Making your case for a higher price

As a sales professional, I had a painful conversation with a roofing contractor a few days ago. He came out, measured, actually nailed down a loose shingle or two, and gave very helpful advice on how I should proceed.

He knew that I already had an estimate in hand from a competitor, and gave me what appeared to be a fair, but not overly aggressive price. His price is 15% higher than the other guy.

No problem.

I sell a premium product and don’t mind paying more if I’m going to receive a benefit from the additional up-front cost.

When presented with the other quote, I expected some effort to either justify his price, or match the other price. Neither happened.

He seemed rattled when I started verifying exactly what he was proposing to do, so I showed him the description of work from the competing contractor and asked him to tell me what was different about his offering compared to the other guy.

His answer: “Nothing really. I do really good work though.”

Such a nice guy, and I appreciate his honest answer… but obviously, more of a roofer than a sales professional. When I present the pricing for my premium service, I do so with evidence to support the more costly tools and methods that we employ, and the superior results that we achieve. Without that evidence, I would not expect any intelligent prospect to pay our premium rates.

Back to the wayward roofer… Since he couldn’t differentiate his product and support his premium price, I’ll be hiring the other guy.

How do you support your price in the face of cheaper competition?

Google Wave as a Sales tool?

Just signed up for Google Wave, thanks to a friend that offered me an invitation.

My first impression is that it looks like an awful lot like an email client, with a few extensions to allow collaboration.

However, a bit of reading in the Google Wave Help section reveals a couple of BIG differences. I’m not suggesting that any are good or bad, just different.

1. Anyone that has been invited to a wave can see what you type, as you type it. I’m glad I read this, as I tend to edit emails pretty heavily before I send them. I’ll have to be more careful as I type waves.
2. Anyone in a wave can play back all changes that were made to a wave. Again, be careful what you type! This isn’t an email where you can type a cruel message, then delete it before you hit send. If I understand this correctly, even the edits that you make will be captured. On the plus side, if you are added to the wave late in a conversation, you can play it back to get up to speed.
3. Anyone in a wave can edit ANYONE else’s messages. Not sure how this will work. Could be collaboration, or tampering, depending on context and perspective.
4. Image attachments are downsampled to reduce file size. That hi-res image that you thought you attached to a wave won’t be hi-res when the other participants see it.
5. Waves can be embedded. ie. You could embed a wave in a website instead of having a chatroom.
6. The conversation is hosted, so you don’t have the old email problem of trying to track a conversation when some folks reply to all, some reply just to individuals, some go off topic. Those things can still happen, but they happen in one place where it is easier to follow.

 

I just found http://completewaveguide.com/, which, oddly, is billed as a complete guide to wave.

I pretty quickly wondered how this might be used as a tool for selling. Two scenarios seem likely: collaboration among the sales team, conversations with prospects.

The internal team collaboration use is a pretty straight forward concept… or at least it appears to be at this point.

Conversations with prospects could become interesting as others are brought into the conversation, and the prospects become customers and are handed off to the team that will provide our service. A few potential pitfalls exist here, but I’ll explore those later.

I’ll check back in after I’ve had a chance to play with Google Wave and try some out some ideas.

How do you use, or envision using, Google Wave for sales?

Adversity during a sales call?

Sales people love to recount stories of their amazing sales prowess.

My favorites involve the theme of uncovering true needs that were not on the prospect’s radar prior to the conversation. Anyone has a fair shot at providing a solution for a known problem. Solving a problem that is unknown to the prospect, but provides real value can be exponentially harder.

Harder still is finding a sales person willing to honestly acknowledge the times when they came up short.

Since I am of the opinion that keeping a stumble to myself prevents others from learning from it, I’ll share a recent experience of the less than flattering kind.

I met a gentleman at a conference and had a very brief discussion about his product. It was late on the  final day of the conference and I suspect we both acknowledged feeling a bit of mental overload. We agreed to follow up in a week or two and see if the services that my company offers would be of benefit.

So far, so good.

The next week we exchanged an email or two and set up a time to meet in person. I spent some time getting to know his product and felt pretty good as I entered prospect’s office for our scheduled meeting.

