You sell a product or service that requires some level of configuration or customization. You’ve just engaged with a prospect. You determined during the first sales call that they are considering buying what you sell or better yet you’ve provoked them to consider it. Now you’re excited because it looks like you’ve got a good sales opportunity. Then they ask “how much does it cost?”. So you quickly work up a price and provide it to them. But that’s usually not the best approach, unless you want to commoditize what you sell. Yet that’s what so many B2B salespeople do!
You may say “but, I need to be responsive to my potential customer” or “asking for my price is a buying signal” or “providing pricing accelerates the sales process” or “if I don’t give them a price now they will just go with somebody else who will” or some other rationale. However, it’s usually not in your best interest and often not in your prospect’s best interest.
Let’s start with you. Once you provide your price you’ve ceded all control of the buying/selling process to the prospect. Call it leverage if you will. They’ve got little reason to continue the dialog with you. They can complete the buying process without you. It may not be a fully informed decision, but you’ve lost the chance to participate, help and influence. Often things go dark. You end up chasing them. Calls and emails are not returned. The date by which they said they’d make a decision slips. Maybe you do get them on the phone and they tell you “just another two weeks because blah, blah, blah” (things you should have known if you’d properly qualified the opportunity). You’re still in the dark and the prospect is in complete control.
Your prospect may THINK they know what they need and, granted, sometimes they actually do. But they may not have fully examined their needs. They may not even know the best way to go about evaluating and buying the types of things you sell. And buyers are conditioned to ask about price right away. But that doesn’t mean it’s in their best interest. We have an opportunity, if not an obligation, to help them consider all the implications of their decision to their business beyond what the product costs them. For example, what about the cost of internal resources to deploy and/or manage the processes associated with the product? What about the importance of product reliability and the costs associated with failure? What about implementation considerations and project management? What about the implications of poor quality to their business? What about how effective the product is at delivering desired outcomes? What about the implications for users? But you’ve lost the opportunity to discuss these things where you might make a difference beyond price.
Price isn’t relevant in the early stages of the buying/selling process. We need context. We need to understand why they are interested in us, what their problems and aspirations are, how they will make the decision to buy (or not buy) and how they will evaluate our offer vs. other alternatives (competitors or do it in-house). We need to fully uncover, maybe influence, their true needs beyond the obvious. This is the only way we can create value for them. Otherwise we’re playing the commodity game. Also, we need to learn enough about them to decide if we really have an opportunity to win!
When do we give price? After we’ve qualified it as a real opportunity and done the discovery work to determine specific needs and implications (for us and for them); things we too often rush through or skip to get to pricing and presenting. So provide your price at the right time, which is not necessarily when they ask for it.
If they are truly interested in you and your product or service they aren’t going to move ahead with another alternative if you don’t give them a price right away. Indeed, their willingness to engage with you in discovery is a sign they’re really interested in you. Now that’s a buying signal! They’ll work with you, not against you. If they stonewall you, I suggest you walk away. You are probably just being used as a comparison point to justify their purchase from someone else. Or they treat everything like a commodity. Go find prospects who understand the difference between value and price.
