Why Breaking Down Your Sales Price Might Just Be Ridiculous
I was working with a new home sales team last week when a passionate discussion ensued regarding price per square foot as an important factoid to share with potential buyers as a way of measuring product value.
This immediately seemed ludicrous to me. I imagined myself positioning a buyer in a corner of a home and asking them how that $110/square foot felt to them. How ridiculous is that?
When buying a home, you are not purchasing one square foot – you are purchasing a place to create a new life, a dream, and a future. These emotional intangibles cannot be reduced to a price per square foot discussion.
The price per square foot discussion inspired me to reflect on the various “ reduce it to the ridiculous ” sales techniques I have heard over the years…
“Over the lifetime of the loan, this upgrade is only an extra $50 a month.”
“When you break it down, you are really talking about a difference of…”
“If you think about it, you could have this [insert wonderful product you are selling] by simply enjoying your coffee at home instead of going to Starbucks every day.”
There are three major problems with breaking it down to the ridiculous:
1) It takes the focus away from the product – and the buyer’s desire for that product – and focuses attention squarely on the cost. New flash! When we focus on cost, we take the attention away from the real reason the person is purchasing: their personal urgency. If a person is urgent enough and emotional enough, cost is automatically minimized.
2) What if the buyer doesn’t agree with you? What if fifty dollars a month is, for that buyer, a lot of money? And what if they consider you absolutely ridiculous for suggesting they give up their daily dose of perfectly crafted caffeine and settle for plain old, disgusting Folgers? Before a sales person doles out this kind of personal advice to a customer, it is imperative that they know their audience! It is likely that as a sales person, you will not have this kind of detailed insight into your customers lives, so don’t risk stepping over the line into the ridiculous by suggesting life-altering behaviors based on your personal opinion.
3) It could make your buyer distrust or dislike you. Take a look at the study Daniel Pink outlines in his book To Sell is Human. Pink surveys a large group of people about the first word that comes to mind when one thinks about “selling” or “salespeople.” Pink then takes the top 25 adjectives people use and creates a word cloud. As you can imagine, the adjectives the participants chose were not at all flattering to sales people. Some of the biggest (most frequently brought to mind) words on the list included pushy, aggressive, manipulative, annoying, and smarmy …just to name a few. When we begin breaking the cost down and showing the buyer how they can “move money around” this could, to a buyer, feel smarmy or just plain manipulative. Consider someone making the same kind of suggestions to you …how would you feel about them?
Please, take my advice. Reducing a potential purchase down to the ridiculous is sometimes just that: ridiculous!
Think very carefully about utilizing this old school training technique. I am not saying that it doesn’t work sometimes and in some circumstances — it can — but it requires great wisdom and discernment. Use this technique with serious caution. The vast majority of the time, it is best to keep the purchase discussion focused on what really matters to the buyer.
Resist the urge to speak to things in someone’s life about which you know little to nothing. Instead, be helpful and genuine about what you do know and then you’ll enjoy the chance to change their world!
