August 29, 2019

Fuzzy Anchoring

One of the things about value pricing that people tend to miss at first is that it’s not a license print money. You can’t arbitrarily raise your prices to dizzying heights just because you feel like it.

The price always - ALWAYS - has to be lower than the value in the client’s head. In other words, you can’t charge more than it’s worth to them and expect to close the deal.

One consequence of this is that it doesn’t make sense to start throwing around big and specific numbers early in a sales interview.

Anchoring high is generally a good thing, but you can blow a potentially high profit smaller project out of the water by scaring the client off with ridiculous numbers before you have a meaningful understanding of what they’re trying to achieve.

So...

My advice is to wait until the very end of the meeting to mention any serious specific numbers (if you mention any numbers at all).

Prior to that, it’s fine to say something vague like “why pay me a million bucks when you could have an internal employee do it?” or say that you’ll “probably be the most expensive option” that they speak with.

Comments like these will anchor high in a non-specific way that the buyer will automatically convert to rough numbers in their head.

Yours,

—J