Dealing with price resistance is one of the most important competencies required for success in selling high-end professional products and services. Buyers of such products and services usually work hard to get the best deal. With easy access to the Internet, numerous studies have shown that information asymmetry has been reduced between consumers and savvy professionals in virtually every industry and market niche.

The conventional wisdom about reducing price resistance has long focused on marketing and sales arguments that focused on how companies compare based on common criteria. As a result, a lot of time is spent arguing about better warranties, better service, and better product quality. In short, you’ve been working hard to be different, but when your competitors copy your every move, you end up being different in the same way as its competitors.

This is a recipe for marketing disaster; a sure path to brand obsolescence.

Here are 3 powerful techniques to reduce price resistance in leads and customers.

1. Develop an effective USP

A Unique Selling Proposition is the particular selling point that definitively differentiates your business from any other substitute or alternative for the benefits you offer to the market. Traditionally conceived as a concept for marketing specific products and programs, the USP concept can be applied to your business as a whole in such a way as to build a protective hedge for your business against competitors.

For a USP to be effective in reducing price resistance, it must authoritatively establish its difference in benefits that are top of mind for the market. You cannot assume what these priorities are. The best way to develop this is through a well-developed market research process (even if it’s just within your customer database) that helps you definitively articulate what’s important to your market.

2. Business model innovation

In the book “Blue Ocean Strategy,” W. Chan Kim and his colleague Renee Mauborgne make a strong case for designing a business strategy that exploits the boundaries of current market, industry, or business definitions.

A business model is simply a representation of how a business makes money. You don’t need to be a Fortune 500 multinational to innovate your business model. Simply adding a product or service offering that is valuable to your customers can sufficiently differentiate your business model in a way that lowers price resistance. In my Denver business consulting practice, we help Denver professional services firms and manufacturers implement differentiated business models using innovations as simple as:

Information Publishing Profit Centers
Partnerships and Strategic Alliances
Market repositioning

3. Implement CATO persuasion

CATO is an acronym that stands for “Comparing Apples to Oranges.” By comparing your offerings with more expensive and inconvenient alternatives, you frame the context of your sales and marketing presentations to highlight the particular benefits of your products and programs.

Direct response guru Dan Kennedy gives an example of this type of “apple to orange” persuasion in his book, No BS Sales Success. He shares how he was able to sell more than a $180 package of information products by comparing those products to the credible alternative of having to incur charges of more than $1,000 for similar information at conferences targeting the same professionals.

conclusion

These are just a few of the many strategies you can employ in your business to reduce price resistance in your prospects and customers. Other methods include aggressive implementation of social proof elements, using a multi-step marketing campaign that involves posting information and generating leads to sell high-end products and services.