What do you do when someone hits you up in your inbox, and after that they say that your price is too high?

Ordinarily when someone hits you up in your inbox and asks for a price, you should try to qualify and run discovery on who the customer is, and what their needs are.

If this is your first time here and you don’t know what qualification or discovery means, then read the two prior posts and you'll get a better sense of that.

Understandably some potential customers are going to be nervous about being drawn into a conversation and they just want the price.

It’s not uncommon for someone to ask straight out for the price and nothing else!

What is the best way to proceed under these circumstances?

One ways is for you to respond, “before I give you a price I need to have a better idea of what it is that you want. To do that I’ll have to ask you some more questions, do I have your permission to go ahead?”

You don’t have to use these exact words.

You can use your own verbiage and other kinds of words or slang that you are comfortable with. The most important thing is to use language that is authentic to you and that is appropriate given the context between you and the customer.

Another option to use when the customer is pressing hard for a price is to give a range within which it might fall.

After that you go ahead to ask permission so that you can have a detailed conversation to narrow it down to a specific price. Obviously in this case you won’t be able to give an exact price until you know exactly what it is that the customer needs, in what quantity, and for what purpose that it is intended to be used.

Back to the paint case study that we introduced at beginning of the post.

How much it would cost will depend upon the kind of paint, the colour, the size of the building to be painted, the number of painters or manual labour that will be required to complete the job, and a couple of other factors.

I am not a professional painter but I assume that these are some of the factors they will want to know before giving a price.

Before they get this information they might give a price that is too low, or unrealistically high. Either way it would cause them to lose the bid, or to undercut their profits right from the very beginning.

It wouldn’t be out of place in this case to say something like... “It could cost anything between 6000 to 8000 Naira per gallon depending on the specs of the job. I’ll have to ask you some more questions.”

Either of these approaches will give you some flexibility.

This is because it will give you time to get all the information you need for an accurate quote, also it puts out some pricing information that will let the potential customer “self-select” himself into the deal, or opt out of the conversation entirely.

If the price range of 6,000 Naira or 8,000 Naira is way above his budget , he will say so and try to end the conversation there. It might seem like a loss to you at that moment in time, but he’s actually doing you a favour.

If you are that far apart on price, it is best to end the conversation now.

So how do we handle situations where the price expectations of the potential customer is “ridiculous” and well below what a reasonable cost for your product or service should be?

We will examine those scenarios in the next post!