How To Handle The Price Objection
The price objection takes many forms:
- It’s too expensive.
- I can’t afford this right now.
- We don’t have enough in the budget.
- You price is too high.
- Your competitors are cheaper.
Why you’re getting the price objection
We’re going to assume you’ve already qualified for budget earlier in the sales encounter, so you should have an idea of what price your prospect is willing to pay.
Click here to read more about qualifying.
Assuming you didn’t present a price above the budget that your prospect disclosed, the price objection should be coming as a surprise.
In this case, price is likely not the real objection.
The real objection is that your prospect doesn’t see value in what you’re offering. In other words, the prospect doesn’t think your product or service is worth the money.
Quantify your prospect’s pain point
One tried-and-true objection handling strategy for this specific situation is to justify your pricing by quantifying your prospect’s pain point.
A “pain point” is a specific problem that your prospective customer is experiencing.
In almost all cases, a pain point can be quantified in terms of dollars and cents. Here are some examples:
- A widget-selling business is missing out on $50,000 in annual widget sales from Instagram by not running Instagram advertising.
- A hair salon is forgoing $500 in weekly haircut revenue by not hiring another stylist at the salon.
- A lawyer values her time at $250 per hour and would be willing to pay at least $500 per week for a case management software that saves more than two hours of her time per week.
Ideally, you want to quantify your prospect’s pain point during qualifying.
When you’re qualifying for Need (the ‘N’ in BANT), you can ask your prospect these questions:
- In your estimate, how much is that pain point costing you per year?
- What would you be willing to pay for a solution that could solve that problem for you?
Sometimes you’ll have to be a little more sneaky about how you reach this conclusion.
For example, let’s say you’re talking to the lawyer from the example above.
You could ask these questions:
- How much time do you spend organizing your cases each week?
- If you don’t mind me asking, how much do you bill your clients per hour?
- So by my estimate, if it’s taking two hours of your time per week and you charge $250 per hour for your time, then this problem is costing you at least $500 per week. Would you agree?
Remind your prospect about their pain point
It’s a lot easier to sell a high-ticket product or service if you can calculate for your prospect the amount of revenue they’re missing out on by not making the purchase.
Prospect:
“$300,000 is too expensive.”
Salesperson:
“Yes, but it’s five times as expensive for you to forgo the $1.5 million in revenue you’re missing out on by not being on the platform.”
Prospect:
“Oh.”
Or, let’s say, something more intangible, like branding.
$100,000 might sound like an expensive fee for a brand designer.
But the designer pays back his fee twice over when your $2 million dollar Instagram campaign increases conversion from 2% to 10% because your ads look that much better.
Change your prospect’s mindset from loss to profit
By default, the prospect’s mindset will be focused on the money they’re going to lose—the cost, their wallet getting lighter, the company budget being spent.
It’s your job as the salesperson to flip that mindset around to focus on the positive—profits, higher net worth, accolades from their boss.
It’s hard to do this with just words. But it’s easy to make your case with numbers.
Because the objection itself is already quantified.
The prospect is telling you: we can’t afford to lose X amount of money by purchasing this.
So when you, as the salesperson, say, “You’re already losing more than X amount of money by NOT purchasing this,” then that is a very logical and direct response that is hard to refute.