Sadly, that feeling of ignorant bliss stayed with me for the next 25 minutes, or so, as I was given a tour of the facility and detailed overview of the prospect’s products and promotional methods. I likely missed the repeated and obvious clues that I was not meeting the prospect’s expectations because I was truly perplexed. Identifying a clear opportunity for the service that my firm provides to be of benefit to the prospect usually comes easily to me. In this case, I unwittingly found myself stalling as I tried desperately to work out a viable solution to present to the prospect. Not only was I struggling to define a value-added solution, I was also unable to build a case to disqualify this prospect.

Simply put, what this prospect needs is not a perfect match for our standard offerings, but it clearly overlaps with some of our core competencies and key strengths. It would not surprise me if the ideal solution does not currently exists in the market, as this prospect is dealing with cutting edge products and requires an innovative solution.

What brought me to my senses was a very direct, and incredibly appreciated, statement from the prospect that went something like this: “Either tell me about your company and what you can do for me, or this is going to be a very short meeting.”

I’ll go out on a limb and suggest that this is most sales people’s nightmare scenario. Overwhelmed, feeling underprepared, caught off guard by a blunt acknowledgement that failure is directly in your path.

My moment of extreme adversity had arrived.

I thanked the prospect, acknowledged that I was unable to provide the recommendation that I had hoped would become obvious to me as he revealed his business situation, and offered that we adjust the expectation for this meeting. Instead of the original goal of determining if my firm would be able to help promote the prospect’s product, the new goal would be for me to gather all the info needed for the leadership team at my firm to brainstorm potential solutions to the prospects innovative problems. Clearly, this is not what either of us had hoped for, but what options were there?

• Conceded defeat and leave with my tail between my legs? An unattractive option since there may be an opportunity to help this prospect.
• Shoehorn this prospect’s business into the standard offerings that my firm provides? I am certain that this would have resulted in an even quicker and unsatisfactory end to the conversation.

 

Curious how this story ends?

Me too!

 

I expect to work through the potential solutions with my firm’s leadership team soon, and go back to the prospect with either a proposal that is viable and will provide real value, or an acknowledgement that we are not well suited to help, accompanied by my sincere thanks for the opportunity.

 

What did I learn?

1)      It pays to be receptive to the cues and clues that prospects present, and ready to adjust my goals when presented with a puzzle that I can’t solve on the spot.

2)      Sometimes feedback that might sound harsh is the most valuable feedback one can receive.

 

What sales lessons have you learned the hard way?

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Using the iPhone as a tool for selling, part 2

Since I wrote part 1 of this iPhone overdose article, I’ve been to two conferences that REALLY tested the iPhone. Here is how it did in each of the areas listed in part 1:

Was it up to the challenge of supporting all of my essential sales tasks while on the road?

1) Email:

What I predicted: Gmail = good, Outlook mail = short term OK, longer term fail.

What I experienced: Gmail worked like a champ. Outlook mail arrived on time, but I had no email history, as it is stored in the .pst file on my laptop, not on a server. Sadly, I predicted this one accurately. Apple has work to do to make email a non-hassle. Expecting outlook users to have no history might be OK for personal use, but not for business use. I can deal with it for a couple of days to get me through a conference, but no longer.

2) Skype:

What I predicted: fail.

What I experienced: Although I read somewhere that the restriction on VOIP over 3G had been lifted by Apple/AT&T, the Skype app still limits VOIP to wifi. Wifi at conferences is always notoriously unreliable, so the Skype app was useless to me. Good thing my call with Australia got rescheduled! Fail.

3) Presentation aid:

What I predicted: fail.

What I experienced: My first 3 attempts at opening my powerpoint deck on the iPhone were sub-optimal. Missing images, images oriented incorrectly, no animation. In short, not useable. Then I loaded the deck in google docs and found that it was 95% true to the original. The 5% that was missing were things I could live with. I actually ended up with a useable sales aid, although a very small one. Because of the small screen size, I never attempted to use this sales aid. Apple = fail, Google Docs = success.

4) Browser:

What I predicted: Ok, but fail on flash sites.

