Price Has Nothing to Do With Your Lack of Sales

How can I say that price has nothing to do with sales? There is a very simple way to test whether price is the biggest barrier to you selling your product or service. Sell your product or service on approval. Most software and many services are now sold with a thirty day trial, or on approval. You can get a free trial of Microsoft Project or Go to Meeting. Your PC, if you are unfortunate enough to use a PC and not a Mac, will probably come with a trial version of office.

Simply sell your product or service on approval and people will see how wonderful it is and buy it. End of article, right? So you are telling me that you are having trouble getting people to try your product or service on approval?

Let’s talk about one famous example of when this sale on approval process really worked well, compare it to your situation, and pin down where the problem is.

In the early 1960’s RCA sold 21 inch table-top color TV’s for $495. That’s the equivalent of $2,986 in today’s dollars. A good black and white 19 inch TV sold for $295. There weren’t a lot of shows in color and many people didn’t see the value. An enterprising sales person, in Texas I believe, would have folks come in to his store and look and not buy. So he simply offered to set the TV up for them in their homes, yes they had to be set up, and let them try them for a month.

Once the family sat around and watched Walk Disney’s Wonderful World of color for four weeks and the few other color shows that were on, they were hooked. When he called them and said he was sending his crew out to bring the TV back to the shop, the kids screamed like they were trying to take back a puppy and the sale was made.

If you look at this on the surface you will think that it’s about price. Once they saw the ROI on their investment, then the sale was made. This is true as far as it goes. There was a huge Entertainment Return on Investment, at least compared to black and white. If they didn’t know about color it wouldn’t have had value. But, they had tried color and now they couldn’t go back to black and white. This is also about another acronym. One you haven’t see before. EOI. Ease of Integration. All the folks had to do was watch. No learning curve, not classes to attend, nothing to unlea
and relearn. Nothing to go get, nothing to set up. All they had to do was watch and enjoy.

What is the EOI for your product or service? How many hours of training will it take to learn and master, how much loss productivity while it get’s up and running, how long before it works seamlessly?

Action Items/Activity Triggers:

1.Try selling your product on approval without changing your pricing or anything else

2. If sales don’t go up immediately look to EOI-Ease Of Integration.

3. Make it so easy to use your product or service that it’s impossible for people to turn it down

4. Make sure your service is so much better than the competitor’s that its like color TV compared to black and white

There is a very simple way to test whether price is the biggest barrier to you selling your product or service. Sell your product or service on approval.