Do Your Customers Value Your Leadership or Your Price?

11 Jul, 2018

You have a few long-standing clients, a few new relationships, and a few promising leads that seem poised to result in successful contracts in the future. So if you’re looking into that future and trying to optimize these relationships – building on their strengths and shoring up their weaknesses – it might help to take a close look at what’s really making them work. Your reps might have friendly charms and million-dollar smiles, but your best customer connections are probably built on more than just personal energy.

Do your customers value your position in the marketplace, the value your product brings to patient health, or your price? If you can say yes to the first two, you’re on steady footing. But if you suspect your clients are responding primarily to your price points, you may be in trouble over the long term.

Value over price

Your product should offer clear differentiation in the marketplace, especially if the marketplace is a crowded bustle of products that are commodified, or more or less similar. If your drug struggles to compete with generics, or your gauze pads are essentially identical to everyone else’s, you may be pushed to sell on price, which brings the complications described below. But if you can identify value that sets you apart, build your house on that value. Rest your case soundly on claims your competitors can’t make.

Avoid the price trap

Selling your product based on price can lead you down a few rhetorical roads all of which end poorly for you, if not for your customer. First, if your biggest boast is affordability, you can easily be superseded as soon as your competitors find a way to outbid you. Numbers don’t lie, and they aren’t subjective; cheaper is cheaper, and if that’s the only argument in your favor, it can quickly disappear, leaving you with nothing. At the same time, pitching on price alone comes with implications — it suggests you know you have little else to offer, and it also suggests you’re cutting corners on raw material, production practices, research, or something else.

Do something that makes you indispensable

If you can’t differentiate your product, try another angle before you plant your flag on price: service. Make your relationship indispensable to your client by doing or sharing something your competitors can’t or won’t. Share unbiased medical data, for example. Or have your reps readily connect clients with medical science liaisons or subspecialty experts.

Partner with a top healthcare sales recruiter

Before you settle on price as your primary selling point, leverage every other option in your toolkit, and coach your medical sales reps to rely on price as a last resort. To bring in the best recruiters to your medical sales team, contact our team at Buckman Enochs Coss and Associates to get started!