branded for life

Our sales target is a nightmare. We keep dropping the price but it seems we’re still far from reaching our goals. Any tips?

How does the offer ‘Pay nothing and get two’ sound like? Keep dropping your prices and that’s what you most likely will end up offering to your customers. Using discount to close deals may be due to one of three problems or a combination of them:

1. Your pricing strategy is too high compared to your direct competitors.
2. You are desperate to get your commission or to avoid corporate pressure.
3. You and your customers are not talking ‘value’. So, if it’s a pricing strategy, keep your price just above competition but don’t go too high. Use the difference as a reason to explain why your product is better. This approach will change the conversation to point number three, ‘value’, which is where you always want to be.

However, if desperation is the reason, push your price by 5-10% higher to give yourself a chance to negotiate without losing sweat.

If you are responsible for setting the targets, remember that sales targets are quite useless and in fact damaging to the business. Sales targets force the team to focus on the overall quota without paying much attention to profitability. Year after year, the business will pay the price thanks to shrinking profits and increasing expenses. A more useful approach is Profit Targets. When the sales team thinks profit, dropping the price will hurt their commissions and bonuses. They will think twice before giving away their own money…and that’s just my two cents.

read what others have read

• two cents: promo in wonderland
• two cents: new franchise.
  location ‘unknown’
• two cents: he said some important stuff, I think