Marketing in Minutes with ATSI

Ask Mark,

A member wrote in the other week asking ..

Mark, With the economy working - or not working - the way it is, more clients are asking for a rate/review, meaning reduction and more prospects are focusing on pricing as the major decision maker. So my question is .. How do I compete on price with services whose prices are 2/3 or ½ of mine?

Not an uncommon question at all. It seems that with the economy the way it is people are looking to take advantage of businesses that may be desperate to move product or sign up new business. In fact there have been several articles that encourage this kind of behavior saying to "negotiate everything."

Clients who are shopping price have shopped price before. That's how they found the vendor they are with and are now looking for another. This is now the time to highlight the value of what you do and how you exceed expectations and consistently go over and above what might be expected.

Tell Mr/Ms Prospect when the last time you lost a client because of a service related incident. Typically the average "shelf" life of an answering service is 3 years. And in all likelihood the prospect has gone through a few vendors in the past 3 years. So, telling a prospect you haven't lost a client for a service related incident since 1999 can have an impact.

Be a consultant and demonstrate solutions that are relative and specific to their industry. Show you understand the industry they are in and demonstrate specific solutions you have designed that resolved issues other prospects came to you with before becoming a new client.

Ex: A prospect in the property management industry came to me with an issue regarding the on call person getting paged for calls that were not emergencies. Understandably they were not happy having to respond to calls that should have been held for the next business day. We think that keeping on call people happy should be a small part of what we do. To solve the prospects issue we designed a process / script so that routine calls waited for the next business day. Calls that required dispatch decreased, meaning the on call person was happier and because less call outs were being placed we were able to do a better job for them and their cost was similar.

OR:

A Client came to us after switching vendors 3 times in 3 years. The issues were usually the same with their previous vendors. Hold times, instructions not being followed, information incomplete / misspellings etc. We worked out a pricing structure based on the information given by their current vendor. Unfortunately this information turned out to be incorrect and the usage was 2-3 times what was documented. Their bill wound up being 3X's what they had paid. This was 2 years ago and they continue to compliment our staff on a regular basis. We were able to save them 100's of dollars in lost productivity and aggravation.

If you are going to compete against price the last thing you want to mention is price.
Service; Specific Solutions; Client Longevity and examples where your staff went above and beyond for a specific client is where you should focus the prospect's attention on.

Please keep the questions coming to askmark@atsi.org and I am looking forward to seeing everyone in Pittsburgh !!