Sales Advice About How Not To Compete Against People Who Are Going Broke

Sales Advice

Sales advice:

you are competing against many people who are going broke trying to sell on low price. If you follow their lead you too will go broke.

In 1900, Paul Nathan wrote a book entitled, How to Make Money in the Printing Business.

I would encourage you, not to dismiss his sales advice and think that this only applies to the printing business. This has universal application.

In this book, he says, “if there is any one thing in the business management of a printing office that particularly commands the utter disapproval of successful printers as being worse than the other evils that beset the trade, it is the cutting of prices. The method of getting work by lowering the price has absolutely nothing to recommend and it is contrary to the common sense.

This is not new sales advice.

When you are tempted to cut price think about this particular quote and what he has to say about this whole issue of price.

The reality is that price is hardly ever THE main criteria in a buyer’s buying decision.

Important, yes.

Critical, hardly ever.

Now, let me give you further proof.

In a study conducted in 64 companies in various industries, the researchers wanted to determine just how important price was in the dropping of a supplier or a vendor.

These companies were surveyed and ask, “what is the reason that you drop a supplier or vendor and go do business with someone else?

The results may surprise.

In only 8.1% of the cases was price quoted or price mentioned as the #1 reason that these 64 companies changed suppliers.

Only 8.1% of the time.

Now if they didn’t drop one vendor to go to business with another vendor because of price what was the reason that they dropped one supplier to do business with someone else?

Drumroll, please.

Here it is: 70.2% of the time that a company dropped a supplier to do business with someone else was because of delivery issues. Delivery. It didn’t get there when it was supposed to get there. It got there and part of it was missing. It got there and some of it was broken. You name it, it was a delivery issue.

Now your prospects, your customers do not care about what excuses you may have about why your delivery was screwed up.

They don’t want to hear about the UPS strike; they don’t want to hear about whatever it may be that somebody in your warehouse forgot to include something and they were sick and their wife was pregnant and she was having a miscarriage and she was, blah, blah, blah.

Your customers don’t care.

They don’t want to hear that stuff.

The quickest way that you can lose a customer is because the delivery was not there when it was supposed to be there in its entirety when it was promised.

The other side of that is that the quickest way you can take business away from someone that you are competing against is to be there when they screw up their delivery. It is a great pain point for a salesperson to exploit when they find a prospect that has delivery issues with their current supplier.

You don’t have to look very far as a salesperson to find companies that are making mistakes relative to delivery issues.


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