There is a night-and-day change in energy during a sales encounter before and after the salesperson unveils the price of their product/service to the prospect.
If you reveal the price too early, your prospect might get sticker shock and end the encounter before you’ve even had a chance to pitch.
The best antidote for sticker shock is value. Here are a couple examples:
Price: If I told you a property in San Francisco costs $500k, you might say, “Wow, that’s expensive.”
Value: If I then told you that that same property will generate $1.5m in rental revenue over the next three years, then you might say, “Dang, that’s a great investment.”
It’s the same thing for a business owner with a quantifiable pain point.
Price: If you tell Bob your advertising program is going to cost him $500 per month, that might sound expensive.
Value: If Bob also understands that he’ll be missing out on $2,000 in revenue per month if he chooses to forego the advertising opportunity, then it sounds a lot more affordable. It would be expensive NOT to buy the advertising program.
If you reveal the price before your prospect sees value, then the prospect is likely to get sticker shock and rush off the phone.
Even if you manage to keep them on the phone, they’ll be repeating a non-buying narrative in their head: “There’s no way I could pay that much for this.”
You can’t reveal the price until your prospect sees value. And you can’t show value until you’ve qualified (because the value you show needs to be tailored to the prospect’s answers in qualifying).
So the order goes like this:
- Qualify
- Show value
- Reveal price
- Ask for sale
In summary, always qualify AND show value BEFORE you reveal price.