To Increase Your Closing Ratio, Focus on Value

After spending hours of preparation, complete with graphics and illustrations, you meet with your prospect, enthusiastically describe the features and benefits of your product and conclude the presentation by quoting your price. You leave the meeting filled with optimism.

All seems to be going well – right up to the time you receive word that your competitor closed the account. Where did your presentation go wrong? It didn’t.

You can trace this lost sale back to the initial meeting: the Contact/Qualification phase. The initial contact allows you to establish both a human and business bond that lays the foundation of trust and rapport from which you will launch your presentation. Use this qualification period as an explanatory time to determine the customer’s needs and budget.

People are more comfortable with selecting a program than they are in giving you a dollar amount. Thus, to determine the customer’s budget, present a menu of programs that offers a general range of high, medium and low pricing.

Presenting your product or service in terms of the total value of your programs, rather than as a cost, also allows you to reduce your vulnerability to losing a contract to price alone. For instance, a company selling generators could instead refer to that same generator as a power system. This type of repositioning differentiates you from your competition by offering a more comprehensive package, thus giving greater value to the product in the eyes of the customer.

The dollar range of the program your prospect selected during qualification will now become the middle program for your final presentation. Because prospective customers want to rationalize choices, in most situations they will select the middle program.

People generally don’t want to feel cheap by selecting the low-budget program. If the premium program is beyond their means, they can feel good about taking the middle ground.

This Contract/Qualification strategy will take the guesswork out of your presentations, give your customers what they want and increase your closing ratio.