The Cure For High Prices

So a chatterati radio news show this week had a feature on what’s happening with commodity prices.

Numerous supposed luminaries discussed why they are all either at or near five-year lows.

Is oil price suppression due to a US-Saudi pact to destabilise evil Putin’s economy? Are the lunatics in Brussels regulating the sugar-price to impossible depths to needlessly create yet another ludicrous mountain? And is the cost of copper dropping due to the pincers of waning Chinese stimulus and a mystery buyer cunningly scooping up almost the entire world’s stockpile?

I’m hardly comforted by one such “expert” stating that, in his experience, “speculation does not cause upward price movement”.

The same sage went on to quote an adage;

the cure for high prices is high prices

My ears instantly twitched.

His point was that people are less happy to pay a higher price, so when one is set, less sales occur and so force the price down again. A kind of classroom price elasticity argument.

Yet I believe you’re better to accept that this must not apply in the solution selling world.

One of my constant battles with salesteams is to help them see that they can – and so often should – raise their prices.

Anyone can sell a discount

One of my favourite sayings.

And a false truism to boot.

Yet buyers never truly buy on ‘price’, do they? Have you ever heard a business purchaser confide in you they bought something once because it was the cheapest? Ask your chief bean counter…

I’m not the kind of person that suggests any problem can be resolved if you throw enough money at it. Not at all. In fact, I’m firmly of the opposite belief. Especially if it involves a cementing of the status quo.

Yet I feel a salesperson’s prime task can easily be a slight shift in the above commodity broker’s saying. Something along the lines of;

the proper cure for a knotty problem usually means a higher price tag

You can even turn this into a natty equation visual;

: – ) = ‽ (↑$)

Or perhaps not…

In any case, the greater the difficulty of the problem, the larger the accepted amount of cash required to fix it can be.

It’s an acid test for any solution bid. How does your big prospect stack up on it?