Don’t Try to Make Selling Easy

If your business model isn’t lowest price, and it almost certainly isn’t, then you can’t afford to sell price. As much as you believe it would make it easier to sell, it would do nothing to help your produce better sales results. Here are a few reasons why.

Execution Is Impossible

If you can’t obtain the price you need to produce the results you sold, then you will fail your client. Your company’s business model requires that you have the profit you need to execute, and without that profit, you can’t perform. If you sell a value proposition that is customer initmacy, high value, high touch, you simply don’t deliver it without the required profit.

When you fail to execute, you violate the trust of the people who were counting on you. Especially if you sold them your real value proposition. That trust isn’t going to be easily regained—if it ever can be. If you allow your client to underinvest because you needed the business, then you put your needs before theirs.

By trying to make selling easy, you make execution impossible. And you lose clients forever.

Changing the Company

There is another problem with trying to make selling easy by selling price when it’s not your business model: you change the company—and not for the better.

If your company starts delivering something different because you don’t have the profit to deliver what you sold, then your operations people to deliver something less. You start cutting corners, taking shortcuts, or skimping on what’s important, and you tacitly endorse that behavior. Instead of changing their delivery only for the one or two accounts to whom you sold price, your team starts to change their delivery for everyone. If it’s not important to do all of the things your business model is built on for these priced-too-low clients, then why is important to do it for the clients that are paying more?

Think they can tell the difference? Think they can deliver high value, high touch for some and deliver  transactional-commodity value for others? Think again. Over time, you erode and destroy the relationships you have with the clients that bought your real value proposition, the one that has nothing to do with being the lowest priced provider.

You don’t need selling to be easy. You need to be better at selling. You might wish you could sell price because you believe it would be easier, but if it isn’t your company’s value proposition, it isn’t easier; it’s dangerous.