Business Customers: Overcoming Sales Objectives

Date: 30 June, 2023

Have you ever spent months canvassing a customer and building a relationship, introducing your product and services, creating a tailored quote only to hear the words “it wasn’t approved internally”, “we’ll review it next year” or perhaps more frustratingly getting no decision whatsoever.

Despite the fact your client actually wants to buy from you, they can’t get it approved by their own finance directors or senior decision-makers.

Often when a client needs to seek internal approval for a large upfront spend, they may make a case for it to be Capexed. However, if this is not already in the budget, the company doesn’t have that type of capital to hand, they're told to come back next year when the case might get considered for approval.

Many companies don’t like the idea of a large upfront spend on a new, untested product or service, no matter how strong the business case.

overcoming objections

Quote monthly - it solves the problem

Brands like Microsoft, Vodafone, Apple and so many more know that presenting a monthly option to their business customers overcomes objections internally.

Quoting monthly enables your client to approach their own internal approval process in a more effective manner. With no capex calculations to worry about they simply present the monthly rental price as they would with any subscription price. It makes their case for approval a lot easier.

At Reality, we have worked with hundreds of Vendors to provide a monthly payment plan to their business customers. Those that provide a monthly or quarterly pricing alternative as a lead when quoting every time mostly win the deal.

You can also offer payment holidays to your customers so they get your product now and start paying for it in the financial new year, or even position a 0% option or subsided rate which acts as a great marketing tool and is often more attractive for suppliers than providing extensive discounts.

Many IT suppliers have adopted this approach as a standard these days to enable them to keep up with customer expectations. It's simply the “done thing” in the IT market.

And it's not just the software itself that can be presented as a monthly cost: implementation, training, up to 5 years of maintenance and support, annual and hosting fees, and any third-party costs associated with a project can all be built-in too so the customer has one single payment each month, making ROI more justifiable from everyone’s point of view.