A Pleasant Sell
July 27th, 2008[ General ]
To be blunt, I really don’t know where I stand on how to effectively price software. The answer for me is that there isn’t AN answer. It’s one of those questions like “what’s the secret to a great relationship?” or “what’s the best job?”. There isn’t an answer. It depends on everything, you, your people, your clients, your software, the climate around you, competition, etc, etc. Warning, there are no answers in this post…..
I can tell you about one of my ideal sales experiences which was of all places, Blockbuster. Why? The main reason is that they managed to always make it about me and my goals. The first time I ever rented at blockbuster was painless. I went in, picked out a video, prepared to be sold to and wade through paperwork. Instead I flashed a credit card, signed one thing, paid some cash and was out in not much more than the average member rental time, carrying a new membership card.
I didn’t think much about it at the time but later realized how lovely this was. We’re so used to being pushed silver, gold and platinum packages and features that we hardly notice it now. In this case they recognized that all I needed was the ability to rent a video. They got me setup for that and left it there. That I greatly appreciate.
Did they miss out on the upsell? Well no. A few weeks later after having rented a whack of videos, they technically did upsell me but again it was about me. They now recognized that my rental patterns dictated that I could save some cash through joining their rewards program. They offered it once, explained the benefits based on MY buying patterns and I happily signed up. There was no fictional pitch. No “well IF you do this and IF you do that then maybe you’ll save this”. It was “you’ve rented x videos in the past y weeks. With this program you would have saved $z”. Am I giving blockbuster too much credit? Well possibly but I still never felt sold to which is more than I can say for just about every other company I’ve dealt with.