Thursday, August 28, 2008

Peanuts & Monkeys

I have a certain reverence for those sales junkies. It takes a lot of patience and determination to keep at it for long periods of time, certainly there is a large pot of gold at the end of the tunnel but it is still a very dark place to tread and often slow. In categories where strong brands don’t exist like outsourced IT services the sale can be driven on what else but price?

During a recent conversation with an old friend who is now developing business for a growing IT outsourcing company I had the opportunity to relive his conversation with a prospect. He said the prospect wanted the lowest possible price and had experienced several issues in the past with other outsource vendors they had partnered with. The dialogue piqued my interest so I asked some more questions. Contracts with other vendors had fallen apart based on the quality of service that was delivered to the client. Pricing was the key differentiator when selecting those vendors and the experience

The immediate analogy that came to mind was if you offer peanuts the best you can afford are monkeys. A monkey is a monkey is a monkey is a monkey just smaller or bigger in size, all they can do is copy each other, scratch and sniff.