What I experienced: Unfortunately, it was OK for quickly looking up a company website to get an idea what they do before talking to their rep. The lack of flash isn’t a huge detriment with most corporate websites. However, NHL.com is heavily dependent on flash, which was a problem for me. I am at a complete loss that Apple hasn’t addressed this yet. Baffling. FAIL.

5) Twitter:

What I predicted: success via tweetdeck and hootsuite.

What I experienced: two conferences, one month apart, different result. Tweetdeck was great for the first conference. I set up a group of key folks to follow and a search for the conference’s hash tag. Cool… until my battery was going dead after about 3 hours. That was shocking. By the time the second conference arrived Twitter had introduced lists, and I was making a list for the conference. There aren’t any tools yet to manage lists, let along on the iPhone. I also switched to TwitBird, as TweetDeck only seemed to get search results when it was open. TwitBird would allow me to refresh and get all the tweets that went out while I had the app turned off. I also used hootsuite on my laptop before leaving for the conference to schedule a series of tweets. That kept me from having to tweet as much, and saved my battery a bit. I’ll call this a success, although the apps could be better.

6) Calendar:

What I predicted: success on much needed calendar function.

What I experienced: Neither conference thought ahead and provided the event schedule as an iCal (or similar) file. For the first one I did nothing and relied on a paper schedule. I really did not like that. For the second, I input the schedule in Outlook, which I sync with my google calendar … and I scheduled a tweet 5 minutes before each event. This way I would be able to share my efforts with all attendees that were following the event’s hash tag stream. I found that I never looked at my outlook calendar, did use the tweets to keep me on track, and pulled out the paper schedule a few times as well. The iPhone did it’s job. Success.

7) GPS:

What I predicted: great hardware rendered nearly useless by crippled apps. Fail.

What I experienced: Crippled as the apps are, they still were very useful at getting me where I needed to go, both driving and walking. I’m incredibly annoyed that the iphone Map app doesn’t work like a car GPS (real time ETA, TTS, onboard maps). The experience could have been SOOOOOO much better, but I was able to make do. Thought this would be a resounding FAIL, turned out to be an annoyance laced success.

Eight) (thank you WordPress for turning my “8)” in to a smiley face with glasses… hence the spelled out “Eight”) CRM:

What I predicted: small screen success.

What I experienced: Never could get the data that I wanted when I wanted it. Gave up on PLD at the first conference and never looked back. Thanks for trying, PipeLineDeals, but it just didn’t cut it for me. Given the screen size, the iPhone did OK.

9) Phone:

What I predicted: seamless success.

What I experienced: Insufficient volume. Spotty coverage. Thanks Apple and AT&T for serving me the double whammy. They should call it the iToy, since the phone function appears to be an afterthought. Fail.

10) LinkedIn:

What I predicted: manageable.

What I experienced: I manage a group on LinkedIn called Affiliate Marketing for eMerchants (if you are an eMerchant, you should join!). But I didn’t do any group management while on the road. The LinkedIn app is useless, and the screen too small to use the tools via the browser. Fail.

Ok, what did I miss?

I had hoped to make the trips sans-laptop. For the first conference, I also had an offsite meeting scheduled with a client and had to take the laptop for a presentation. I never took the laptop out of the bag for the latest conference, but that is because I was able to go home at night and do my critical online tasks there. Had I been away from home I would have had to take the laptop along. Sad to report that the iPhone just isn’t up to replacing the laptop for conferences… at least not for me.

Jeff Cress: the Sales Guy
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Using the iPhone as a tool for selling?

As I prepare to head to head to the Commission Junction University conference one of the trade show prep items on my list it to figure out how to use my snazzy new iPhone 3GS as a sales tool so I don’t have to lug my massive 17″ laptop with me. In many ways it is an amazing device, however I am not sure if it is up to the challenge of supporting all of my essential sales tasks while on the road.

Here are the ideas and results so far:

1) Email:

One of the tools I’m using to set up appointments at the conference and stay connected to the office and family back home is email. While my personal gmail is easy to get via the browser, my work Outlook email is on an exchange server that does not store messages. Since I don’t have a .pst file on my iPhone, I’m stuck with crippled email access to pick up new messages as they arrive, but no access to old messages. This is somewhat of a Fail, in my opinion, but I’ll have to deal with it.

