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[Note: Watch for upcoming posts where I'll be interviewing some CEO's of companies that are changing the tools we use as sales professionals.]

If you’re selling a product that is virtually, if not exactly, the same as all of your competitors, then you are selling a commodity. Many salespeople mistakenly resort to discounting as their only selling strategy in order to get business when selling commodities.

You don’t always have to resort to this. There is a way to deal effectively with commodity selling that I’ll share below.

When selling a commodity you are also selling your personal capital too.

What is personal capital? It’s the attitude, knowledge and skills that you bring, as a sales professional, to the customer that are independent of the products you sell.

What are some examples? There are a million of them: product knowledge, knowledge of how the customer needs to be invoiced/shipped/packaged, good people skills with the employees at the customer, ability to run customer meetings with productive outcomes, anticipation of customer needs before they are expressed, etc.

Here’s the best part about all of this. Customers are willing to pay you more for the same product they can buy from your competitors because of the personal capital that you bring to the table. This is exactly why order takers make such poor commodity salespeople.

“This sounds great Scott, but my customers don’t even appreciate that I do these things for them. All they talk about is price.”

The problem is that you haven’t communicated to them the extra value that you bring. Customer surveys have consistently shown that most customers don’t know the added value that you provide to them. Furthermore, these same surveys also show that if they were aware of the added value they wouldn’t be as price sensitive.

So, how do we communicate this extra value?

Every six months show them a formal report that tells them what they are buying from you and include a section labeled “Additional Services.” List all the added value services you provide (such as the examples listed above) in the Additional Services section and put a big N/C next to each item. You can deliver this report to them at a scheduled meeting that you advertise as your semi-annual customer satisfaction/update meeting. This information will open their eyes to all of the added value that you bring that goes unnoticed. You’ll probably get some good feedback too.

If you’re selling a commodity, be sure to sell yourself first and your product second.

© 2008 Scott R. Sheaffer

Tags: competition, pricing

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