Posts Tagged ‘staged’

I was chatting with another small business owner a few days ago, and he was confessing that now and again he would cycle through the home shopping channels – QVC, Ideal World, the Home shopping network etc.  He was quick to point out that he didn’t actually purchase anything from these TV shows, but he watched them for selling suggestions.

His logic was that channels like QVC invested millions in developing different ways of selling plastic rubbish to cash strapped viewers, and maybe the ideas could be applied to B2B selling techniques.

The idea that he was most interested to try was the “easy pay” system, where the cost of a purchase is divided into 3 or 4 equal payments, with each payment taken out per month.   His logic was, if it worked to sell a £50 food processor, it must have an even bigger impact if you are selling £10,000 of IT service.

Now I am not convinced one way or another on the idea of selling a service and including an “Easy Pay” offering.  However, it does provide some interesting ideas, including:

• Provide split payments, useful when a company has run out of budget – half in this financial year, half in next financial year
• “Easy Payments” or split payment could be an additional sales option to add to your Unique Selling Proposition
• Splitting payments could make your option appear cheaper that the competition
• If you do stage payments anyway (part up front, part on a stage delivery, part on completion), isn’t this providing the “Easy Pay” option anyway
• Easy pay may make you seem more willing to help companies in this time of financial difficulties

As you may have gathered from the above, I am also tempted to try this option in a few future quotes to see if it makes a difference in conversion numbers.  However, if I do, I wont call is “Easy Pay” (this suggests that you think the company can’t pay in full), but I like the term “Staged Payments” or “Managed Payments”

So I might be giving this a Try?   But what do you think?