Escaping the Price Trap!
The Sales Board’s Price Competition Study was undertaken in an effort to provide hard data to aid in the understanding of a dilemma facing U.S. sales organizations in companies of all sizes and across all industrial categories.
The challenge is price competition. In today’s global economy, salespeople are under pressure like never before to match or beat lower prices from competitors, domestic and foreign. When they do, their sales margins shrink, resulting in lower profits for their companies and lower commission-based earnings for themselves.
To make matters worse, every time salespeople cave into pressure to discount their prices to match a competitor’s offer, they teach their customers to ask for more discounts next time.
This creates a vicious cycle in which price haggling becomes the focus of sales conversations, with value propositions having no place.
As the creator of Action Selling ®, a proven, research-based system for managing and conducting the sales process, The Sales Board has seen this vicious cycle at work in numerous client organizations.
The purpose of our Price Competition Study was to quantify the problem on a national level and to provide statistically valid data that would shed light on a number of questions vital to the future of companies and salespeople across the industrial spectrum.
Among those questions…