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.

This means that sales pitches that consist of nothing more than a list of the solutions functions will most likely do nothing more than annoy a prospect as the chances are that they will have researched the product beforehand of they have shown an interest in it.

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 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.