Value

I recently went through a drawn out effort to buy a car. While I had some preconceived notions about what I wanted, I tried to approach the effort with an open mind. I was interested in how well the salespeople I'd encounter could capture what I was looking for and how well they positioned their own products.

I experienced a very mixed bag of results. In general, the more experienced individual was better at talking about what mattered to me (in order one hopes to refer to that while closing the sale), while the younger people were all about price. I saw this across brands, and in fact the more established (pricier) brands were where the poorest sales efforts existed in some cases.

People don't buy cars based on price. We buy based on a series of intangible factors that range from sensibility, practicality, to sex appeal and ego stroking. One of the keys for the seller is to understand how those motivations manifest themselves in an individual buyer and work to those. It's the same way in B2B sales, though more factors influence the individual - ego, politics, career aspirations etc.

I was saddened to see the two most senior people (in terms of their titles in their organizations) I was dealing with focus almost exclusively on price. This bodes poorly for them and their businesses and is in stark contrast to what the brands they represent are about. Forgetting value is a cardinal sin in sales.