How Less Comedy Can Help Beat Price Tag Objections

The people I work with do not tend to offer the cheaper options in their market space.

They are often in the top one or two, in fact.

And on the basis you get what you pay for, they find success.

No matter how hard it can be to persuade the corporate procurer of this.

So I am well-versed in pitching a seemingly expensive looking price tag as set against a supposedly less so competitor. And that is without citing (perhaps) John Ruskin’s wonderful Common Law of Business Balance.

When suffering the inevitable wince of a seasoned buyer seeking to reduce any amount quoted, I can find myself first empathising through the ‘you never solve any ongoing problem by randomly throwing more money at it’ conversation.

In fact, within IT circles, there’s a fable that there’s an inverse relationship between fresh cash and programming completion. The more money (& people & resource) you throw at a project that seems to be going on too long, the less likely it is to ever finish.

A worry not restricted to the tech sector.

Those aware of this often reframe extra begging bowl requests as ‘investing’ or ‘financing’.

Mitigation break clause ideas abound for the savvy solution seller. From pay-as-you-use to ‘failfast’ style tactics.

So it was that hearing Britain’s most downloaded film review podcast I heard a new slant. One to merrily deploy in such conversations.

This Springtime week’s box office Number One happened to be Deadpool 2.

Yet the critic lamented it was the “very, very disappointing” inferior sequel to its original of which he’d been a big fan. Apparently, “the problem with the first film was that it was a more corporate version of Kick Ass and the problem with the second was that it wasn’t quite Kick Ass 2”. He used this equation to elaborate;

Comedy + Money = Less Comedy

I was immediately struck by how this could be applied to many a costings objection handle. In the business context I earlier described, you could switch in all manner of project ambitions for ‘comedy’ and sound your klaxon.

At the very least, you get to start a conversation on your terms. Positioning your bid in the light that hopefully you know your buyer needs to see it through.

There is an interesting reverse too;

Problem + Money = Less Problem

Which surely is the easier sell where someone seems backing away from solving a problem you can undoubtedly resolve. So long as you remember that here, Money means just the right amount, not thrown recklessly. “As little as possible, as much as necessary”. Although you’d probably also need to show the resultant ‘Less’ is in fact ‘No’.