You Have to Pay for Your Competitive Advantage

Salespeople want absolute superiority when it comes to product, service, or solution. They want an absolute advantage when it comes to pricing. You want dominance when it comes to generating a return on a client’s investment. If you had all of these things, then selling would be easy, and you might really, really want selling to be easy—but it isn’t.

All of the ideas above are in conflict. If you have the very best product, service, or solution on earth, you must spend the money necessary to have that advantage in the marketplace. How on earth could you have absolute dominance and also have the lowest price? The additional premium you charge is how you have the very best solution.

If you have the ability to generate greater results than anyone else, a strategy called “customer intimacy,” then you have to make the necessary investments to deliver that level of value. Look, your competitors aren’t stupid. If they have a lower price, they know that they are giving up something when it comes to customer intimacy. Maybe they decided not to make the investment in the additional people. Maybe they don’t want or intend to make the investment in leadership. To reduce their price, they have to give up something.

You have to pick a lane on these things. You can have the very best product, but you are going to have to sell at a price that allows you to deliver the very best product. If your product is your intimate knowledge of the client and the ability to work creating high trust, high value, and high caring, then you are going to have to give up low price to deliver those things.

If you want to sell at the absolute lowest price, you’re going to find that it’s much more difficult when you have no compelling differentiation. You are also going to notice that you mostly sell to difficult clients who care only about price, and who do not value you as a salesperson nor your organization as a partner.