Weekly Tip: Talking About Price, Made Easy

There is a baseline set of misconceptions about price in sales conversations that if left untreated, will diminish your effectiveness. Those misconceptions are:

1.  Money and price are synonymous.

2.  Because money has a set value, it is valued the same by all people.

3.  Money is static, non-changing and this causes price discussions to often be forced into haggling, because there are only three price choices; less, more, or same. Between two parties, any one of these three choices leaves one party disappointed.

Those three beliefs are inaccurate.

• Money is only valued in relationship to other things, never alone. For this reason, if you are only talking about the money without its value relationship to what it represents, you will get stuck in the single dimension of price.
• There is no such thing as “apples to apples” comparison, so there is no such thing as an exact price comparison. A pack of gum at the convenience store costs a nickel more than the one across the street at Walmart, yet it is purchased. It is not the gum that gets the premium, it is the convenience, here vs. there. I know people who will drive all over town to save that nickel, and others who never think twice. In business-to-business transactions, the dimensions are exponentially more complex as the offering increases in complexity.
• If you want to be more successful in price discussions, only talk about money, not about price. Most of my clients pride themselves on not being the lowest-priced providers, yet they get defensive when discussing it. If you get better at discussing money, talking about price gets much easier.