Unique Challenges of Business-to-Business Service Providers:
Part 5
A difficulty conveying
compelling sales propositions – Building value
perception and moving away from price.
In the last part of this series looking at the unique
challenges of business-to-business service providers,
we shall look at the challenge of conveying compelling
sales propositions. How can we build the perception of
real value and ideally move away from price?
Perhaps a good way of looking at this is by way of an
example. Take for instance computer training. This is
often seen as a cost for companies, not only of the training
courses themselves, but the cost of people being away
from work, not producing, while they are being trained.
What does the average computer training company do?
Well, first of all they probably mail their training
literature to the Personnel or IT departments and tell
them what their employees will learn on their programmes – how
to lay out documents, use spreadsheet and databases – all
for the cost of £X.
Contrast this approach with that of targeting Sales
Directors and letting them know for instance how much
your database training will improve their sales, helping
them maximise the information they have on their customers
and prospects and showing them how this extremely useful
information can be targeted and efficiently converted
into highly effective promotional campaigns/mail shots,
etc. Would they be interested in hearing more?
And if you could back this up with facts on how you
have been able to actually increase clients’ sales
and provide client testimonials on how individual companies
have benefited, how much more would they be interested
in using your services?
The key is to focus on what your service can do for
them, how much it will save them and increase their efficiencies
and/or profit, not on what it is or what you do.
If you would like to transform your business, then please tell me a little bit about
you and your business by completing this brief questionnaire. My assistant
will then telephone you to arrange a convenient time for an exploratory consultation call, to see
whether we would like to work together.