A Business Tip A Day, Keeps Competitors At Bay

For the month of June, listeners of radio station 938LIVE got some practical business tips from Sant in one of their lifestyle features segment called Positive Business Minutes (PBM). Stanley, who is the Senior Producer-Presenter for 938LIVE’s The Living Room programme, had kindly invited Sant to be the presenter for PBM after the authors came on as guests on his show. Basically, PBM contains “bite-size business nuggets, each lasting about 2 minutes per capsule), that are specially catered for busy corporate leaders and executives. These 2-minute slots were played 4 times in one day and each day’s slot would contain a different tip.

Since the month of June had 21 weekdays, Sant created 21 business tips covering a wide range of topics. Some of the topcis he shared included effective closing sales techniques, how to overcome the price factor to get your customer to buy, using scarcity to create demand, admiting a flaw to establish trust with your customers, and many other practical marketing strategies.

Though we didn’t publicise the fact that Sant was doing this, we had quite a few friends and business associates telling us that they heard Sant on the air and found his tips really interesting and useful. So we thought it would be nice to also share some of the tips here for you. Some of the tips are short excerpts based on the strategies that can be found in detail in Secrets To Dominate Your Niche, while others are more direct marketing based.

Here’s one of the direct marketing based tip that Sant talked about.

How To Get The Upper Hand In Price Negotiations

Many entrepreneurs find that they can’t make the sale when it comes to price negotiations. But do you know that there is a way to overcome this $$$ barrier and make the sale? One of the best ways to gain the upper hand in such situations is to first recognise that price is just a number–in your mind and in your customers’ mind. Price is relative to the perceived value that you are providing for your customer through a product or service.

One of Sant’s strategies that he personally uses for himself and his clients is to increase their prices. The interesting thing is, even though he increases the price, the number of customers actually shoot up instead of dropping. This is because Sant focuses on creating massive value for the customers and draws their attention on that instead of the price. He explains, ” When you focus on building the perception of value and the desire within the propects, then it price will matter less.”

Another point to remember when you are negotiating a deal with the customer and it is all just coming down to the numbers, is to bring in emotional elements into the discussion. Always remember to AVOID getting stuck in price negotiations because once you start talking about numbers, then all your customers care about is pressing the numbers down. 

Sant then shared about friend in real estate who was trying to broker a deal. But the buyer and seller were at a stalemate on the price of the house. Neither of them wanted to budge even though everyone wanted to move on to close the deal. When the friend came to Sant for advice, he said, ” Get the seller to focus on the reasons why they wanted to sell the house in the first place and get the buyer to focus on why they wanted to buy the house so badly.” When his friend followed his advice and posed the respective questions to the seller and the buyer, the deal was closed within the week!

So when you start to focus on building the value of your product or service, then the price that you are asking for in exchange will matter less to your customers. Try that the next time you are closing a sale and let us know how it went.