Given The Game Away?

Met a decent chap this morning running a funky scene-setting business through lighting controls.  Turned out they’ve only really one salesguy on the road, so not really a prospect for us (I’ve given the appointment-arranger suitable lashings whilst repeating the word ‘qualification’ in latin).

He did recount one amusing tale of how they won a high-end residential deal.  The project manager asked for breakdowns of individual unit prices.  In common with most reps I guess, the quoter did not want to do this (it takes time and is usually used as a stick to beat you with by either removing items, or worse arguing about separate prices).

When this happens, it’s often the case that two separate people from the bidders are involved.  And in this particular instance, something got lost in translation.  The unit price quote added upto around £250k.  When pointed out to the prospective vendor that the original quote was £290k, the boss did a bit of quick-thinking.  “Oooops, looks like we’ve given you our cost prices here…..”  And urged the (thankfully) underling client-side to hold on for amendments.  They agreed, and the next question was ‘how much were you lookng to spend?’  The answer came back as ‘around £270k’, which prompted a splutter along the lines of “arh, that’d give us less than ten percent profit…”

‘Proper’ quote sent, the business was won.  The value equalling almost £300k!