Sales people must realise the real value they bring their customers.
- Do you ever feel reluctant to cold call and look for new business?
- Do you make price concessions just to get the business?
- Do you feel undervalued and unappreciated in the sales role?
- Do you fear your customers will leave you for a cheaper alternative?
How much difference would it make, if you had an infallible conviction and rock solid belief that you bring enormous value to your market place, and that your customers hugely appreciate and depend on you?
If you truly believed this, then cold calls would be easier, and you would never need to give away valuable margins to secure business. Your customers would appreciate that though you are more expensive, you bring infinitely more value to them than any of your cheaper competitors. Finally, your own self respect and sense of worth in the sales profession would grow exponentially.
Why then do so few salespeople truly understand the considerable value they bring to the market place? Is it perhaps because we are conditioned to believe that buyers are omnipotent, that salespeople are apparently desperate, needy, pushy, self interested vermin who couldn’t get a proper job? Is it that many salespeople still (regrettably) focus on themselves, their products, their features and benefits and consequently are unable to see things from their customer’s perspective?
Whatever the reason may be, salespeople rarely understand and appreciate just how much value they bring to their customers. As long as this continues, they will always feel uncomfortable cold calling, they will crack and buckle whenever prospects negotiate, and because they don’t understand it themselves, they can’t possibly expect their customers to fully value them. The nagging fear that your hard won customers will one day leave for a cheaper alternative will always be there, dragging down your confidence and pushing you towards a self limiting attitude, rather than an attitude of abundant opportunity.
If you don’t truly understand how much value you really bring to your customers, you are inevitably leaving money on the table, severely limiting the amount of time customers stay with you, and making it infinitely harder to get new customers. What’s more and above all else, you are letting your customers down. Salespeople owe it to themselves and their customers, to realise the value that they themselves bring to the marketplace.