2) Skype:

Another mixed bag here, I think. I use Skype to talk to a few overseas clients/prospects so that neither of us have to foot a huge phone bill. It would be less than ideal if I am unavailable to these folks while on the road. Yes, there is a Skype app on the iPhone that allows free Skype calls. However, the app restricts calls to WiFi. I have no idea what kind of WiFi access I can expect on this trip, so I’m leaning towards saying that the iPhone isn’t up to the task for this. Sad really, as the hardware is capable, but a business decision by AT&T/Apple artificially limited functionality.

3) Presentation aid:

Here is my idea… I meet a prospective new client at the trade show and want to use some of my electronic sales aids to help clarify a point or guide a discussion (I tend to be a fairly visual person). In person I would reach for my trusty powerpoint deck on the laptop, or if we are on the phone I might initiate a GoToMeeting so that the prospect can see what I’m looking at on my laptop. I have tried using my standard slide deck on the iPhone and found that most of the slides do not look right. So, it looks like if I want to have my deck and view it too, I’ll have to either lug the laptop, create paper copies (how archaic!), or rework the deck so that it displays properly on the iPhone. Another Fail for iPhone.

4) Browser:

I’m in the internet marketing business, so the thought of traveling without internet access is just crazy. The Safari browser does reasonably well at adapting larger screen content to the smaller screen. However, the one  HUGE drawback is the lack of support for Flash. You would be surprised how many websites use flash to deliver rich content… and subsequently show NOTHING on the iPhone. Apple? Come on! This is insane. Since I’m only out of town for a couple of days, I may be able to get by without the laptop, but in general, this is another FAIL.

5) Twitter:

Yes, this Sales Guy is trying to build an online presence for interacting with clients and prospects via Twitter. And so far, not having great results. Every day I clear out piles of “someone that wants to sell me teeth whitening is now following me on twitter” messages, and automatic Direct Messages from people that I’m following. Pretty much all low/no value stuff. True as that may be, I can’t ignore it and risk missing a REAL message that is hidden amongst the static. Tweetdeck for iPhone is OK, and HooteSuite works fairly well via Safari. Given the limitations of the screen size on the iPhone, I think this is a success.

6) Calendar:

Out of my daily routine, in a different state, living from a suitcase, meeting new people, attending seminars, finding my way around… I’m getting disoriented just thinking about it. My trusty calendar has the potential to keep me on track. I’m loading my appointments in Outlook, which syncs to my google and iPhone calendars. I just tweeted a question to the event organizers asking if they have the full event schedule as a downloadable calendar. Wouldn’t that be SWEET! Otherwise I’ll be constantly looking at my paper calendar to see whats next. How 1990s? I think the iPhone succeeds here, just waiting on the event to give it the data.

7) GPS:

The flight arrives in LAX, then we drive to the conference, and crash at a different hotel at night. Quite a few opportunities to get lost. Between the iPhone gps, map app, and google’s directions I hope to be OK. I’ll give the iPhone hardware full props here, but again am annoyed that the software is intentionally crippled. And no, $100 for the tom tom app is highway robber, I’m not playing that game. No real turn by turn directions on the iPhone, although the hardware would support native turn by turn, with text to speech directions. Nice Apple. Thanks for shafting your customers by crippling the device, then creating a monopoly in the App store so that your chosen partner can have a monopoly. I want to call this a fail because I am ticket at Apple. However, I’ll still be able to use the gps to get where I’m going, just not with easy turn by turn guidance as we drive.

Eight) CRM: (thanks WordPress for making my look like a smiley face with sunglasses)

Props to Pipeline Deals for providing an iPhone app for our CRM software. I’ll be able to keep up with all of my prospect history and record new notes while I’m out. The small screen will make typing difficult, but given the physical restrictions of the device, this looks to be a success.

9) Phone:

Yep, I almost forgot that one. I’ll forward my office phone to my iPhone and should have fairly seemless phone coverage. What sales person can live without phone coverage, these days.

