Promote The Value

Surfing the web for sales sites one evening, I happened across a couple of great blog posts ran by a sales training company.  One particular I wanted to comment on, but unfortunately they’ve turned off the functionality.

It was about how to handle the often thorny issue of telling prospects your price.  I loved the immediate response they recommend; “expensive”.

Their reasoning goes that if they baulk at that from the off, then they’d never appreciate the value so it’s best to qualify out at the start.

They also suggest you can be open with them when they come back with ‘how much?’.  My training on this back in the day prompted me with two approaches where you’re keen to brush the issue under the carpet for now:

Wide Ranging

By using your ‘range’ of pricing you can muddy the waters.  Eg: we have all sorts of products at different levels, ranging from $1,000 to $100,000 and it all depends on what you want…”  This also works well when you sell something ‘by the month’, as the figure can sound tiny.

Equate To Something

Favourable comparison to another figure works well too.  “For less than the minimum wage” is a line I’ve heard myself use.  “it’s a small percentage of the savings you’ll make” is another (albeit slightly corny) way of removing price as an immediate issue.

The people writing the aforementioned blog may well frown on such methods, as they could argue that you’re only fooling yourself if you don’t qualify hard.  Yet two factors influence my alternate view.  Firstly, these techniques work when you’re not speaking to the sign-off authority, ie: a minion that can only say ‘no’.  Secondly, for just about everything I’ve ever sold, there’s never been a budget, and for situations where you have to create both the value and urgency of your proposition, they seem to have served me well.