Cut pricesIt’s easy to chant the mantra “avoid cutting prices on kitchen quotes”- but how do you do that when prospects are demanding discounts and putting you into a competitive bidding situation?

On The Dealer’s Voice podcast, our listeners ask us a lot of questions about this topic.  But they always center around the moment a prospect is beating you up over the price of their proposed kitchen.

We can come up with a lot of techniques on how to deal with this awkward situation- but the better place to focus on is actually much earlier in your sales process.

Let’s pretend you’re selling me a car for example.

I know, most over used example on the planet, but bear with me for a minute.  The car I’m interested in is $20K.  I’m going to start you off selling like most kitchen designers start – talking about features.

So imagine that over the next 15 minutes, you proceed to tell me about all the great things on this car- the upgraded wheels, seats, sound system, the sunroof, the gas mileage, electronic locks, integrated GPS, blah blah blah. You know – feature galore.  Imagine the features just vomiting out of your mouth in my utter and total amazement.

One might mistakenly think you’re selling.

But what you’re actually doing is making me more sensitive to price.  With each added feature you talk about, I begin to think “I don’t need half of that stuff…so there must be a lot of extras tossed into that $20K car…I bet if I stripped some of that stuff out, I could get what I need for only $15K.”

And bingo – I’m going to beat you up on price later.

By talking about features too early in the process, you’re increasing my price sensitivity.  You’re also decreasing my trust level with you.  After all, I just met you so why are you talking about features when you don’t even know what I want or need?

When I don’t trust you, it’s easy for me to beat you up on a price later.  I just rationalize that you’re no better than the used car salesman trying to take advantage of me.  I just quietly listen, make my mental notes and prepare for the war of nerves ahead.  That’s where I’m going to tell you I don’t need all those upgrades and make you redo your quote 17 times until I get the price I want.

I’m going to confuse you (and myself in the process) with mixing and matching things that might not even make sense.  And if I don’t get what I want, I’ll threaten to walk down to your competitor – because I don’t really have a relationship with you. You’re just another salesperson pushing product with no interest in me.

So next time someone is asking you to cut prices, ask yourself the question of what happened earlier?  You might just need to improve your kitchen selling process.