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Negotiating Strategies Aren’t Market Intel

Do not confuse customer negotiating strategies with market intel.   Do not confuse buying tactics with objective data about the value of your products and services.  They are not the same thing.  Your customers will always be happy to underpay you.  They will ask for discounts.  They will tell you your prices are too high.  That doesn’t make it true.

Customer feedback about your pricing is polluted by self-interest.  Every human being in the world wants stuff to be less expensive.  It’s part of our wiring, part of our survival instinct.  Our instincts drive us to hold onto our resources so we can provide for ourselves and our young.  If you doubled our resources tomorrow, guess what we want to do?  Hold onto them.  If you multiplied our resources by ten, guess what we want to do?  Hold onto them.

Customers will always want great stuff for as little money as possible.  That is rational behavior.  If you put yourself in the shoes of the customer, you will see the truth of that.  You do the same thing when you are the buyer.  Customers will never stop seeking lower pricing because it is rational, prepared buying behavior.*  (And in many cases you have trained your customers how to most effectively win discounts from you.)  But you need to stop confusing customers’ desire to get stuff cheaper (and the negotiating strategies they employ to do so) with market intel about the value of your products and services.  They ain’t the same thing.

Customers will ask for better pricing.  They will ask for discounts.  They will tell us our pricing is too high.  Do you know what that is evidence of?  Their human survival instinct at work.  Nothing more.  Your faulty conclusion that your products and services are somehow overpriced because of this “data” is causing you to under-price and costing you substantial margin.

*If you are selling to purchasing agents, they are literally hired and compensated to do this.