Pushing past prospects objecting to your price can be hard. What do you say to someone who thinks your prices are too high? How do you get control back so that you don’t find yourself losing a prospect, or working for less than your worth?
Don't justify your value
Something you never want to do when a prospect objects to your pricing is to try to justify yourself. Doing this takes you from a controlled position in the conversation to a defensive position, and it's always harder to make a sale when you are on the back foot. Psychologically when we attempt to justify our value and worth, we are showing that we lack control, we lack power and we can even appear desperate.
Business owners want to work with capable people, in-demand and confident, so rather than attempting to persuade someone through justifying your value to them try agreeing with them.
It sounds crazy, and it sounds counterproductive but acknowledging the perception of the prospect of your price does a few things, it puts the control back into your hands and it shows your confidence you have for the value of the work you provide.
One of the best things to add to this is the "compared to what?" approach. In this situation language is important, so you are going to want to be careful with the words you choose to use here. How you word this is likely going to depend on what they have said and what you have already uncovered, but a good basic example might be something like:
“Yes, I understand. The work we do certainly is not cheap, but I am interested as to why you feel this is too much, what are you measuring this against?”
There can be a wide range of reasons that might come back, you need to be ready to have a conversation about this without jumping into justification mode. But two of the most common reasons that you will hear are:
- They have a made-up “rough budget” in their head, that has little context and almost no alignment with the value of the work you’re providing.
- They have had other quotes or worked with someone in the past where your costs do not match what they have experienced in the past.
Point 1 - the made-up figure
The best way forward is to focus on the value of the outcome and how much of an impact will it make. By this stage, you probably should have had a “why” conversation where you find out the real motivators for the project and what success looks like. If you have, rehash that conversation once more. If you haven’t done this, it’s time to find out why.
Point 2 - previous price expectations
The best way forward is to focus on why they chose to contact you, what it is they see you offer them. Perhaps the other contacts are not able to offer the same quality of work, the customer service isn’t high or any one of a range of reasons. The key is to find out what they believe is your strong point.
Regardless of the answer as to why they think your costs are high, agree with them and avoid any rationalisation of your value, then see if you can have them explain where the disconnect is. Give the prospect some space, let them use their own words and more often than not you will find the prospect talking themselves into the final sale stage.
