What if I said our company’s widgets are the highest performing, highest quality widgets in the industry, and even better, we’re the low price leader. I hope you found that opening statement a little bit hard to swallow. You knew something was wrong with it, right? Like can I be the highest quality widget manufacturer in the industry and also be the cheapest? Not Really, right?

Low-Value Assumptions
As soon as you hear low price leader, you’re going to make a whole bunch of assumptions that do not include being known for high quality, but this is what happens when you show up for your client as being price focused. Once you’ve shown them that you’re focused on price, you’ve motivated them to be focused on price, and now you have this silent agreement that the key factor in your relationship is going to be price, and once you built your team, your clientele and all of your processes around low-value assumptions about price, it’s very hard to then flip that over and sell life insurance and financial services and drive lots of referral business with high-value clientele.

Compete on Value
It’s critical that you start competing on value. Maybe you can’t turn the whole ship in one day, but you can begin making high-value assumptions about your employees and about your clientele that will help you make the shift from a price based conversation to a value-based conversation. You can start having deeper conversations with your clientele where you listen carefully, you empower them, and you give them great solutions to real problems, and you can leverage your team’s ability to perfect the customer experience and help you drive more value for your client. On a personal note, when I was working for consulting companies, I loved low ball biters. They made it very easy for me to avoid low-value clientele because they would absorb all of them. It prevented me from accidentally getting stuck with clients that I didn’t want and meanwhile, clients who wanted real value and wanted to work with someone they can trust would come to me.

So if you were competing on price, there’s probably some agent somewhere who’s very glad that you are because it’s freeing them up to work with high-value clients and make lots of money and have a much bigger impact on the world. So if you’re new at this, please make the commitment that you’re going to compete on value. And if you’ve been at it for a while and you’re stuck in the world of price competition, let us help you get yourself unstuck. Try that on and let us know how it works. Of course, we’re here to help.