Pricing like you don’t care…


The price someone is prepared to pay resides in their mind, not in your desk calculator and not in your head. This little story shows how when your mind is free from the angst of winning the business you can often get a better price.

Yesterday I was with some customer-facing staff from one of our clients talking about real-life situations where they had managed to get a customer to pay a little bit more.

One of the women described an enquiry that had come in from a customer she had dealt with in the past. She didn’t like him. He was always brusque with her and whenever he had a technical question he demanded to talk to a man as he assumed that her gender precluded her from understanding the technical products she had been selling for years. You can imagine how annoyed this would make a strong and capable woman like our friend.

His second mistake (the first; being rude to her previously) was the barrage he let fly at her to make her understand how just how urgently he needed the product. Having made his point he put the phone down without so much as a please or thank you.

The enquiry was for a product she knew well and could acquire for him quickly and cheaply. All she had to do was to decide how much he should pay.

She added her usual mark-up and looked at the figure. She remembered how rude he was to her… and she added a bit more… then she remembered how desperate he was… and she added a bit more… then with a smile, she pictured him with steam coming out of his ears when he realised that he had no choice but to buy from her…. and she added a bit more.

After letting him stew for ten minutes or so, she called him back. Putting on her best telephone voice and a knowing smile, she told him that she had managed to track down a supply of the product he needed so desperately and she would pull out all the stops to get it to him the same afternoon… then she told him the price (now about four times as much as she would have normally charged). It was still a relatively small amount in his scheme of things and the value of getting the parts to him the same afternoon was that he could get on and finish the job. He didn’t flinch. He placed the order and for once actually thanked her.

There are several morals to this story:

Firstly, don’t be rude to suppliers’ staff if they have discretion to set prices.

Secondly, for people in a hurry time is money and they will pay to save it.

Thirdly, and most importantly, becuase she really didn’t care whether he bought from her or not, her desire to make the sale was taken out of the equation…. all that was left was his desire to buy. It turned out that his desire to buy could be measured in a price that was four times what she would have charged to a customer whose business she really wanted. This means that you should concentrate on what is in the customer’s head not yours… how is he or she benchmarking your price, what are the circumstances of the purchase, what value will he or she derive from the product (including the service you can give), does he or she know where else to go?

I am not saying that you should price customers based on their attitude, although I have a sneaking admiration for her approach. However what this does show is that a polite customer asking for the same product in the same circumstances would have also probably paid four times more than the normal mark-up. It is only when you are genuinely ambivalent about winning the business do you actually push the envelope on price.

Have you ever priced a customer to go away only to find they didn’t?