How to Increase Your Prospects’ Budget

Many salespeople are selling themselves short by selling projects, products or services at a fraction of what they could have sold them at. The top-performing salesperson needs to sell in such a way that it allows prospects to have a larger budget during the sale.

Three Ways to Increase Your Prospects’ Budget

#1. Focus on outcomes and challenges. Your prospects do not buy your product or service; they buy the outcomes and solutions to the challenges that they want to overcome. Don’t sell the features and benefits of your product/service; instead understand what the prospect is actually seeking to accomplish and which challenges he or she wants to really solve.

This will dramatically increase the size of your prospects’ budget because they always have a budget with which to achieve key outcomes or solve critical challenges.

#2. Ask for a budget to solve challenges. Salespeople tell me all the time that they have tried to ask for budgets in the past, but it doesn’t work. The reason is because most salespeople ask for a budget (if they ever do, that is) for what the prospect would be willing to pay for a particular product or service.

Your prospect doesn’t have a budget to pay for your product or service. They have only a budget for solving challenges. So ask about particular challenges that your prospect has and then find out what his or her budget would be for solving those challenges.

This way you’ll discover that many of your prospects have a sizeable budget because it’s about solving their challenges rather than paying for the solutions that you have.

#3. Give three options in your proposals. So many salespeople are leaving tons of money on the table because they’re offering only one solution in their proposal.

Instead, offer three different options in your proposal: the first being the least expensive; the second being a little more expensive; and the third option being even more expensive than the other two with escalating value along the way.

By offering these three options you are now giving your prospect the opportunity to get more value by investing more money in you. Not every prospect is going to choose the higher option, but a good number will choose the higher options.

The other benefit of offering three options is that you’re giving context to what you’re charging. So rather than having to seek out multiple bids from multiple vendors, prospects have now received multiple options from just one person. This will not only increase your prospects’ budget but will also increase the likelihood of actually closing the sale.

When you apply these three simple tips for increasing your prospects’ budget, the size of your sales will balloon up significantly. Be consistent with these three approaches and watch your efforts get rewarded in a dramatic way. Which of these three tips was most useful to you? Please share below in the comments.