Reduce Price Resistance: 3 Simple Techniques to Convert Unsold Customers and Customers

Dealing with price resistance is one of the most important competencies required for success in selling high-end professional products and services. Buyers of such products and services generally work hard to get the best deal. With easy access to the Internet, numerous studies have shown that information asymmetry has been reduced between consumers and knowledgeable professionals in virtually every industry and niche market.

Conventional wisdom about reducing price resistance has long centered on marketing and sales pitches that focused on how companies stack up against common criteria. As a result, a lot of time is spent arguing about better warranties, better service, and better product quality. In short, you’ve been working hard to be different, but when your competitors copy your every move, you end up being different in the same way as your competitors.

This is a recipe for marketing disaster; a sure path to brand obsolescence.

Here are 3 powerful techniques to reduce price resistance in leads and customers.

1. Develop an effective USP

A unique selling proposition is the particular selling point that definitively differentiates your business from any other substitute or alternative to the benefits you offer on the market. Traditionally conceived as a concept for marketing specific products and programs, the USP concept can be applied to your business as a whole in a way that builds a protective hedge for your business against competitors.

For a USP to be effective in reducing price resistance, it must authoritatively establish its difference in the benefits that are a priority for the market. It cannot be assumed what these priorities are. The best way to develop this is through a well-developed market research process (even if it’s just within your customer database) that helps you definitively articulate what’s important to your market.

2. Business model innovation

In the book “Blue Ocean Strategy,” W. Chan Kim and his colleague Renee Mauborgne make a strong case for designing a business strategy that exploits the boundaries of current market, industry, or business definitions.

A business model is simply a representation of how a business makes money. You don’t need to be a Fortune 500 multinational to innovate your business model. Simply adding a product or service offering that is valuable to your customers can sufficiently differentiate your business model in a way that lowers price resistance. At my Denver business consulting practice, we help Denver professional service firms and manufacturers implement differentiated business models using innovations as simple as:

Information Posting Profit Centers

Associations and Strategic Alliances

Market repositioning

3. Implement CATO Persuasion

CATO is an acronym that stands for “Comparing Apples to Oranges.” By comparing your offerings to more expensive and inconvenient alternatives, you frame the context of your sales and marketing presentations to highlight the particular advantages of your products and programs.

Direct response guru Dan Kennedy gives an example of this kind of “apple to orange” persuasion in his book, No BS Sales Success. He shares how he was able to sell more than a $180 package of information products by comparing those products to the credible alternative of spending more than $1,000 for similar information at conferences to the same professionals.

Conclution

These are just a few of the many strategies you can employ in your business to reduce price resistance in your prospects and customers. Other methods include aggressively implementing elements of social proof, using a multi-step marketing campaign that involves information posting and lead generation to sell high-end products and services.

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