Price conversations are a bad thing. Invariably, you are dragged into the mud and blood of comparisons with someone ridiculously cheaper. We get these requests – “send me your price sheet”. My ears prick up like a Dobermann when I hear those words, because I am mentally getting ready for trouble. I know a couple of things are happening here, none of which are good for me to make this sale happen.
The buyer is possibly shopping the deal to get three quotes to keep the compliance department happy, so that they can award the deal to their already selected and much preferred, favourite provider. My job is to be used by the buyer, to pony up the necessary paperwork, so my rival can get all of the money. Another reason may be so that they can play all of the providers off against each other and fill in the matrix. Along the top they place the names of the suppliers and down the left hand column, they put in the names of the solutions they need. They populate the corresponding cells with the numbers of the respective pricings. The cheapest alternatives are quickly identified, you are too high and then are tossed on the scrap heap.
Sometimes, the buyer will say “just send me the pricing” and you will try to resist. You want to meet with them online or in person, to fully understand what they need. You are doing what you should be doing, but they are not playing ball. They say, “send it”. My advice – send it and then completely forget about it. The chances of this going anywhere are almost zero, not fully zero, but pretty much indistinguishable from zero.
Instead, spend your time finding people who want to share their issues with you, so that you can understand if you have a solution for them or not. They will be price focused and that is natural, because they have a spreadsheet somewhere for the P&L. This document has a set of numbers therein, which specifies how much they have allotted for the solution. Now here is the wonderful thing about the P&L – the whole thing is a fiction. Those numbers in those cells can be moved around with the clicking of a mouse and the pressing of a keyboard button.
Rather than offer a price, offer a packaged solution. Let me give an example. You notice your competitors are getting revenues from an accommodation business. The target client is advertising the business, but you have no action with them. You have tried contacting someone down the food chain. All they said was “send me the pricing” and they didn’t want to meet with you. You have found the boss’s name but no email address. Being creative, you guess that the person at the bottom of the decision-making hierarchy has an email address which may be standard. What if you insert the boss’s name? It might work and get you access to the real decision-maker, the maestro of the P&L spreadsheet, who has the authority and means to move those numbers around.
Great, but what are you going to offer them? You have a very desirable audience for their product, so that is a key prerequisite covered off. Rather than offering exposure with a hope of some take up and some minor sales, you do better than that. Your package is to create a contest, where the winners are able to stay in the accommodation as the prize. To enter the contest, the target audience have to give up their contact details. With their receipt, now there are concrete opportunities for the client to directly market to these highly valuable potential customers, who have raised their hand.
To make the offer attractive, you give away five to ten accommodation prizes, so that target individuals do the mental math and work out they have a pretty good shot of winning and are activated to hand over their contact information. Being the accommodation business, there are always cases of product which is vacant, so there is only the cost of administration and cleaning to worry about, so a relatively low cost prize can be secured.
The point is the package is the offer, rather than a single solution. We come to the big boss with a well thought out strategy for getting more business. The means to get that new business is through the tools you have on offer in the package. The decision to move some numbers around that P&L spreadsheet just got a whole lot easier for the big boss.
“Send me the prices” is a losing proposition. We have to do better than that by responding by navigating our way further up the food chain, to the more savvy decision-makers who can recognise a great package when they see one. Don’t allow yourself to get stuck with people who can only say “no” and who can’t re-arrange the P&L expenditures. If this is where you are now, either get to the boss or find another potential client company, where you can get in front of the boss.
