Let me tell you how I completely changed how we pitch to clients after stumbling upon this “comparable value” thing. Honestly, it started when I kept hearing “it’s too expensive” from prospects, and my team was getting frustrated.
Hitting a Wall with Pricing
First, I forced myself to record five sales calls. Painful, but eye-opening. Every time we mentioned price, prospects’ eyes glazed over. Our £15,000 software package? They’d physically lean back from the screen. Even though competitors charged more for less!
Here’s what we were doing wrong:
- Drowning them in features: Rambling about API integrations nobody cared about
- Defending cost defensively: “Well, considering the market rate…” cue snores
- Ignoring their mental shortcuts: They just compared us to cheaper, crap alternatives
The “Aha” Moment at 2 AM
After binge-watching sales training videos (and too much coffee), I tried something stupidly simple. Grabbed a sticky note and wrote: “Stop selling software. Sell the damn outcome comparison.”
Next morning, I made our team:
- List every hidden cost prospects currently swallow
- Find verifiable examples of what happens without our solution
Our game-changer? Calculating that one restaurant chain client wasted £500 monthly just printing paper schedules</strong because their old system couldn’t handle shift swaps. That became our anchor point.
Redoing Our Entire Pitch
We rebuilt our demo around three brutal comparisons:
- “Keeping your current system is like paying staff to dig holes then fill them”: Showed the math on wasted manager hours
- “Switching to BudgetSoftware™? That’s upgrading from a bicycle to a…slightly nicer bicycle” (with screenshots of their laughable features)
- “Our price isn’t £15k—it’s £83 per location monthly to stop flushing £1,200 down the toilet”
Practiced it on my most skeptical friend. When he said “Okay, that actually makes sense,” I knew we were onto something.
Real Results (And a Confession)
Month one of testing this:
- Closed 2 deals that were “too expensive” last quarter
- Shortened sales calls by 20 minutes (less feature rambling!)
- Had a client repeat OUR comparison to their CFO (“this kills the £500 monthly paper waste!”)
My pride took a hit though. That “brilliant feature” I spent months building? Not one prospect cared when shown the comparable value. Killed my ego but saved the deal.
Biggest lesson? Stop justifying. Start comparing. Show them the financial bleed they tolerate now – makes your cost feel like a bandage, not surgery.
Sips coffee Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to frame that first “unaffordable” client’s payment screenshot. Cheers to awkward maths saving deals!
