Tony Bilby doing a white board sell

White Board Sell

I’ve always said that if you’re selling on price you’re not selling.  Robots can sell based on lowest price, but if you’re a great salesperson, and a world class champion, you figure out a way to sell the best product and service possible without sacrificing profits.

Brian Tracy talks about this in his blog article “how to sell value rather than price”

http://www.briantracy.com/blog/sales-success/how-to-sell-value-rather-than-price/

and about selling the value and the benefit of the product or service because price then becomes less important.

Examples:

Who’s going to buy the product?

  • In other words, he recommends profiling and gaining a better understanding of the customer based on their education, background, what motivates or interests them, how they go about making decisions in their organization, and more.

Identify customer problems early.

  • This is really important because if you land a meeting with a high level executive and you are trying to sell a complex solution, like enterprise software, security, business intelligence as some examples, you need to have met with staff at the organization, done research, and are ready to make a recommendation based off your meetings with his or her staff members before you walk into their office.  If you can cite examples, challenges, and working with an executive’s people prior, you may be setting yourself up for a home run.

Make a list of all the product benefits.

Not much explanation required on this one.  You should know your product or technology inside and out.  You should be able to provide:

  • An immediate one or two minute value proposition off the bat.  In case anyone, at any time, asks you what you do, you can respond and gain instant credibility.
  • You should be highly educated on your product and be able to speak to the technology benefits as well as the business benefits immediately.
  • You should be able to white board an overview of your technology or product to anyone any time.  Your white board should make sense to both engineers and business managers.
  • You should be able to articulate time-to-value and return on investment right away.
  • You should be able to address and immediately respond to common customer objections.
Tony Bilby and woman white boarding architecture

IT White Boarding

Harnessing some of these most basic skill sets will allow you to maximize profits, sell on value, and deliver the customer a great solution that makes everyone happy:  happy customers, happy business partners, happy vendors; nothing should be more enjoyable to a salesperson than achieving this important combination!

Tony Bilby