Why should a customer pay your higher price?

When a prospective client shares that your competition is a lot less expensive than you, how do you respond? Your response can make all the difference in the world. It’s all about knowing your own value.

I run into this all the time in my world, and you may have seen it as well. When I’m meeting with a potential client, or possibly talking to them on the phone. At a certain point in the conversation, we get to budget. As we’re talking through that, they say something like this:

“Your competition quoted me X number of dollars, which is one-third of what you just quoted me.”

How are they expecting me to respond? You probably know the answer already, especially if you’ve run into this situation yourself.

People who say something like that assume that you want the sale at any cost, because that’s what they’ve run into before. They assume you will respond with something like, “Well, we can do it for that price too!”

Instead, I respond with something along these lines:

“I appreciate you sharing that. Why do you think they’re so much cheaper than us?”

You might be shocked at some of the things people share.

“Well, they probably don’t have the history or track record that you do.”

“They don’t have the expertise that you do.”

How they respond is very, very important. Because what they’re really sharing is the reason that they would pay you more than they would the other guy. Of course, your tonality becomes excruciatingly important. But if you do this right, suddenly you’re having a full-blown conversation. Perhaps your response might be something like this:

“That doesn’t surprise me. Would you like to talk about that?”

So, when you don’t know the true intent behind the prospect’s statement, resist resorting to the technique you just learned in your sales-meeting role play on how to overcome the price objection. Instead, starting asking questions to better understand the prospect.

Now, once you’ve worked with the prospect to discover the real intent of their statement, and it is price, now you’ve got to examine why your price is an issue. Most salespeople would consider this a problem with the prospect perception of the salesperson’s product or service value. However, that orientation is still focused on the salesperson — we call this “us-centered vs. them-centered.”

A better strategy for the salesperson, rather than focusing on value, is to go back into the selling process and re-explore the prospect’s pain. Remember, the prospect’s pains are their reasons for doing business, NOT the salesperson’s reasons for doing business. When the salesperson starts guiding the conversation back to pain, it’s amazing how the prospect’s price objections and resistance seem to evaporate.

Bob Bolak is president of Sandler Training in Boulder. Contact him at  bbolak@sandler.com.

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