Unless your company is looking to slash margins to nothing, selling on price is a losing game for any sales team. That’s why the best salespeople specialize in selling value: establishing clearly in a prospect’s mind a gap in product quality, customer service, and other traits that makes your product worth the expense. Selling value has become all the more difficult and important a skill in recent years, as the internet has ruthlessly eliminated any obfuscation of pricing–if you have a cheaper competitor, 90% of customers will know that going in. So today, we’re going to discuss five tips for selling value: selling something more than ‘the cheapest solution’.

Pick Your Leads

Not all prospects respond to selling value; there’s a significant number of buyers in any industry who will take the cheapest option above all others, dismissing any downsides for one reason or another.

For that reason, picking leads is important if you want to focus on selling value. It takes only a little research to spot the lost causes–if a company has nothing but ‘cheap’ solutions in place, you can be reasonably certain that they’re not going to splurge on your product.

Form a Rapport

Your ability to form a rapport with prospects will be your single most important skill when selling value over price. You have to be someone the prospect wants to buy from, not with a higher price as a cash grab–regardless of the reality of your product versus competitors’. That’s why the arrogant, slimy salesperson of Hollywood isn’t the kind of person you see at the very top–being unlikeable is a death sentence in sales.

It’s quite important to provoke investment from the prospect as soon as possible for this reason. Make them to spend time or resources on you, and they’ll take a greater liking to you. It’s basic psychology that every salesperson should use to their advantage. It also serves to shorten sales cycles, so it’s well worth the effort.

Know The Industry

If you can’t go toe to toe with your prospects in a discussion of the industry, your word will be worth nothing and you’ll find selling value nigh impossible. That means knowing the competition, knowing how the industry is evolving, and being able to explain where your company and your product exist in that industry. If an innovation has occurred in the field that you don’t know about, savvy prospects are going to go elsewhere.

Know Your Product

Knowing your product means knowing the answer to any strange question the prospect might throw at you. One of the keystones of selling value is knowing the things about your product that AREN’T in the standard pitch. If a prospect raises a common complaint, you should be able to respond with an immediate workaround, the sort of thing your current customers are already doing.

On the other hand, if you’re confronted with an objection you know has no solution–lying isn’t the option. Your relationship with the prospect is in many ways more important than the quality of your product; value is more than the contents of your product’s box.

Customer Service Matters

The forgotten value. The number of excellent products that have lost sales because word-of-mouth decried their customer service should tell you exactly how important this is when selling value, but entirely too many sales teams and marketing divisions forget about the importance people place on customer service. Think of it this way–the rapport you create with a prospect is incredibly important. Every aspect of customer service can serve to strengthen or damage that rapport permanently.

A messy sales process, shoddy support, or a rude company representative going viral can kill your work selling value. Think of negative word-of-mouth you’ve heard in the past…and consider how much of it was customer-service based, not product quality based.