Interview with a Sales Coach Expert (Aaron Chong): Episode 4

Video Transcript 

Terence:

So, Aaron, I got another question. Right. So one of the things is that being a marketer, I have clients that always complain to me or yeah, my customers, they don’t have money or they are shopping for the best deal. I think this is a common sales problem. Is there some way you can address this or how would you in general address this?

Aaron: 

Okay. That’s that’s in general way. I would say that’s a very good question. Actually. A lot of salespeople, what they would think is that price is always a problem. Oh, I’m not the cheapest. The principle is that when you think about this, right, there’s two things that you need to think about. Number one, if you compete on price, there’s only one best spot. Is anyone better than you? If you’re not the cheapest, you are expensive.

So if you keep on comparing on that, your pre framing your mind and you’re installing the lift into your mind that you’re not the cheapest and therefore if you cannot afford the price, you will eventually give up. Now the second thing is that what value are you providing that will make people see that you are different? And I will focus on the second thing. Right?

So having said that, if you want to prevent this from happening. So there’s two things again, cure and prevention. If you want to prevent this from happening, first of all, you need to know the value that you can actually bring to the customer, which is relevant to the problem that they’re facing, which is actually causing them pain that would be valuable to them. Right? But most of the time, if they don’t see value, if the customer don’t see any value, then they will compete on price.

Terence:

So if I have $1,000,000 problem, for example, I’m probably willing to pay half a million dollars to have that million-dollar problem. So. Right. You. Yeah, I would.

Aaron:
If you have a profit of half a million left, would you?

Terence:

Yeah, absolutely.

Aaron:

Why not? Right. It’s a positive, right? That’s the thing. Yeah. So a lot of people, what they’re trying to fight on is on the price. They don’t understand value. And unfortunately, this is what is happening today. A lot of people have been taught with what value is overused and so overrated to a point where people are just, you know, like preaching it everywhere. Oh, value, self value. Although I preach it, but they don’t.

Tell you or they don’t teach you how to recognize value, what is actually valuable to people. And it has to be in terms of emotions, both tangible and intangible as well. Right. So when you show value to people, what you can actually deliver to people that can solve the problem that is painful to them and use that as a value that you propose inside your offer so that when they see it, then you’ll be different because the rest of the market is going to be talking about the same thing.

Oh, we have this package, we have this, we have this tree marketplace, we have these ten posts that we can do. We’re going to run your ads for you. So you do need to do everything. So. So it’s like that kind of package. What normally people would give up is that.

But what you can do differently to prevent that people from shopping on price is that you show value that they feel It’s much more like what you said earlier. All right. If they can see a 10 million tangible value comparing to the cost that they actually buy, then the cost is insignificant already.

The problem with people is that. They saw the price here with a lot of salespeople and they put the value here. This is what you pay. This is what you get. But what we want to do here is that this is what you pay. This is what you get and that right. So when you see there’s a value gap there, there’s where people don’t don’t care about the value and don’t care about the price anymore. Right. It would be the differentiator.

Terence:

Yeah. Right. But it must be value that’s relevant to the customer, right?

Aaron:

Of course, it cannot be a value that is irrelevant to me because if I don’t like a Ferrari and you sell me a Ferrari. Even at 50% discount. I was like, And that’s why there’s people that buy LV Gucci product and there’s people that don’t buy LV good product, isn’t it?

To certain people is valuable because it means that it means buy my, you know, I like this or I’m using it to build up my own status in security. But to a lot of people that are more secure about themselves, they don’t even care about this is not something important to them. They won’t go and buy it. Even though LV is LV has never done any discount.

If LV do a 10% discount, I can tell you a lot of fans, a lot of people that are insecure and using all these kinds of products, they will go and buy it. They will go in, queue up, right? Look at Apple Watch Apple 14, right? iPhone 14. Everybody was queuing up. Why? Maybe they like the whole thing because it’s important to get the newest thing.

Terence:
Yeah.

Aaron:

Yeah. I’m an Apple fan as well. But to me, I wouldn’t go and chase the new things anymore because that is not maybe valuable to me back when I was younger, but it’s not valuable to me right now. So I don’t do that anymore. So I would rather wait for it to be in the market for two or three years or when my phone has something wrong, then I’m going buy an iPhone.

So to me, the phone is a tool to me. So my value change over time. Right. And what salespeople usually fail to do is that they fail to recognize the value that is relevant to the customers. They’re trying to push down value that they think the customer should be buying, which is your product knowledge, the features, the benefits that you think will bring the customer right.

If you don’t have a headache, I can tell you, Hey, this aspirin is going to solve your headache won’t give you any headache. Your headache going to be gone in 3 minutes. At the time you’re not having any headache. Do you think that’s valuable to you? Now or constantly. You don’t have migraine?

Terence:  Yeah.

Aaron:

It won’t be valuable to use in it. If you’re constantly having migraine. You have a migraine or you’ve had a headache every single day for 5 minutes and it’s affecting your focus. You might then say, Hey, you know what? Oh, I would love to try this out. Then I would have the kind of feeling you want to to take action to to get the product right. So it’s more to seeing the value and price discrepancy which is relevant to the customer, which solve also a problem which is painful to them.

Terence: Wonderful. I think that’s a great distinction and that will help people to compete on price and not sell on price. Focus on value. Right?

Aaron:

Yeah. Focus on value is relevant. And a lot of times if you compete on price, there’s only one place the winner is going to be in the end, the customers. And if you can sell something, you win the customer and you’re not making any profit. Why do it anyway?

Yeah, unless you’ve got a strategy at the back. All right. Yes. So that’s another thing that I can tell you about, is that if people compete on price, we can absolutely smash other people. We have a pricing strategy that we know how to acquire a customer at the cheapest possible cost.

Right. Let’s say today everybody is fighting on a single price, right? Like price sensitive items. And if you’re not the cheapest, you are more expensive people. And then people compare on that, especially on like shopping, Shopee, Lazada, all these Amazon kind of eBay where people can compare prices immediately, right? So if people were to do that, then if the person has a strategy that can actually lower his price way below the cost.

But you know how to calculate your customer lifetime value, how much the customer, how much the business is going to bring you in the end and you got data for it, then you can do something that is crazy enough to beat the entire market price. Now that’s a sales strategy. Yep. Okay. Comparing to comparing to, uh, the price and value differentiation. So that’s the first thing that I will do.

Terence: Perfect.