like Tesco and Wall Mart. There will always be someone who can come in cheaper than you.