Panic stricken to close the sale, you rationalize in your mind how the only way you’re going to get the sale is by making the deal a little better.

You think about it and decide discounting the price is ultimately the only way you’re going to get the sale. 

Without anymore hesitation, you offer a discount and the customer says “yes”  without missing a beat.

You pat yourself on the back for being so smart.  You congratulate yourself for being able to determine the customer’s price/value relationship and adjusting the price downward to get them to buy.

Quit kidding yourself. We’ve all done this, including me!

Can we all say right now, “Stupid!”

In our infinite wisdom of using a discounted price to close a sale, we more than screwed ourselves, and for that matter, the customer.

Yes, we screwed the customer, because they bought based on an unsustainable price/value relationship.

When we asked the customer to buy at a lower price, they immediately shifted their expectations to the lower ratio.  What this means is the customer will see a lower level of benefit from what you sold them.

Also, it certainly impacts the customer’s willingness to buy again.

Let me put this into an example you might better understand. You want to buy a car, and to close the deal, the salesperson throws in an upgraded sound system. You’re excited and you enjoy the new car and everything about it, including the superior sound system.

After you’ve had the car for a year or two, you offer a ride to a friend who happens to be a guru with sound systems.  Before you know it, your friend is showing you some amazing ways to enhance the audio even more.

You can’t believe what you’re hearing and you can’t believe how it took a couple of years to know this.

What the example above shows is the failure to benefit from the value of the offer.  Why? It’s simple — there was no price associated with it.

If you would have had to pay for the sound system, you would have been far more interested in understanding how it worked. More than likely, you would have already learned what your friend pointed out to you.

When you discount the sale to close the sale, you’re not doing anybody any good.

Your objective should be one thing and one thing only — showing the customer the full benefits of what you have to offer.

An expression I like to use that I encourage you to use is this:  Full price equals full benefits.

Copyright 2014, Mark Hunter “The Sales Hunter.” Sales Motivation Blog. Mark Hunter is the author of High-Profit Selling: Win the Sale Without Compromising on Price.

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