In the world of B2B sales and pricing, small missteps can have big consequences. Whether it’s a misguided sales approach or an ineffective pricing strategy, these mistakes can cost you potential deals and profits. Let’s break down two common mistakes and how to avoid them.
Mistake #1 – Selling Instead of Engaging
We all want to sell our products and services. So during a sales meeting with a prospect you start by jumping right into a pitch about how incredible your product is, highlighting all of its bells and whistles; you emphasize why your product is such a great bargain and why the time is now to buy it. But during this process you alienate your prospect and completely lose out on a potentially great business opportunity.
What went wrong you might ask? I’ll turn to a Business Development Bank of Canada (or BDC) post for answers. This BDC post wisely states that you should make your prospect feel like they’re making a choice based on their unique needs. However, if you start a meeting by doing a monologue pitch, there’s no space to listen to your prospect, to learn about and identify their problems, much less suggest useful solutions.
So switch from pitching to having a conversation with your prospect. Ask big questions. Research your prospect’s company beforehand so that you come to the meeting equipped with a foundation of knowledge. Be curious, ask questions, and listen. That will take you places.
Ask big questions: Understand your prospect’s pain points.
Do your homework: Research the company to bring valuable insights.
Be genuinely curious: Focus on listening rather than just selling.
Mistake #2 – Basing Market Pricing on a Single Benchmark
Vendavo’s Dan Cakora details as follows how even price benchmarking started out with the noblest of intentions can devolve into chaos: in a perfect situation, you are surveying the field of competitors and adjusting your prices based on a collective review of all the different competitor prices out there. However, as Cakora notes “[i]f Company A benchmarks Company B, and in turn Company B benchmarks Company A, they could reference each other exclusively and become untethered from the rest of the market.” The worst case scenario of this is you get into a “The Making of a Fly” situation. On April 8th 2011 a post doc student hopped on Amazon looking to buy a copy of the Peter Lawrence 1992 developmental biology classic titled “The Making of a Fly”, and in the process happened upon an already brewing algorithmic (automation) pricing war of epic 2 proportions between two Amazon vendors over said book. Without getting too much into all of the chronological details, with both vendors zeroed in on each other, the price of the book rose astonishingly over the next several days, peaking at $23,698,655.93 before finally the madness was stopped and the book returned to the more pedestrian prices of $106.23 and $134.97 respectively.
And with this duo of B2B mistakes covered, that concludes this article ! Do these B2B mistakes sound familiar?
Conclusion – Learn from These Mistakes
By shifting from a selling mindset to a consultative approach, leveraging comprehensive pricing benchmarks, and continuously adapting to market dynamics, you can strengthen your B2B strategies and drive growth.
Avoiding B2B Mistakes?
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