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25 & 26 MARCH 2020


STOP Discounting! It's killing your business!

The key to increased sales and higher profits is learning how to sell based on faith and trust, not features and benefits.

A chance remark by a client got me wondering as to why so many businesses fail (around 60% after 5 years according to smallbusiness.co.uk) and many more get stuck in the frustrating and stressful “struggling state” of just doing enough each year to survive but never quite making it to the next level of success that makes life so much easier.

So whilst networking over the past few years I sought opinions from everyone I met. To my surprise many people were stump to answer the question with any confidence, and most of rest seemed to me wrong!

They conflicted with the core principles of coaching that I had learned - success is rooted in your habits and the way you react to circumstances; or put another way, we only achieve what our habits allow us to achieve.

Flip that thought on its head, ask the slightly different question: “What habits are causing a business to fail?” you get an even more intriguing set of answers; and the one we believe is the most damaging to your business is “discounting your price to close a sale”.

That’s not surprising, we live in a world of discounting. Every time we go shopping most people are looking for a good deal. So it stands to reason that unless we have been taught differently, we believe that discounting is part of the sales process. Yet its very damaging for the long term health of your business, here’s five reasons why:

1. You are giving away potential profit
2. It reinforces your service/product has minimal added value
3. It lowers your sense of worth
4. Customers talk about your price not about your value add
5. You attract customers looking for deals, you’re always negotiating!

So what’s the alternative?

Well at RiseTen believe the answer lays in a completely different approach to selling. It is at the heart of a new workshop that we have just launched called Discovery Selling.

In some ways its going back in time to “added value solution selling”, something that was prevalent in professional services sector during the 1990s before the influence of digital marketing and the boom in the service industry created by the internet.

We came upon this idea by talking to people about what was getting in the way of them scaling their business. As we listened a pattern was emerging, too much detail was being exchanged during the sales process.

When you have an innovative product its easy to get carried away with your passion, provide an endless list of features and key benefits, confusing your prospect and causing the selling process to stall.

Want a buyer really wants is confidence to make the “right decision”. This is best provided by adopting a relationship based approach to selling, building trust and faith in you as a supplier.

Get it wrong, and the customers will turn their attention to price and look to make a buying decision on “getting a good deal”. However, when you learn how to sell using “faith and trust” in an authentic way, a prospect will say yes without knowing all the detail.  And when you then deliver on the promise they will become a loyal customer who believes that no-one can be as good as you!


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