In the current economic climate, selling anything to anyone is a challenge. Technology is one of the most difficult industries as far as generating sales goes.

One of the main reasons for this is that information is so readily available through the Internet that the prospects of today are far more sophisticated buyers than those of a few years ago. Quite often, buyers will know just as much about a solution as the person selling it.

Sales pitches in which the seller reels off the functionalities of a product of which the buyer is already aware quite often shoves the sales process into reverse as potential buyers will most likely resent being force-fed information that anyone can look up with a few clicks of a mouse.

The fact that there are so many programmers and software developers with the skills to constantly be creating new products and solutions, or (as is quite often the case) duplicate existing technology and perhaps slightly alter or improve it is also a key factor in the difficulty of technology sales.

Because of this, solutions from different companies are looking more and more alike to potential buyers, and so the sales process moves further down a path of price based competition.

What if you could create value for the customers to the extent that the deciding factor was no longer price? Customers are interested in getting the most for their money and so could it be possible for a seller to create that sort of value during the sales process, make potential customers steer away from price fixation and on the whole make them more willing to pay a higher price?

One thing’s for sure, if you’re like most companies out there delivering a pitch, day in and day out, based entirely on products and features, you’re succeeding in only one thing: driving the customer back to price. So then, how does a technology company differentiate themselves today?

In order to compete on another level than price, you should not put all the emphasis on what youre selling, but how youre selling it. The technology industry seems obsessed with PowerPoint, probably more so than any other industry. And all PowerPoint does is describe. Are your clever animations and graphics all that much better than everyone elses? In the competitive marketplace of today, value doesnt lie in the hard sales of products, but in the way in which theyre sold and acquired.