How To Command Top Prices For IT Solutions And Win The Business Every Time

How To Command Top Prices For IT Solutions And Win The Business Every Time

Unconfuse-Your-IT-Services-Presentations-To-Get-Top-Price

Price is important to any consumer no matter what they are buying. Whether it’s a happy hour beer, a used car, furniture for your living room or your IT services; everyone wants the best price.

But here’s the problem, most sales people think best price equals lowest price. And in the absence of value, so will the consumer.

But in reality, the best price should mean the lowest price for the best service. If the value is there, the price becomes less of an issue the vast majority of the time.

There will always be price shoppers. These few don’t care about anything except the bottom line number they pay.

First, these people are the minority. Second, we don’t want them as our customers anyway.

Do You Really Want Customers Like This?

Clients who only want the lowest price are usually the first to complain. And what’s worse, they blame you for not delivering what they didn’t want to buy.

Most times, our highest paying clients are the easiest to work with. The lowest paying clients are the ones who suck up most of our time and complain the loudest.

So here are some techniques you can use to shift the price question from dollars to value.

Sell Value

Seems obvious right? But it is one of the most difficult things in sales to do.

People buy on emotion and justify that purchase decision with logic. So your job in selling your service is to insert emotion even though IT pros are best at the logic part.

When you’re explaining something, talk about what that thing does, as opposed to what it is. A great way to do this is to expand the definition of the thing by asking and answering “BECAUSE” and “SO THAT”.

You know they need a certain piece of equipment or service. Ask yourself: Because why? So that they can do what?

Next step is to dig deeper: You need this product BECAUSE you don’t have a firewall. You need a firewall SO THAT your data is protected.

But don’t stop there. Keep doing this exercise on the last part of each sentence until you’ve really hit the problem and the value of solving it.

In this case, we replaced the product with protecting data. So let’s go deeper:

You need to protect your data BECAUSE there are hundreds of hackers trying to get into your system every day. You need to stop them SO THAT you they don’t steal your clients credit card data.

You need to protect your clients credit card data BECAUSE it will cost you a countless hours and dollars to fix and you could lose all your clients. You need to avoid this SO THAT your don’t go out of business and get a ton of bad press.

Now you’re onto some value. Get the idea? You can keep going. The further and deeper you go, the more value you’ll show.

But you do another thing in this process. You...

Un-Confuse It

People will generally pay more for higher quality. But only when they understand what the thing they are buying is and why it is higher quality.

Let’s face it, IT services are confusing. When we’re selling some firewall widget like in the example above, the prospect only here’s a thing. He has to guess what the value is because it is too technical.

When you do the exercise above you’re forcing yourself to speak in their language. You will never be able to sell the value if you talk over their head. They’ll just think you’re really smart… just like the three other proposals you’re competing against.

As you practice and plan your sales presentations, look for every piece of tech talk. Every time you mention something technical, you’re next few sentences should be simple explanations of what that thing is.

And never underestimate what your prospect does not know. What seems like something obvious to you may be completely foreign to them.

Most people won’t stop you to ask what it is because they feel like they are missing something they should know about. They feel stupid so they don't ask the question they should. So if you say it in a way that assumes they should have known it, you’re actually encouraging them to just smile and nod even though they don’t get it.

Help your prospect to understand your products and services by keeping it simple. The simpler the better.

If you're using audIT, you have the ultimate tool to un-confuse it.

It doesn't get much simpler than this:

 

Visualization

Paint a picture for your prospect of what life would be like without fixing their issue. Use stories, visuals, colors. Whatever you can to demonstrate the emotion as opposed to talking tech.

Color coding good, bad and danger zone items in your presentation is a way to instantly grab their attention in a super understandable way. If I color code something as green, what does it instinctually mean to you? What about yellow? What about red?

These are internationally known as go, slow and stop. Or good, caution and danger. People understand this on a fundamental level instantly.

If you have pictures that represent bad, use them. We constantly use a real life picture of a prospects server room with their spaghetti wiring job. Our prospects immediately see the problem and get it.

The audIT presentation incorporates easy to understand info graphics to explain complex issues.

Do you have simple info graphics you can use? These can be great to simplify and draw out the emotion. Even if you have to hand draw it on the back of a napkin, this will help you move them toward the sale.

Comparative Analysis

In IT it is very likely because the product is so confusing, the last provider won the job on price. And the last provider is now under delivering and under performing in the eyes of their client. Which is exactly why they called you in to propose your service.

The question is, will you repeat the cycle and offer the lowest price? Or will you focus on the value and gently persuade them of the value of your higher price?

With audIT we use a straight line extrapolation to score our prospect and clients current level of IT. If a client is at a score of 35 out of 100 and pays $1,000 per month now, what would it cost to get to a perfect score of 100?

Likely, they would need to spend over $6.000 per month using the same provider to improve their score to 100. This will be an outrageous number to them very likely.

But it’s an accurate number. And it demonstrates how severely they are under paying and under performing as a result. But it also shows them they will spend way too much to get to 100 with their current provider. Nothing will elicit emotion more than demonstrating how their money is being poured down the drain.

But what you have done here is show them a very high price. Which should and will scare them.

However, now when you show them your price, anything lower will be a discount. So if you’re price is only $2,500 a month, they will see a savings from $6,000.

Instead of asking you why you’re so much more than what they are paying now, they see a discount. And you are able to command a higher price and deliver a better service.

 

Here's What The audIT Comparative Analysis Looks Like

Value Sells Higher Prices

Many times clients buy IT based on the lowest bid. So you as an IT provider go in knowing you have to be the lowest price or you lose the job.

So instead of giving them the service level they need, you’re giving them the service level they want to pay for. And this doesn’t help you or them.

Elevate the value of IT services and your bottom line by incorporating these techniques into your sales presentations. When you sell the value over price everyone wins.

Make it super easy to do all this by test driving audIT today. It’s free to try for 15 days with no credit card required. Click here to try it now.