Holding Onto Price in a Down Economy

By Mark Hunter

Discounting on price is not a sales strategy. It's an impulsive move made by desperate salespeople. In a tough economy, customers think and expect everything is going to be discounted. Because of this, salespeople feel it necessary to oblige the customer to close the deal. Unfortunately, however, this leads to a downward spiral, much like an addiction to an illegal drug. Once a discount is offered to one customer, it becomes easier and easier to offer it to another one. Before they know it, the discount is being offered to everyone. Like a drug, the "fix" is in the additional sales the salesperson is able to gain. However, just like with the addictive drug, there is a "withdrawal." Sales come at a reduced or a very reduced margin. To make matters worse, the discount ends up altering the attitude of the customer who now believes the real value of the product or service they bought is the reduced price and not the full one. Overcoming this mislabeled sales strategy of offering a discount can only be done when the salesperson is willing to change their way of thinking, despite how difficult it may be.

The first step necessary to correcting the salesperson's mindset is to help them believe in their ability to close the sale. Competent salespeople know why the customer is looking to buy and are able to capitalize on the needs the customer has disclosed. When sales professionals begin to feel the need to discount, it's usually because they don't believe they've established a solid reason why the customer should buy from them. They have failed to ask the right questions to get the customer talking and then avoided the critical skill of following up. When a salesperson has spent all of their time touting product features and not uncovering the benefits to the customer, their presentation may not include what the customer actually needs. Only when the salesperson has taken the time to probe deeper will they truly understand why the customer wants to buy. They need to ask the right questions and then listen to the responses. Then they will be able to capitalize on the information provided them.

The second step necessary to avoid the need to discount is to keep the message on the immediate return-on-investment the customer will receive when making the purchase. Keep in mind that businesses don't buy anything, they only invest in things. Every purchase made by a business is seen as an investment in helping them achieve their own goals. For this reason, the message must focus on the immediate gain that will result from their decision to buy. This emphasis is best brought out when the salesperson ties their questions into exploring how and what the customer expects to achieve immediately, as well as how they've measured results in other purchases they've made.

The third step is found in knowing how to respond when the customer asks for a discount or states that the price is too high. Salespeople need to be ready for these objections and not be concerned or disarmed by them. The first time the customer brings up this issue, the salesperson should not even acknowledge what was said. Often, customers feel an obligation to inquire, and once asked, they've done what they were "supposed" to do. The salesperson should only respond to the customer when they have brought the issue up for the second time, and the way they handle it is critical. They need to ask a question that is pointed directly at the most significant need the customer has. This will serve to shift the customer's thinking back to why they're looking to buy to begin with. After they respond, the salesperson should continue the dialogue with a series of follow-up questions designed to uncover even greater needs. The more the customer is focused on their need, the less they will be focused on a lower price.

Finally, salespeople must keep in mind that there will be times when they must be willing to walk away from an order. Although this can be scary and risky during these tough times, it's essential for them to believe they don't need every sale. Not only does walking away help them realize that there are other opportunities out there, it also serves to strengthen their resolve to hold their line and maintain the value of what they are selling.

Holding on price in a down economy is not easy, but it is doable, and, in fact, it is essential! When sales professionals believe in their product or service with complete conviction, focus on the immediate ROI, and ask the questions necessary to uncover the customer's greatest need, resorting to the mislabeled sales strategy of offering a discount will be unnecessary. Maintaining your pricing integrity in a down economy is truly a winning strategy because, in the end, profit margins are higher, the ability to service a customer is better, and the confidence of the salesperson is greater. Especially in today's marketplace, that's worth pursuing.

Mark Hunter, "The Sales Hunter", is a sales expert who speaks to thousands each year on how to increase their sales profitability. For more information, to receive a free weekly email sales tip, or to read his Sales Motivation Blog, visit http://www.TheSalesHunter.com

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Mark_Hunter

Five Easy Ways to Improve Any Website

- Get the basics right and make the sale.

1. Your Website is a Salesperson not a Billboard
Many companies use their homepage as a huge billboard with flash animation and many more believe that the home page should tell the visitor who they are and why the company is so great. In reality, customers are visiting your website because they’re trying to find something. You need to help them find it.

