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What can we do when a prospect or customer asks us, “What’s your price on this?” “What’s your price on that?” Ad infinitum. We know that many times we can lose this battle but there are sales skills that can  put these price questions to bed and save the order.

“When our customers start a roll-call of pricing questions it’s time to go shopping at the grocery store…”

Sales Tip 101
When customers have issues with pricing, their foremost concern is usually about the total price of all the products and services they’re buying from us, not each individual item. Normally a customer will have a vague notion of what the total price might be before they even receive any sales help from us. This is best demonstrated when customers look at formal proposals. The first thing they look at is the page with the total pricing. Customers focus on totals.

How to Sell with a Shopping Cart
When we go to the grocery store we pile a bunch of stuff in a cart and pay the total when we check out. Bar codes have allowed grocery stores to hide the pricing that used to be displayed individually on every item. They’re not stupid and they know what we know. Customers care primarily about the total price of the purchase, not the price of each individual item.

Let’s Go Shopping
When our customers start a roll-call of pricing questions it’s time to go shopping at the grocery store and put these sales tips into action. The first sales tip is to stop quoting price after price and respond with some variation of, “Rather than quoting each item’s price let me put together the complete package/order/proposal for you with a total price. Some of our pricing might be higher than you’re expecting and some will be much lower, but our overall pricing is consistently competitive and your total price will be too.”

We have to get into the mind of our customers and figure out what information they are really seeking. Most of the time when asking about pricing one item at a time they are really just wanting to know, “What is all of this going to cost me?”

Related information: Does any customer every pay the lowest price for anything?, A Great but Infrequently Used Objection Handling Technique

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Tags: objections, pricing

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