Buying on Price? Then prepare to pay twice….

Things often happen in 3s don’t they?  At customers & prospects this very week, I’ve come across three separate instances of the same thing.  (I wrote about one in detail just a couple of days ago)

In each case, sales people have yelped in anguish about what happens when their ‘spec sheet’ is placed in front of a decision maker hitherto not involved in their sale.  Both sheets are similar.  Both offerings can do the job.  Yet their competition is cheaper.  Guess what happens next….

The way each seller wanted to handle the situation was different.  Each of them though, realised by the time the visual comparison occured that things may have been left a little late.  Given two similar options, managers about to sanction spend are overwhelmingly likely to authorise the cheaper one.

In my examples encountered just now, they all wanted to make the quote look as different as possible way before the executive shoot-out.  And their way was to load in extra services and associate extra spend with way more extra return.

I was reminded of a wonderful quote from top fella Colin Chapman (he played footie for Chelsea & Bolton in the 70s and latterly has been an enthusiastic, highly successful sales person in the UK packaging industry):

“he who buy’s on price, pays twice”

So when you suspect such a biased pagent is possible later down the line, you could always find out buying history at your target prospect, and it won’t be long before you dredge up a whince-enducing tale of when buying the cheapest nearly brought them crashing to their knees.