Not being a coffee drinker, on my way home from work I stopped at the "Local Coffee Shop" to check out the prices. For the record they did not have an $8.00 cup of coffee. The highest price cup of Starbucks coffee I could discern was $5.00 and that was with the works.
This snippet of street dialogue got me thinking about your industries and your clients.
Are you finding that your clients are more careful about their spending and making buying decisions?
What are you finding? How much discussion versus impact?
- Linda
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Linda Richardson is founder of Richardson (http://www.richardson.com/), a leading sales training and consulting firm. Ms. Richardson has written 9 books on selling including her most recent, The Sales Success Handbook. She has been published extensively in industry and training journals and has been featured in numerous publications.
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5 comments:
Finding What
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We sell nutrition and have done it for twelve years and we've found consistently, including now, that people who want it buy it and people who don't won't.
Last week a couple placed an order that cost them $3,250 for a bulk order - that was from a $5,000 order discounted at 35% and from now on they'll get a 40& wholesale discount. In that same week a woman on disability with very limited income ordered $250 worth of products because she wants to feel better and believes our products will help her.
In that same week a woman financially very well off said that $70 was too expensive - she didn't know the value of the products and didn't want them.
So we find in any kind of economy people buy what they want to find money to buy.
Linda, Reading your comments left me with two thoughts. First, the street dialogue that you mention seems to be at first blush, sterotypical. Construction workers seeing what appeared to be a successful woman walking to work, and judging that person to be one who would also fit the "sterotype" Starbucks customer, who didn't appreciate the value of money and hard work was how I read it. That doesn't mean that the construction workers couldn't have been very well off, that's just the problem with stereotypes.... The $8.00 versus $5.00 comparison was only math, and not as relevant as the "value of hard work and hard earned money"premise.
With that said, your question, regardless of the dialogue, goes to a much bigger picture. I'm a GM and work at a Fortune 50 Co. and I can share with you that my experience is that clients are definitely being more cautious with their expenditures, but the impact isn't being fully felt as of yet. Implementing contingency strategies and awareness of economic conditions go to the discussion piece. I'll spare comments on subprime and stock market impact, and leave it at more discussion than impact, but still - impact, with more on the way. IMHO
Linda,
What I am discovering in my daily activities is once a customer perceives prices are rising then thats it. No matter how much I say or how high my discounts are they still believe prices to be higher now. I am a fairly young (25) sales consultant ( 2years)and right now I am having to come up with ways to reevaluate my approach. I still know I will hit my 4th quarter target but its just that harder.
I will continue to be a partner to my customers, but once they fall into this cycle of perceiving higher prices and their own slower sales cylces that is just a horrible scenario for all sales consultants.
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I recently left a company that represents catalog companies in the US and abroad. In the last few months there, I saw a sharp upturn in the number of companies demanding more for their advertising dollar, or vanishing off the screen as they just could not complete amid rising fuel, supply and mailing costs. I definitely think more people are feeling the crunch these days, and are modifying their spending -- both on the consumer and B2B level.
Absolutely they are more cautious on spending. There's no more 'free money' in the form of equity to refinance out of homes and variable rate mortgages are squeezing discretionary income. However, discretionary is the key word. We still fill our tanks, still heat our homes and still have caffeine addictions. I, for one, have gone to the $1.55 cup of Starbuck's drip coffee.
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