Differentiating yourself from your competitors means more than offering the lowest price on your product or service. In fact, bringing price into the picture before you’ve captured the attention of your prospect is a great way to lose a sale. There are countless creative ways to connect the dots for your prospect without talking price (and I’ve written about this on the blog many times). If you find yourself struggling to demonstrate value and connect the dots for your prospect without bringing money into the picture, I highly recommend picking up a copy of Escaping the Price-Driven Sale: How World-Class Sellers Create Extraordinary Profit, by Tom Snyder and Kevin Kearns. It’s a rather dense book, but I’ve learned many invaluable tips from it. If you have the time, it’s definitely worth the read.
Here’s a summary from Amazon Books:
“Do you frequently discount to win business? Do your customers ignore the differentiators you believe you bring to the marketplace? Does your brand seem to matter less to customers today?
“Great products, stellar service, and a strong brand are just prerequisites today. They no longer differentiate. If you don’t do something radically different soon, you will become unnecessary to customers.
“Integrating the most comprehensive research in the selling profession with years of real world application by leading sales organizations, Huthwaite, Inc., creator of SPIN Selling®, brings you Escaping the Price-Driven Sale. This book builds on Huthwaite’s history of providing groundbreaking concepts with straightforward guidance for execution.
“Sellers who master requisite new skills can dominate their market and virtually eliminate their competition. Those who fail to make the adjustment are doomed to irrelevance.
“Escaping the Price-Driven Sale reveals how sellers can become differentiators themselves by providing insight that customers cannot find elsewhere.”
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