Cheap Prices Create Cheap Customers

I think this is a chicken and egg type of question.

What came first? Cheap prices or cheap customers?  I’m a firm believer that a huge by-product of cheap prices is cheap customers.

You might say what’s wrong with cheap customers, but I’ll challenge anyone on that comment and here’s why.

People who argue with you on price will tend to be ones who will argue with you on everything else.

I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve had back office personnel, customer service people, and many others come up to me after a program I’ve done where I’ve talked about this problem and they thank me.

For any company, the majority of customer issues arise from a small percentage of customers, and too many times, these customers are the ones who hassled you on getting a better price. We can tell a lot about how a customer is going to be to work with by seeing how they handle the buying process.

Customers who challenge you on everything are going to many times be the same customer that challenges every other department in your company.

When you are willing to lower your price to close a deal with a customer who is challenging you for a lower price, stop and ask yourself is it worth it.  Is the sale worth it at the lower price, and even more so, is the profitability of the customer worth it if they are difficult to work with?

If you want to get better customers, then start by having better pricing. What I mean by “better pricing” is pricing you don’t change just to close a sale.

Copyright 2012, Mark Hunter “The Sales Hunter.” Sales Motivation Blog.