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.

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.

Another reason that technology is becoming more and more difficult to sell is that there are many skilled developers and programmers constantly making new solutions and more commonly, replicating other solutions and tweaking them to make them their own.

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 there was a way to create enough value for the customer that price was no longer the deciding factor? Getting the most for their money — that's what buyers are after, aren't they? Is it possible that if a seller could actually create real value in the sales process, customers might be less interested in price and more willing to pay a premium?

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?

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.