How to Discuss Money on Your Sales Call?

Have you ever struggled to start the conversation about money on your sales call?

If so, you’re not alone. I find that most sales people struggle to discuss money on their sales calls.

This is partly due to the way you think about money.

• Do you believe money is scarce or plentiful?
• What do your parents believe about money?

When you think about what the media is discussing about money right now, you may really believe money is scarce.

What you believe and how you think about money will be a large part of how comfortable you are discussing it on your sales call. But we can save the money mindset conversation for another time. Today we are discussing how to start the money conversation on your sales call.

The set-up

You are going to pretend for a moment that you are at a point on your sales call where it’s time to discuss money. When I discuss money with my prospects on a sales call, I like to use the word investment versus money, spend, cost, etc.

Here is a side note about that philosophy. Price, money, spend, cost, and any other term about money means how much something costs. Investment or value is what you get in relation to what you’re paying for. Investment makes me believe I will get a return on the money I spend.

I will money and investment interchangeably during the rest of this discussion.

So in order for you to start discussing the appropriate investment at this point on your sales call, we’ll assume you understand your prospects goals and frustrations. It only become appropriate to discuss the investment if you know what goal your prospect is moving towards, and what frustration they are avoiding or fixing.

There are five steps for you to use as your basic strategy framework on your sales call.

1. Where are they now, and how did they get there?
2. Where are they trying to get to?
3. What are the obstacles to getting where they want to go?
4. What are the consequences of their obstacles?
5. What’s in it for them if they achieve their goals?

If you look at number four in the sales call strategy, you will see what I refer to as “consequences of their obstacles”. Part of identifying obstacles is to tie in the cost of these obstacles.

Your example

Let’s pretend your prospect is making widgets. And for every 100 widgets they manufacture, there are 3 that are bad. Let’s also pretend that your product/service can make it so that for every 1,000 widgets they manufacture, only 3 are bad after you install your new process.

In order for you to quantify the dollar consequence of this frustration, you would need your prospect to do the math of what your solution would save or make them.

Then take it a step further and have them do it for a 12-month period. The numbers are getting big in your prospects mind at this point.

Now to keep your sales call on track, also have them figure out what it cost them for the time period they have been manufacturing the way they are now.

A very important part of your process to remember on your sales call is to let your prospect do the math. If you do the math for them, whose number is it? If they do the math, they own the number.

Applying the math on your sales call

Now let’s pretend again, that the math totaled a nice round number of $1-million dollars. This is what their frustration is costing them, or what they can make if you install your new process. It could also be a combination of the two, just make sure you and your prospect understand what the number represents.

You know from experience that you can help your prospect achieve their goals and eliminate their frustrations for $100,000.

We’ll pretend also that your prospect does want to fix the problem, and they want your help in doing it. You know this because on your sales call you asked the right questions that helped your prospect share this with you.

Here’s how you start your investment conversation.

“If you could solve a $1-million dollar problem for $100,000, would it make sense to do it?”

That’s it. That is all you have to do to start your conversation about the investment for your product or service on your sales call.

Did you ever think it would be so easy to start discussing money on your sales call?