The Power of Value Selling

12Handling Objections and Negotiating on Value, Not Price

It's May 8 in Denver, Colorado, and Crystal wakes up to 7 inches of fresh snowfall. Last night, the temperature dropped 38 degrees in 1 hour and kept going. Of course, she knows that her home state is fond of dramatic temperature swings—still, it's a potent reminder of how fast things can change.

At 8:42 a.m. Crystal—a top‐performing account executive at a video hosting company—is 18 minutes out from her fourth meeting with the head of content at a conversational intelligence (CI) company. While she knows better than to include this deal in her second quarter forecast, she's confident she can bring it home by August. After all, her company's solution is an ideal fit for the CI company's customer retention problem—the proposed video‐training library will offer an improved and tailored onboarding experience, freeing up CSMs to offer more personalized experiences and address issues at the point of need. Crystal has already shored up the VisionMatch: The head of content, Rebecca, agrees that Crystal's solution is uniquely positioned to solve the problems and impact the business in a meaningful and measurable way. Like I said, things are looking good for a July/August close … until 5 minutes into the meeting, Rebecca says, “Look, your price is just too high.”

I'm sure many of you have been here before. Dealing with objections is a core part of being in sales. Still, we don't always see it coming. When we're blindsided with ...