When you get a new account or are trying to land some business from a competitor, is the prospects focus just on the price? When it comes to the budget step, it's also about things like time and resources.
In this post, I want you to have a little bit more of a structure in the budget step, have a better roadmap to get through this process and help you feel a little bit more effective and confident getting past the dollars and cents.
Most people in the budget step think "do you have a budget set aside for this" or "do you have a target price" and "would you mind sharing it with me". That IS part of the budget step (bracketing what the price can be, what their target price is, or what they're paying now). All legitimate parts of the budget step I wouldn't change.
The challenge though can be that the time and resources to switch from the current vendor to you (if you're getting the business from the competitor). The time and resources it takes to move the business, to change a production line, or change the internal processes that many times can be the factor that gets in the way.
I've seen so many situations where the salesperson's company could meet the target price. They could meet some kind of budgetary dollar and cent figure, but when all was said and done, the prospect still didn't move forward because of the hassle factor of moving from their current relationship to the new relationship.
In a Sandler mindset, it's always about the information we find out up front that helps us later. Instead of figuring out later in the process that they have a problem with moving and they don't want to deal with the hassle, we're going to proactively bring this up:
"Hey, you're going to have to move the business. That's not going to be easy. It can be a bit of a hassle. We'll make it easy for you, but it still is not going to be turnkey. There's going to be some new processes you have to learn. You're going to have to do some extra paperwork. We have to train some of your internal people.
Can we talk a little bit about that?"
Some kind of word tract like that, and then really diving deep into it. But having a mindset that it's not just about the dollars and cents, many times. It's the time and resources it takes to switch to you as their new supplier, as their new relationship, as their new trusted adviser.
What can you do when you're talking about the budget to proactively bring up time and resources in addition to the dollars and cents?
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