The most important thing you can do to improve your website is use your home page to sell. You need to view your website as your virtual sales person working 24 x 7 x 365 and equip it with the same tools that you would provide the sales team. Save all the bragging about yourself the about us or company info pages.

2. Make it easy to buy, sign up, get information and navigate
When customers arrive at your website they need to easily understand where to find what they’re looking for.

• The best way for you to do this is to make your navigation intuitive and easy. People have been trained to look to either the top or on the left side for the main navigation. There’s no reason to stray from this format.
• Featuring products and allowing people purchase directly from the home page will increase your sales.
• The ability to sign up for special offers or newsletters and to share your site with friends is also a key element and both should actually be featured on every page.

3. Engage customers with content
Content is not just important in search engine optimization, it’s the key to keeping customers engaged with your website. The more engaging your content is the longer people will stay. And the longer they stay, then the greater your chance of moving a widget (generating a sale, sign-up or download).

4. Integrate rich media: video and podcasts
Adding rich media elements like videos and podcasts will offer your visitors another reason to stay on your site. You should also create individual pages and with transcripts of each podcast because that generates the type of keyword rich content that the search engines love to see.

5. Drive traffic with online and traditional media
Put your URL on everything. While natural search results will generate much of your traffic, online and traditional media should both be used to drive traffic incremental traffic. And generally, more relevant traffic means more sales, sign-ups, whatever.

As we’ve explained in other articles, ideally you would want to use landing pages that highlight the specific offer that your featuring in your online and tradition media.

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Understand your Customers through Research

Don’t worry research is not as hard as it sounds and it’s not something exclusively for huge conglomerates or companies with massive marketing budgets. Every company can do it and more importantly, every company can benefit.

Everything you need to know about customer research you learned in 5th grade science class:

• What is the question you want answered (hypothesis)?
• How will you test it (experiment)?
• What do you results say (evaluate)?

Do those three things and you’ll be able to make better decisions that will lead to better results.

Here are five keys to customer research:

1. The Research Plan.
Begin by figuring out what you know, what you don’t know and what you’d like to know. (what’s the question?) Then figure out how to gather the data (how will you test it?). Will you send out a survey, test offer response, conduct a field study, etc?

Say for example you want to figure out if it makes more sense to offer 20% off or buy two get one free: A simple way to test would be to put together two offer emails, that are exactly the same except for the offer copy and send them to two groups of customers that are roughly the same size.

When the customers respond, track the results. Did more customers respond to 20% off or buy two? You should also consider which one generated more revenue – more customers may have responded to the % off, but the fewer customers responding to the buy two offer might have generated more total revenue.

Evaluate your results. If 20% offer was better, what if you’d offered buy one get one, did you have to offer 20% or could you have offered 15% and gotten similar results, what if you’d offered 25% off?

Results often lead to more questions and as you can see, research isn’t something you do once. The best results come from continuously testing, measuring and evaluating.

2. Current Customers.
Find out what’s working by asking your current customers. You already have an existing relationship with them, and you can find out you what they liked, why they bought and what sets you apart from your completion. Their feedback will give you your competitive differentiators and should be the key sales points.

3. Potential customers (and your competition).
Learn how to improve by asking your competition’s customers or reviewing your competitors websites, sales materials, etc.. What is your competition’s value proposition? How are they positioning themselves? Ask their customers why they chose them over you.

The honest feedback may not be what you want to hear but it’s the key to uncovering your faults and finding out how you need to improve. If you can’t improve, then at least you’ll be able to address the issues pre-sale rather than post-lost sale.

4. Non-Customers (and other industries).
Explore untapped markets by evaluating other industries and talking to non-customers – people who aren’t in the market for your products. Why don’t they want what your selling? What are they looking for? Is there an untapped market in another industry that you or your competitors are missing or could easily exploit? If so, you can gain market share by getting their first.

5. What’s it all mean?
While research can be complicated and technical, it’s also something that can be done relatively easily. Every company already has or can easily start to gather a wealth of information -- from customers, competitors, industry and trade sources. By planning appropriately, then compiling and evaluating this data we can make better decisions, increase sales and improve revenue.

You should also recognize that it’s a continuous process, because the answers to the first question should lead to additional questions, answers and more questions….

