Selling just commodity products will always take you straight into a fruitless price competition. Why should a customer change his supplier for any other reason than selecting a cheaper new supplier? Just because you are nice and friendly? Not in this world.
So you need to find another way to both keep your existing loyal customers and win new ones.
Despite persistence and offering great products, I would suggest becoming the supplier who really understands the customer.
- Maybe he’s not looking for another cartridge supplier, but for somebody who takes away his pain caused by not working printers?
- Or somebody who guarantees that every printer is working and who proactively replaces cartridges?
- Or somebody who makes the customers own cartridge depot become redundant – saving money and space at client side? Companies are open for ideas to both improve their productivity and reduce the costs. Most of all, they want to avoid pain. If you don’t know your customers pain, you have no clue what he is doing. You have to change that! Reset your thinking: Customers should not only want to buy from you. They should be begging to be delivered by you.
Get out of the price war and start focussing on removing your customer’s pain.
By the way: This helps you to get more loyal clients and it raises the bar for your competition, since they keep on fighting the price war. And if anyone tells you, “we already have a supplier”, a good response might be “of course you do, and having a backup you can rely on, will even improve your business. Or would you like to fly with an airplane, where they have only one navigation system and no backup?”