With the sharpness of the downturn in the economy, trying to sell pretty much anything has become significantly more difficult. The technology industry is currently one of the most difficult industries in which to generate sales.

One big reason for this is that quite often, consumers have already made up their mind as to what they want due to the availability of information. Todays prospects are far more sophisticated buyers than what they were just a few years ago and it is quite common for a prospect to know just as much about a product 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.

The reason this is creating a problem is that as these technology developers create more and more software based on other versions, consumers are seeing the different solutions from different companies as more or less the same thing. Therefore their decision of which one to buy becomes based more or less solely on price.

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.