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The truth is that people aren’t a whole lot different from sheep. I’m not a Bible scholar but I think this concept is even Biblical. Allow me to focus on one area of human behavior that we share with sheep. Sheep and people tend to move and think as a group. Our customers and prospects, just like sheep, feel safest when they are doing what everyone else is doing.

“When we run across price objections from customers we can take advantage of the “sheeple” concept.”

The World’s Best Example
The best example of this in the known universe is the old sales tip IBM used to teach their sales force, “No one ever got fired for buying IBM.” In other words, IBM was saying that buying from them represented a safe choice because almost everyone buys an IBM computer. Not everyone can be wrong, according to IBM. This statement said nothing about the quality of their products or service. This sales tip said everything about IBM’s acknowledgment that people act like sheep.

“Sheeple?”
I have a friend who uses the term “sheeple” to represent this phenomenon. He’s a very successful sales professional and when he encounters price objections he remembers that his customers think like “sheeple.”

Join In, Everyone Else Is
When we run across price objections from customers we can take advantage of the “sheeple” concept. We can use our own version of the following in our approach to their price objections, “Our company has thousands of customers who pay our standard prices for our products and services. Most of them have been with us for years. This tells me our prices must be seen as fair for the products and level of service we provide.”

In a few short sentences we’ve just told the customer they can rest easy at night. There are many other customers just like them who are buying the same products and services from our company at the same price we’re quoting them - and most of them are repeat customers. And to think sheep could teach us how to sell.

Related information: How to handle: “Tell me your price right now.”, Does any customer at any time ever pay the lowest price for anything?

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Tags: objections, pricing

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