Improve Your Take Rate with Landing Pages

In our previous article, Five Steps to Building a Successful Marketing Campaign, we outlined five steps that go into building a successful marketing program. If you’ve read that, then you understand the importance that planning and research have in marketing success. Even if you foolishly elect to ignore all that advice, you can improve your results by doing just one thing differently: use online landing pages to take your customers directly to the specific information that you want them to see. Landing pages by themselves are not the answer, but you can improve your results just by implementing one.

Here are the five steps you need to know to make the most of them:

1. Create One (a landing page).
You’re going to make an offer that customers are going to respond to, don’t make them search for the offer/product again by sending the main page of your site. Take them directly to a landing page that delivers on the offer you sent. From your landing page, customers should be able to do three things:

• Learn about the offer
• Buy whatever widgets your promoted in your communication
• Shop for other widgets

2. Get People to Your Page.
Consumers respond to offers, so you’ve got to have something to offer. Without something to respond to, then your limiting your traffic and therefore limiting your ability to sell. So the first step is to extend an offer with a call to action that drives customers online to the unique landing page that you’ve created for this offer.

3. Know the Context of Your Copy.
You can link to the most appropriate location in your site based on the context of your copy. If you’re talking about the offer, link to the an offer specific page; when discussing a product, then link directly to the product page; if your talking generally about the company, only then should you consider linking to the main or about us page. BUT whatever page you take them to, make sure it pays off on the offer and the customer can still do the three things we explained in the previous step: learn, buy or shop.

4. Measure the Response.
Free Download, 20% Off, Buy Two, Get One Free – your customers won’t all respond to the same one offer equally so it’s important to test variations and to measure the response of each. Since each will appeal to different customers at a different time, don’t completely write off an offer if it’s not successful. Use the response information to better target your messages and offers.

5. Monitor the Results.
The great thing about online is that it’s an extremely flexible medium. You can immediately change the copy or offer if one element is not performing relative to the other variables. To get the most out of your campaign, you’ll need to monitor the response and sales rate of your offer. Know matter how the campaign is performing, you should plan on making some adjustments. Use the data you’ve gathered to make those decisions, then monitor and repeat until the program is complete.

Your marketing efforts and develop a consistent call to action for all your material and plan your channel

For example:

• Get 30% off widget X for more details visit mycompany.com/widgetoffer.

Five Steps to Building a Successful Marketing Campaign

1. Create a Plan
Too often, the success or failure of a marketing campaign is judged on the back end results. Unfortunately, these results can be dramatically impacted by the amount and type planning that was put into the campaign on the front end. More simply put: poor planning leads to poor results.

The stage for success is set at the beginning of the planning process. A proper marketing campaign plan will answer: who, what and how.

• Who do you want to talk to?
• What do you want to say?
• How do you want communicate it?

If your plan does not answer these questions, then you’ve left opportunity on the table.Your plan should also include what you hope to achieve as a result of the campaign -- is it sales, awareness, etc. These goals should be tangible and measurable. Depending on the length of the campaign, you should also outline what adjustments you’ll make to the what and how from above and include those as contingencies.Once completed, you should figure out how will you evaluate the success or failure, what will you hope to learn and how will you use these key learning’s in the implementation of future campaigns.

2. Understand (Research) your customer.
By understanding your existing customers and knowing what your potential customers want, you’ll be able to craft a message that appeals most to each particular customer. Unfortunately, without speaking to every single customer, that’s impossible to know, so you’ll have to put your customers into clusters or segments based on how they respond (or how you expect them to respond) to your messages or offers. By putting customers into groups, you can more easily test your various offers and the response that each generates.Many companies also use various socio-economic demo graphics that are way too complicated to explain here. Bottom line: Research is the key to knowing the who, what and how.

3. Execute the plan.
If you’ve put the time into your creating plan and into understanding your audience, then the execution of the plan should be the easy part. The key here is to execute the entire plan start to finish, don’t stop midway through because you think you’ve achieved your results.

4. Keep score.
You’ve set the bar in the planning process, now measure the response in relation to the bar. Be prepared to make adjustments according to your plan based on the response.

5. Review and repeat.
The planning for your next campaign begins here. By understanding what you did to achieve the results, what worked and what didn’t work, you’ll be able to figure out which levers work best. Over time, this knowledge accumulates (and if you use it) you’ll find that your campaigns become more and more successful.