Walk into enough sales meetings and a pattern emerges. You show the prospect the scope of work, talk through the price per square foot, answer a few questions, and wait. Larry Levine, author of Selling from the Heart and a veteran of B2B sales, thinks that pattern is exactly the problem.
“The reason why you get treated like a transaction,” Levine said, “is because you carry yourself like one. You’re walking into these conversations and you’re acting like a salesperson.” His prescription? Show up differently, not with a pitch, but with a purpose.
Pump the brakes on price
The most common trap Levine sees sellers fall into is responding to “how much will this cost?” with an immediate answer. He argues that jumping straight to price signals that you are, in fact, just like every other vendor that walked through the door that week.
“Anybody can quote a price,” he said. “But why are they asking you? What’s the why and the what behind all of this?” Instead of launching into justifications and figures, Levine encourages sellers to slow the conversation down with a few well-placed questions: What would you like to accomplish? What’s working right now? What would you like done differently? What does a clean office actually look like to you, describe it for me.
“Before we walk your building,” he suggested telling the prospect, “let’s just take a few moments. I have a couple of questions I’d like to ask. It may help give you peace of mind about whether we’re even the right person to help you accomplish some of these things.” That shift, from vendor to advisor, changes the entire dynamic of the meeting.
The curmudgeon in the corner office
Of course, not every prospect is interested in a heart-to-heart about their facility goals. Some will glance at their watch, remind you they have two more vendors coming in this afternoon, and want you to just give them a number. Levine doesn’t dismiss these buyers, he understands them.
“These facilities managers, these curmudgeons, they’re out there,” Levine noted. “They’re perception-oriented and they’re risk-averse. They have people reporting to them, and they report to somebody. They’re sandwiched right in the middle.”
The last thing a facilities manager wants is to make a decision that leaves their custodial team unhappy, their building looking worse, and their own reputation on the line.
Levine’s approach to cracking that shell is disarmingly direct. Acknowledge the situation. Tell them: “I know you’re going to beat me up over price, just like you do with the other 10 or 11 vendors. But my commitment to you is to help remove all the obstacles you may have about people like us. When this is all said and done, I’m going to make you look really, really good. Because you’ve got people counting on you to make the right decision.”
The key, he said, is confidence and believability. “When you act like everybody else, you get treated like everybody else,” Levine said. These people go right to price because they expect the conversation to go down just like the other 15 or 20 they’ve had in the last couple months, he added. Break that expectation, and you break the pattern.
The perception problem
Levine draws on a simple but vivid illustration. He’s a member of his local Kiwanis chapter in Thousand Oaks, California, which meets at a local golf course. And the cleaning, frankly, doesn’t impress him.
“Point being, it’s probably a low-price leader,” he said. And the result is a space that sends a message, just not an intentional one. His challenge to cleaning company sellers is to bring that perspective into every conversation: “What if their best client walked in? What would they see?”
When you sell on price, Levine said bluntly, you die on price. The companies that win long-term are the ones that help prospects understand what cleanliness actually means for their business, for staff morale, client perception, and the reputation of the person who made the call.
Setting the tone
Perhaps the most important idea Levine leaves sellers with is this: The experience you create before a contract is signed tells your prospect everything they need to know about the experience after. “If you show up and inspire them to think completely differently, and they haven’t even signed on the dotted line yet, you’ve completely changed the paradigm of the whole conversation,” he said. “You’re top of mind.”
That means arriving with insight. Referencing an industry trend you heard about on the drive over. Asking about the last 90 days and the next three months. Helping the prospect cast a vision for what their building could be.
“Inspire them to see and achieve things about their building they didn’t know was possible,” Levine said. “It’s not always about price. It’s the experience you bring.”
For commercial cleaning companies caught in a race to the bottom on price, that might be the most valuable square footage of all: the space between a transaction and a transformation.
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