favmika phillburt collins

[Tijuana Strauhal]

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If you haven't learned that this is a losing tactic, I offer a reminder that moving beyond this approach is critical to your long term success. Selling on price will limit your career and inhibit the success of your company.

Selling on price is a sign of a failed perspective. It demonstrates that you do not know the value of your products, services or time. It generally flows from failing to invest the time to fully qualify your prospect. Or worse, it stems from a lack of understanding that properly qualifying a prospect is where the widest opportunities are found and value creation begins.

A common refrain heard once you finally get through to a prospect is the ever popular "send me a quote before we go any further." Many in Sales fall into this trap. Buyers use this request as a delay tactic or it is simply a means to avoid a further conversation. More detrimental is the likelihood that a quote offers the Buyer a tool to extract price concessions from their current supplier.

Agreeing to provide a blind quote, by default, means you have chosen to compete on price. Your decision to provide a quote also highlights that you are not worth the time or expense the prospect has to employ to make a switch. You have lost the opportunity to define the full circumstances where you may bring value. It also represent sales dollars you have missed and likely ceded to competitors (this is a double whammy as it strengthens a competitor at your expense.)

Many will claim that providing a quote moves the sales process forward, keeps
the prospect engaged and hopefully leads to a positive conclusion. It is this optimistic "hope" that should always be a red flag that a blind quote request raises. Invariably, your prospect will respond to your follow-up on a quote that your price is too high. Thus the Gerbil wheel of chasing price is fully realized.

Some may question whether harm results from competing on price. The harm stems from the fact that pricing as your differentiation strategy soon leads to a race to the pricing bottom. Your business will be at risk every time someone provides even a slightly lower price (win on price, lose on price.) It is not a long-term path to success, especially if your company is not the lowest cost producer.

The answers to avoiding price competition is readily within your grasp. The knowledge resides in your active customer relationships. Existing customers can highlight areas of your business that delivers value for them. It may include areas where they perceive value that you have not considered. Feedback from your customers can unlock critical insights that minimize the importance of the pricing question or eliminates it altogether.

With insight from existing customers it is easy to construct approaches to prospects knowing the problem and issues your product and services have overcome elsewhere. Customer knowledge allows you to confidently query areas of a prospect's business that reveal deeper issues and potential problems prospects haven't considered. Specifically, you can appropriately probe for the following critical details:

You will likely know how you have solved issues in these areas from previous efforts and customer's insights. Asking these types of questions, the bare minimum you should explore, will gain you credibility with a prospect. Answers to these questions will expose more of any wider opportunity available and allow for a broader offering in response (if required.)

One aspect that should not be over looked is to have available quantified results to demonstrate performance examples to the prospect, as needed. Each step along this path diminishes the impact of pricing on the final decision.

Prospects resistant to exploring the approach outlined above, insisting on a quote before engaging in these questions, should be dropped. Responding with a quote only serves to support the Buyer's attempt to use your company as leverage against their current supplier. Not only is it a waste of your time, it reduces the profitable time you can spend with Prospects looking for comprehensive solutions to their issues and problems.

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About the author: I have 20+ years of Sales and Executive Management experience improving business results by delivering positive customer outcomes. I have worked in the fields of Automotive and General Industrial manufacturing, as well the Chemical Industry.

So when you lose a deal and the customer tells you it was because of price, don't buy it..... 99% of the time it's not the real reason. A technique that works flawlessly is to ask this question, "If all the prices were the same would I have gotten the deal?" then SHUT UP and listen for the closed in answer, yes or no..

If they say no, ask "what were the things that made them choose the other vendor?" Then SHUT UP and listen for everything they say. Pause 5-10 seconds when they are done to insure they have shared everything. Important, don't try and defend your product or service. Say thank you and agree that if the other vendor ever decided to not work with them that you appreciate what was important and that knowing that you and your company would work very hard to fulfill those expectations. Be gracious. I've had so many customers change their decision after my graciousness and agreement to understand their real needs. Amazing........

If they say yes, ask them "why they would choose you?" Then SHUT UP and listen for everything they say. Pause 5-10 seconds when they are done to insure they have shared everything. When they give you all those reasons then act disappointed and sad that you let them down with pricing. Share the disappointment that you have in letting them down for all the reasons that they would use you and that together you both have to figure out how to make the deal work because of all the reasons they shared they wanted to do business with you. Once the customer has justified why they would really want you I've had them almost 100% of the time say, "You know, I really need to use you, write the order up" Amazing..........

This simple technique has had more deals change for my teams over the last 40 years. Usually when you think you lost because of price, that was not the main reason. So, don't buy it, find the right reason you lost it and learn. Price is an excuse when there is no other value and sales folks hide behind it all the time. Don't let this form of self-talk influence your success.

I recently lost a bid with same high bid price as what the item sold for. When I look at the bid history my bid has the same timestamp as the winner, but is listed lower than the winning bidder. I interpret this to mean my bid was first. But if that were the case, I wouldn't have lost, right? This was not an automatic bid, I checked.

No. It means exactly the opposite. The bids are not sorted by time from latest to earliest, they are sorted by amount from highest to lowest, and when there is a tie between the exact same bid amount, the earliest is considered "higher" and is placed above the later one.

Don't bid even amounts. Add a few cents to position your bid a bit above the round number you are likely to come up with to increase your chances of being on the winning side of what might otherwise have been a tie or a loss to someone who knows this tip. $76.01 would have won in this case, but $76.27 would have been even more likely to beat someone else who valued the item at about $76.

A careful examination of the bidding history with the show automatic bid enabled will probably show that the winning bid was placed before yours. However, the winning amount wasn't revealed until you placed yours. That is how eBay's proxy bidding system works.

I agree with the advice of always adding a few cents, as the others have mentioned, to help avoiding ties which always goes to the one who first bid the amount. By adding a few cents rather than bidding in even dollar amounts you many have won.

Here's the bid history as attached to the original post. As noted in a reply above, the times shown are identical, but electronic processes work in nanoseconds and the earlier bidder wins so apparently the winner's bid was received a fraction of a second before the runner-up.

The OP said, "my bid has the same timestamp as the winner, but is listed lower than the winning bidder. I interpret this to mean my bid was first." But that's a misunderstanding about how eBay arranges bids. Bids are arranged in order by amount, not by time received and in case of a tie, the earlier bidder wins, so the bid shown on top must have been placed earlier.

I am currently performing a stock take with a counting journal for a store, and a few lines did not have a cost price associated on the specific site, so I updated it manually on the line of the counting journal, however, when posted, the cost price is lost. Is this intended logic for counting journals or is it something that I am missing?

This is by design and for a goof reason! Losing an item means you can`t find it anylonger in the warehouse. In that case you have to take it away to exactly the same value (according to the value model) that it was representing. If it would be possible to manually overwrite that value it would end up in situations like: No physical quantity but financial value, no quantity but negative value....

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