You can be highly successful following traditional sales coaching on when/how to share price. Never give it on the first call, make sure you have an ROI first, have a dedicated call to go over it, dance around it with objection handling.
But I have to share this alternative experience with y’all. I don’t have data to back this up, Keenan and John Barrows would likely have choice words for me, but it works so well.
Be the first to share pricing, and make it higher than your ASP.
”Hey Darryl/Cindy Lou, I know our focus was on your challenges and how the solution lines up, but let’s also sit down and talk about pricing.” Whether your champ is the wallet holder or not, this is much better received.
When I stopped inviting my boss to the pricing calls and treated them like a champ-building exercise, one of three things started happening:
- They said WOOOO no way, too high tbh (qualify out the bad deals fast)
- They said WOOOO too high, but here’s what I can do (gets coaching/alignment, speeds up sales cycle and prevents ghosting)
- They said oh I could do that (established higher pricing anchor/bigger deal)
Doing this in my last gig, I closed the largest commercial new logo deal in company history by more than 2x, and my avg deal size for each (qualified, late stage) opps were higher compared to my peers who leveraged the more traditional approach.
The key here is putting your buyer first. The longer you wait, the more anxious they think you’re scared to talk money because the cost is high. That fear puts your deal at risk. I also tend to do this when I sense the deal isn’t worth the effort in the beginning, so I scare then away with list pricing. One time that actually led to a big, juicy deal I didn’t expect.
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