Pricing Table Topics: 4 of Spades – Determine Purchasing Power Before Negotiating

This one is the 4 of Spades from the Selling Value card deck.

Every time a salesperson gets in front of a procurement officer, a purchasing agent, however they're called, the purchasing agent will act price sensitive. Their job is to get a better price for their company.

And so, they will always tell you that your price is too high, they need a discount. And you have to decide as a salesperson, do you want to give it to them? And here's the trick, does the purchasing agent actually have any power or authority to influence the decision process?

If you're selling a commodity, and they could go to three, or four, or 10 different sources to get essentially the exact same thing, and those are all approved sources for the manufacturing capability, procurement has a lot of power. You need to do a great job at making sure procurement stays happy and figure out what it really takes to close that deal.

On the other hand, if you're selling a piece of capital equipment and you've had a long sales cycle selling to a relatively large committee of people who've been debating, what's the best solution for us? And then they take that to procurement so the purchasing can go buy it. It turns out, procurement has almost no power.

They'll pretend to have a lot of power, but they really don't. The decision was made by the committee. And so, we don't have to give big discounts to procurement in situations like that. Here's the problem, it takes guts.

So, do you have the guts?

We hope you enjoyed this example of Pricing Table Topics. What you just heard was done without a script. If you want to get better at speaking about pricing and value, grab a deck of our cards, pick a card, read the saying, and then talk for one to two minutes about what that card says. You'll become a better speaker and expert.

If you have any questions or feedback, please email me, mark@impactpricing.com.

Now, go make an impact.

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