Sales Performance and the Price of Fish

Loved a recent post by the self-proclaimed “A Sales Guy” talking about the fact that when a sale focuses on price, it’s because the relative value surrounding the price has no context.

Take, for example, two salmon fillets, one $6.00 a pound, one $9.50. Same size, same weight. All things being equal, you take the cheaper of the two, right?

But what if the $6.00 / pound fillet was raised in a fish farm with 10,000 other salmon and artificially enhanced—and the $9.50 / pound fillet is freshly caught, true Alaska Salmon?

The context controls the value here.

As “A Sales Guy” states, “There’s no good or bad price by itself. Price is a reflection of everything around it.”

Prospects move to price negotiation almost immediately because they know it’s the one thing they can control now. They don’t have to wait for a “proof of concept,” they don’t have to wait and see if the implementation is going to go smoothly, they don’t have to look at the inevitable workflow, personnel, and management changes that a major purchase is going to require of them. Most of the time, prospects negotiate on price because it’s the easiest way to mitigate the inevitable costs they know they’re going to pay on the back end.

If you can show the prospect the value on the back end, prove how front and back align, discussions of price slip into the background relatively quickly. Not that the cost element ever completely goes away, only that it takes a back seat to achieving the value they’ve just discovered through the quality, strategic insights you’ve already provided.