With the economy how it is at the moment, the prospect of trying to sell anything to anyone is quite daunting. One of the most difficult industries to generate sales in is the technology industry.

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.

As a result of this, sales pitches in which a salesman lists the functions of a solution, of which the buyer will most likely already be aware, will not move the sales process forward, in fact, if anything it will move it backwards as buyers do not want to hear information that they already know.

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?

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?

If you want to compete on something other than price, you must focus not on what you sell, but rather on how you sell. Probably more than any other industry, technology is PowerPoint obsessed. And what does PowerPoint do but describe? Are your animations and graphics really that much better than the next persons? In today's marketplace, customer value does not reside in flogging products or services but rather in the manner in which products and services are sold, and the manner in which they are acquired.