In the current economic climate, selling anything to anyone is a challenge. Technology is one of the most difficult industries as far as generating sales goes.
One of the main reasons for this is that information is so readily available through the Internet that the prospects of today are far more sophisticated buyers than those of a few years ago. Quite often, buyers will know just as much about a solution as the person selling it.
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.
Another aspect of technology sales that is making it difficult to sell is that there are so many talented software developers and programmers that are constantly creating new solutions or, more often than not, replicating and perhaps slightly improving existing solutions.
The reason this is creating a problem is that as these technology developers create more and more software based on other versions, consumers are seeing the different solutions from different companies as more or less the same thing. Therefore their decision of which one to buy becomes based more or less solely on price.
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 is certain, if you are like most technology companies, reeling off sales pitches day in, day out that are simply based on the features and functionality of your products, then the only thing youre achieving is pushing the prospective customer back to the price. So how can technology companies make themselves stand out?
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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