Episode #302: Clients Forget The Price

Have you ever paid for something that you found was very good and which you used for many years. You will have forgotten perhaps the price you originally paid, but you have not forgotten the quality you received. You always maintain a positive mindset about that company and the product or service. On the other hand, if you paid for something that didn’t deliver what you expected, over time, you will forget the exact amount of money involved, but you will always recall that the quality was poor and not acceptable. This is where salespeople make the mistake of concentrating on price and don’t make the effort to bolster the quality aspects of what they are supplying.

Not only does the item or service suffer from a negative association with poor quality, the salesperson’s personal brand is also damaged and maybe irrecoverably. When you find a bad deal, you make the determination to never buy from that supplier again and by extension from that person again. Not only that, you will also make a point of warning others not to deal with that person, because they are not reliable or they lack integrity or they are a rip off. In the market our reputation is everything and we cannot afford to allow it to be stained with ill repute.

Sometimes even good quality firms have problems. Machines, supply chains, people are not perfect so there can be problems. How these problems are addressed says everything about the integrity of who you are dealing with. No one likes people who want to justify the unjustifiable and you would think that no one would be that stupid, but you would be wrong. Yes, there are people who will try to slip out of any and all accountability and who run from taking any responsibility. We can all accept that things can go wrong, but what we want is for it to be fixed and fixed pronto. We will forget the price we paid, but we will remember that the problem was sorted out fast and with integrity and no arguments.

Given all of this logical discussion about price versus quality, the expectation would be that when salespeople talk to clients they are concentrating on quality to justify the price. Instead what do we get? The pitch. The salesperson goes into great detail about the specs for the widget but doesn’t take the time to align what the widget does with what the buyer wants. The latter is the quality conversation, not the rattling off of data and details about the weight, size, colour, etc of the widget. Getting the requirement to be matched by what is going to be supplied is the key aspect of providing a quality service.

How do we know what is required? No mysteries there – we simply ask. In Japan, this is where things break down. You might be thinking “wait a minute, how hard can it be to ask what they buyer wants in Japan?”. Surprisingly, salespeople here usually don’t ask questions, because they are busy going headlong into their pitch. One cultural twist is that the buyer has been trained to expect a pitch and every Japanese person has been trained since childhood to do what everyone else is doing and don’t stand out and be different. As the sales leader you can talk to you are blue in the face about what they are supposed to do, but if you don’t actually go with them to make sure they are asking questions, they won’t take that route. Conformity is a crushing weight in Japan and few are willing or able to buck its oppressive limitations.

Once you have asked the first key question, life gets better immediately. What is that key question? It is so simple – “may I ask you a few questions”. We not quite that simple, because you have to set it up. You need to talk about what it is you do, then mention some results you have had for similar clients, proffer that “maybe” you could do the same for this client. At this point you then say, “in order for me to know if that is possible or not, would you mind if I asked a few questions?”. There is a very tiny number of buyers who will dismiss this approach and ask for the pitch anyway. That cannot be helped and that comment is a red flag anyway, which tells you it is better to hightail it out of there and find a better client. The vast majority of clients will agree and then you can start aligning what you have with what they want and the whole quality dimension possibly starts to go straight up.

If we keep in mind that quality lingers in the mind of the buyer, then we are always better off to be concentrating on that. Prices fluctuate based on the market, supply chain, energy disruptions and currency movements, but the fundamental quality doesn’t fluctuate, unless there has been an unforeseen event. If we can align the price to justify the quality, then over time the memory of the price paid fades, but the recollection of the quality never goes away. When it comes to the time to do more business with you, the buyer is open to that because the track record is there and the trust has been built.