You know the feeling when you’ve been carefully building the relationship with your prospective clients.

You have done proper research to know about the company and the prospect.

The first few meetings seem to be going well. You have built rapport with your prospects.

Now, it’s time to talk about pricing.

Talking about pricing can be a challenging task, especially when you are in front of an important prospect.

Am I asking too much or too little?

If you ask too little, it might affect your bottom line and make you look desperate.

If you ask too much, you run the risk of missing out on a potentially great opportunity.

Your important prospect looks at you and says,“you’re too expensive.”

How do you respond to this?

Here are some simple price negotiation strategies you could use when your prospect talks about pricing.

Strategy #1: Prevention is the key

I am a firm believer that when it comes to overcoming sales objections, prevention is the key.

If you are able to address sales objections before the prospect could even mention them, you are more likely to overcome them.

 

So, if you believe that you are charging a premium for your service, you should be able to justify the pricing early on before giving any room for objections to rise.

Try to differentiate yourself from low-cost competitors as early as possible.

During the conversation, you could highlight the benefits of working with you.

For example, if you are a copywriter, you could try saying something like this.

“Our clients love working with us because our sales copies tend to have higher conversion rates and our services are time-saving.

Even though we are considered a premium service provider, the benefits like higher conversion rate and saved time outweigh our high cost.”

This is one of the price negotiation strategies that really applies to any sales objections you want to overcome.

Write down a list of objections your prospects might have and try to address them throughout the conversations.

 

Strategy #2: Let’s talk about this.

I truly feel that the entire sales process is a collaborative effort.

“Make a customer, rather a sale.” ~ Katherine Barchetti

In essence, you are trying to find out how you guys might be able to work on a project.

So, if you can shift the conversation from “I am selling to you” to “Let’s see how we can work on this project together”, you are able to engage with your prospects better.

Instead of:

“This is how much my service costs.”

To

“The investment to working with me is x amount. How does that fit into your budget.”

See how the entire tone of the conversation shifts from ‘I’ to ‘We’.

Essentially, you want to have a two-way, continuous conversation with your prospects, so that you can find the best way to work with each other.

By shifting the position, your prospects are more likely to share their budget with you.

You can then take their budget and craft your services or proposals accordingly.

Strategy #3: Shift the focus of conversation

When your prospect complains about pricing, you can shift the focus by mentioning other important aspects of your service.

Take a look at this.

Prospect: “You are too expensive. I know someone else offering the same service for less.”

You: “I understand what you are saying. The reason why my clients hire me and not a low-priced consultant is because they tend to see the results faster. Won’t you like to see higher conversion rate on your website (the results) faster?

Prospect: “Well, of course I would like to see higher conversion rate on my website.

You: “I could share with you how I create higher conversion rate for my clients. Would you like to talk about this?”

Now, the focus of conversation has shifted from pricing to your service process.

Strategy #4: Be creative

When a prospect complains about pricing, we sometimes think that the only way to overcome this is to reduce the price.

There are many other aspects to price negotiations and a lot of creative price negotiation strategies you can implement.

For example:

Payment terms: Instead of reducing the price, maybe you could give a better payment term to your prospects.

Money back guarantee: Money back guarantees are a great way to ease your prospect’s insecurities about working with you.

Try this:

Prospect: “You are too expensive.

You: “Let’s talk about this. Would you be open to discussing different ways of working with each other? I have a few ideas if you’d like to hear about them.

So, if your prospects complain about pricing, be creative and explore other solutions.

Give some of these price negotiation strategies a try and let me know how it goes.

 

Strategy #5 – Explain the consequences of a delayed deal

There can be times when everything seems to be going fairly well. You’re confident about closing the deal. But, suddenly the plot thickens.

The prospect says something like, “Well, this sounds promising but we’re thinking about holding things off until next month. Can we reconnect sometime in the next couple of weeks?

Instead of offering a low-ball offer by dropping the price to expedite the process, here’s what you can do –

Prospect – I got a couple of meetings lined-up this week. Let’s reconnect next week or month.

You – Well, I would be happy to meet you sometime later, but let me tell you that our service prices will be higher by then. So, if you want the services at a lower price, we might want to push things a bit earlier.

This is yet another of the classic price negotiation strategies that should make both the parties meet halfway. Don’t try to seal the deal by lowering your price in order to fetch a deal.

 

To your big sales,

Melinda