We all want to know how much? All buyers are going to eventually ask that question of a seller, especially in the business to business environment where pricing may not be published.
The worst answer that we can give to a buyer when they say “how much” is, “well, it depends,” because our buyers, which includes us, have been trained that “it depends” is a weasel way of allowing a seller to delay addressing that question.
There's a bunch of different ways that we can address the “how much” question at every stage of our sales process.
The single best way is to preempt a buyer’s question by saying something like, “Buyer, as we go through this process at some point you're going to want to know ‘how much’ and I want to be able to tell you. In order for me to do that, I'm going to need to know THIS, THIS and THIS. Once we check all those boxes I'd be happy to share what a price might look like for our services. Are you okay with that?”
That's the ideal situation and works when we have the presence of mind to control the “how much conversation” right at the beginning of our interaction with buyer.
Sometimes we forget and sometimes our buyer gets there ahead of us. In that case here are three different ways that we can respond to “how much” when we've barely gotten to know our buyer.
- “lots that's the best answer I can give you right now 😊, what’s your threshold for a project like this?”
- “it's probably more than you were thinking, what are you expecting to pay?”
In both of those examples we’re being a little goofy. The second one takes some guts and we have to make sure that we have a bit of rapport and deliver with a nice big smile so our buyer knows that we are being a little bit silly. If we don't we risk really damaging and being off-putting.
Another way early on in the sales cycle is if the buyer says “how much” we can ask for some super simple information like, “how many square feet is your space and how many daily visitors do you have?” Our buyer will likely answer because they believe they are getting information they want (a quite), then we could say, “based on limited amount of information I have we're probably going to be starting at $X, am I offside?”
With all our responses we need to end with a question to put the ball back to our buyer so they can choose if that want to continue talking.
Talking about money is hard, for buyers and sellers. To make money conversations easier, role playing regularly with our leader or a peer allows us to stay present with our buyer when they ask “how much” instead of falling into a canned response that may damage rapport.
Until next time… go sell something.
