How much would your customers pay to listen to your Sales Pitch?
Scott Edinger, founder of Edinger Consulting Group, asks an interesting question: would your customers be willing to pay to listen to your sales pitch? At first this sounds crazy, but he’s trying to make an important point. It isn’t enough to say that you are selling a particular product or service at a good price. Everyone does that. To stand out from the competition, you need to provide enough value to potential clients during the initial sales meeting and subsequent contacts that the clients would actually consider paying for that time spent together—even before they have purchased your product. So how do you do this? Edinger offers five ideas, three are below:
- Identify issues unknown to the client.
- Help clients analyze issues that don’t appear to be a risk but in reality are a risk.
- Identify missed opportunities.
The idea here isn’t to give away thousands of dollars of free consulting in the hopes that one day the client might buy; instead the goal is to change how you think about the sales process. Each interaction—whether in person, by telephone or over email—is an opportunity to provide something of value to the customer.
About Mike Periu
Mike is a seasoned executive with experience in small business finance and management. He is the founder of Proximo, LLC a leading provider of corporate, consumer and small business education and training services with an emphasis on finance and technology.
Mike Periu is also a leading national voice for individual empowerment through financial education and entrepreneurship. He has been interviewed over 500 times in national and international media, including NBC, Univision, CNN en español, Telemundo, HITN, TVE, RTE, SBS, MegaTV and others.
Mike writes regularly for American Express OpenForum, Yahoo! Finanzas and is a Huffington Post contributor.
Mike has degrees in Finance and International Business from Georgetown University. He is on the Board of Directors of the Council for Economic Education and was a Fellow at the Kauffman Foundation’s Labs for Enterprise Creation.
