OC20-01 It’s Too Expensive – Pricing Pressure

So you met with this prospect and they really seem to love what you do and now they come back to you and say, everything seems great. Only we think your price is too high. So what do you do? Do you cave? Do you lower your price? Well, here's the challenge. If you actually just lower your price and still give them the exact same thing, then you're teaching your client that you were ripping them off before. Now you're just willing to do something for a lower price to get the business, which means before you were overcharging them. So we can never give a unilateral concession, but price should always be viewed in the context of results. And what that means is that when someone pushes back on price, well you can say to them is, look, I'm reviewing my notes and here's my understanding of what it is you are trying to solve and what the impact was of not solving that.

And here's what we said results need to look like and what we're going to measure together. Now, if I overshot that, please let me know because if we can pare back what you need, we may be able to reduce the price, but in order to get the results that you're looking for, this is what the investment needs to be. See, what we're doing in this context is we're saying, look, if you're willing to pare back the results then I may be able to pare back the investment to get you there. See, here's the thing. How much less would you have to pay for it to be a good deal, but you don't get the results that you need? The answer is 100% less because if you don't get the results you need, it doesn't matter what you spent. So we need to make sure that anytime we're talking about price, we're talking about in the context of results.

So when you get that pressure, when someone says, well, this is too expensive, the other vendor is less. You can always say, look, we know what it takes to generate the right results. And if someone else has figured out a way to deliver the same results for less investment and time and resources, then I understand if you feel you have to go with them. But in our experience, having done this multiple times, this is the investment it takes. If we want to actually make sure we can deliver those results for you. So anytime you're faced with price, you counter with results.