In the current economic climate, selling anything to anyone is a challenge. Technology is one of the most difficult industries as far as generating sales goes.

A big part of the reason for this is that information on products is so easily accessible that quite often a prospect will know just as much about a product as the salesman. The technology consumers of today are far more sophisticated and well informed buyers than what they were five years ago.

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.

Because of this, solutions from different companies are looking more and more alike to potential buyers, and so the sales process moves further down a path of price based competition.

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?

If you are like most companies out there and have people delivering sales pitches every day that are based on little more than the inherent functions and features of a product, then you will usually only succeed to do one thing, turn the customer back to price. So how can technology companies differentiate themselves from each other in this day and age?

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.