10) LinkedIn:

I manage a group on LinkedIn called Affiliate Marketing for eMerchants (if you are an eMerchant, you should join!). While I can be away from my profile for a couple of days, I really want to stay on top of anything that pops up in the group. the iPhone LinkedIn app is way too limited. Looks like I’m stuck with using LinkedIn via the browser and doing lots of zooming. Not a fail, not a blazing success. Hopefully manageable.

Ok, what did I miss?

Did I get something wrong? I am a rookie iPhone owner. Did I miss something that might make my live easier? Let me know.

As of this moment, I’m leaning towards taking my chances with just the iPhone and no laptop. I bet the conference has an internet kiosk set up somewhere if I absolutely have to get online and the iPhone won’t cut it.

Jeff Cress, the Sales Guy

www.twitter.com/AffiliateMgt

Yola: Selling by giving away rich content?!

As I learn more about selling Affiliate Marketing Management services, I am getting a real education in online marketing, and how to sell things online. Although I am “the Sales Guy”, my formal education is in Marketing. And besides, I was in Pharma for over a decade. Ethical Pharma doesn’t sell anything directly online. But I digress… I stumbled on a sales model that I had seen done MANY times before, with mixed results. Yola.com has adopted the “Freemium” model and is running wild with it. While most online “freemium” services are so crippled and restricted that they do little but cause frustration for those foolish enough to try them, Yola has turned this equation on it’s head and gives a staggering level of website building and blogging tools for free. As I’ve explored the site and set on building this blog two things have consistently jumped out at me:
1) What a slick interface and rich set of tools. Yola’s free service provides more than many paid services that I looked at.
2) While the value proposition on the free plan is impressive, Yola frequently offers premium upgrades, and most appear to be a good deal.

No, this isn’t an infomercial for Yola. I just think that their model makes a great example for discussion.

Feeling compelled by Yola’s implementation of the “freemium” model to make a purchase, I’ve had my eyes opened to the possibilities of the “freemium” model. I always thought that to sell something, one had to preserve as much value as possible, giving away as little as possible for free. What I’m seeing with the Yola model is just the opposite… give as much value as possible for free, compelling the consumer to invest time an energy in setting up and growing dependent on the service. Then offer premium options that really put the product’s value proposition over the top.

On the other end of the “lets give them something for free first, then charge them later” spectrum… Columbia House, circa the mid-80’s. I hate to date myself here, but I suspect that my aversion to “free” offers began with the old “get the first 14 albums for one cent, but you are committed to buy 9 at full club prices over the next 2 years” (or something like that). I ended up with more useless records that I never listened to out of that deal than I’d care to admit. And all right before CDs came out, so I got to buy the good ones again a few short years later.

What sales models have seen that you love or hate?

Jeff Cress, the Sales Guy

www.twitter.com/AffiliateMgt

Yep, it’s trade show season

I’m about to head off to the Commission Junction University 2009 conference in Santa Barbara. I know, I lead a rough life.

I posted a contribution from Nicole at RetailMinded.com on preparing for a trade show. I hope it helps you as much as it helped me.

This will be my first conference as an active vendor. I attended a few shows when I was in pharma, but I was there for meetings and had no responsibility for prospecting and selling at the event.

With a new role come new goals for the conference.

Kind of silly to go without a goal. I’ve got a couple:

1) Promote our client’s programs. This is the overt reason for the trip.

2) Prospect for new clients. Yep, there is a reason the boss is taking the  Sales Guy with him.

3) Learn about the industry. Sure, I’ve been around sales for a long time, but I’m new to the Affiliate Marketing scene. this is my first chance to get a feel for the state of the industry and my company’s place in it.

4) Pick up an award! mgecom, inc. is a finalist for the CJYou 2009 Agency of the Year Award. We have very high hopes that we will return home with some new hardware and bragging rights.

I may not be able to influence the award (although I’ll try… ethically of course), but I will certainly work on behalf of our current customers and let that example impress the prospects that are there. The challenge will be in balancing my sales goal with my educational goal. At any rate. I am sure that this conference will be a huge success.

Check back late next week for a recap of what I learned, and see if I met my 4 goals.