With the sharpness of the downturn in the economy, trying to sell pretty much anything has become significantly more difficult. The technology industry is currently one of the most difficult industries in which to generate sales.
A big part of the reason for this is that information on products is so easily accessible that quite often a prospect will know just as much about a product as the salesman. The technology consumers of today are far more sophisticated and well informed buyers than what they were five years ago.
This means that sales pitches that consist of nothing more than a list of the solutions functions will most likely do nothing more than annoy a prospect as the chances are that they will have researched the product beforehand of they have shown an interest in it.
The fact that there are so many programmers and software developers with the skills to constantly be creating new products and solutions, or (as is quite often the case) duplicate existing technology and perhaps slightly alter or improve it is also a key factor in the difficulty of technology sales.
The reason that this is making the sales process more difficult is that as more and more technology developers replicate software and make it their own, the solutions from different technology companies seem more and more similar to consumers and so they will most likely end up choosing the cheapest one.
What if you could create value for the customers to the extent that the deciding factor was no longer price? Customers are interested in getting the most for their money and so could it be possible for a seller to create that sort of value during the sales process, make potential customers steer away from price fixation and on the whole make them more willing to pay a higher price?
One thing’s for sure, if you’re like most companies out there delivering a pitch, day in and day out, based entirely on products and features, you’re succeeding in only one thing: driving the customer back to price. So then, how does a technology company differentiate themselves today?
In order to compete on another level than price, you should not put all the emphasis on what youre selling, but how youre selling it. The technology industry seems obsessed with PowerPoint, probably more so than any other industry. And all PowerPoint does is describe. Are your clever animations and graphics all that much better than everyone elses? In the competitive marketplace of today, value doesnt lie in the hard sales of products, but in the way in which theyre sold and acquired.
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