The Price Question Isn’t About Price… Mostly…

Why a stranger’s first question is a request for orientation

Call your own business from a number nobody there knows. Open with “How much is it?” Ask three times, and write down (or better yet, RECORD) exactly what you get.

I do this all the time with my business and I have often done it with clients. It’s incredibly useful – unfortunately clients that haven’t been trained yet do a horrifying job (in fact when I have listened to recordings it’s worse). I am happy to say my guys do a good job but they KNOW any time I call they have to be prepared to do a client call.

…the thing is they ALL think they do a great job!

Run that test this week, before you read anything else I write about it. Then come back and reread the article.

In my experience, about eight out of ten first calls open with a price question. Whatever you heard on your test call is happening on most of the calls you never hear.

Why a stranger opens with price

A first-time caller has no idea what you actually do (I mean unless you sell commodities like apples or cars or movie tickets). They don’t know your packages, your process, or the difference between you and the shop four miles away. If you’re not a commodity they don’t really know what they are buying. “How much is it?” works at the car lot, the plumber and the gym, so they use it on you. It’s a reflexive action.

They aren’t price shopping. They’re just shopping, and price is the only thing they have.

The agency owner hears it as “What do you charge?” The contractor hears “What’s a quote run?”

What a number does when they have nothing to compare it to

Understand, if you give them a number with no context it isn’t information. It’s a comparison tool, and you just handed it to someone with nothing useful to compare it against.

Christopher Hsee showed that when people evaluate one option by itself, they can’t judge an attribute they have no reference for, so they lean on whatever is easy to compare (Hsee, 1996). A price on its own is hard to judge, so the lead goes looking for something to compare it to, usually a cheaper option. They put your retainer next to a freelancer’s hourly rate, or your roof next to the guy with a truck and a ladder. They’re not measuring quality, long term relationship, headaches they would have…

The first number has a second cost. Tversky and Kahneman found that people adjust from an initial number, and they adjust too little (Tversky & Kahneman, 1974). Say a figure in the first sixty seconds and that figure tends to stick… before they know what it buys. People adjust away from it less than they think.

You may lose that comparison even when your price is fair, because they’re comparing the wrong things. I’ve told owners this for years: sticker shock is almost never about the price. It’s about whether you’ve built the value before you say it.

Count your last ten inbound conversations. How many opened with price? Remember that number.

Price is a conversation that comes after the exam

You’re going to tell them the price. In person (or on a real call), after you know what they actually need.

Nobody quotes the surgery before an examination. You don’t know yet whether the agency client needs a full rebuild or a cleanup of what they have. The contractor doesn’t know whether it’s a patch or a new roof, and nobody quotes the roof from the driveway. It’d be negligent to quote this way.

The exam has a name in each business:

| Business | The exam | What you learn before the number | |---|---|---| | Agency / B2B | A short fit call before any proposal | What they’ve tried, what it cost them, what “working” means to them | | Contractor / local service | The on-site walkthrough | What’s actually broken, what’s in the way, what they care about fixing first | | Martial arts school | The free lesson | Which program fits the student and the family. Student goals! |

The phone call has ONE job: get them to the exam. A price quote on that call feels helpful, and it usually makes the appointment less likely.

DON’T say: “We charge [your price] a month.”

SAY: “Great! My name is ____. Who am I speaking with?” (and if they ask again, “It depends on what we find,” and your next question)

Two steps when they ask anyway

They’ll ask.

Step one: let the first ask pass. Not rudely. You don’t apologize for it or explain why you’re skipping it. You keep going with your next question. “Great! My name is ____. Who am I speaking with?” It’s perfectly logical to want to know their name before you talk about anything else. In my experience, most never ask again. They asked out of reflex, you moved, and they followed.

Step two: "It depends on ___," and continue. Fill the blank with the true variable. “It depends on scope.” “It depends on what we find when we see it.” Then your next question, immediately. No pause, no trailing off to see whether that was enough.

If they push past both, give them the floor: “Projects start at [your lowest starting point], and the right one depends on what we find. Let’s get the walkthrough on the calendar…” Name your lowest starting point, not your standard one. Never end the sentence on the number.

Yes, that sets a low anchor. That’s why it only comes out after both steps fail, and never as the last word.

Every step is short and ends the same way: the next question.

The responses are not the technique. The momentum is the technique. The person asking the questions controls the call. Answer and then go quiet, and the lead fills the silence with the same question, this time with an edge on it.

Asking questions doesn’t cost you the relationship either. In one set of studies, people who asked more follow-up questions in a conversation were liked more by the person they were talking to (Huang et al., 2017).

If you’re frequently getting asked about price more than once in a call… it’s you not them.

A script isn’t training

Two errors sink this, in order.

Error one: no script. Somebody improvises on the most valuable sixty seconds in the business, and then the owner wonders why the close rate is bad.

Error two, the expensive one: a script poorly trained on. It’s printed. It’s by the phone. It got read aloud once in a team meeting. The owner now believes the problem is solved, which is what makes this error worse than the first one. Reading a script isn’t training on a script.

Train it in order. Straight through until they don’t need the paper. Then nothing but price questions, back to back. Then both together under real pressure. Then do it again on a set schedule (put it on the calendar).

Make the standard countable too. “They seem comfortable with it” isn’t a standard. Comfort is a feeling, and it shows up long before competence does.

In my business, staff members as young as ten answer the phone, and they’re good at it… because the script is good and nobody gets to skip a training stage.

Your move

This week, two things.

Make the call. From a number nobody knows, open with “How much is it?”, ask three times, and write down what you hear.

Count the last ten. Go back through your last ten inbound conversations and count how many opened with price. Reply and tell me the number. I read every one!

You can’t out-market a bad first call. Every dollar you spend on advertising walks through that conversation at some point, and most of it walks back out when somebody quotes a number to a stranger who doesn’t know yet what they’re buying.

If you want help building this into your sales process, come talk to me. The version I wrote for martial arts school owners, with the full four-rung script, is here. I’ve also written about the fear sitting under most buying decisions here.

References

Hsee, C. K. (1996). The evaluability hypothesis: An explanation for preference reversals between joint and separate evaluations of alternatives. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 67(3), 247–257. https://doi.org/10.1006/obhd.1996.0077

Huang, K., Yeomans, M., Brooks, A. W., Minson, J., & Gino, F. (2017). It doesn’t hurt to ask: Question-asking increases liking. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 113(3), 430–452. https://doi.org/10.1037/pspi0000097

Tversky, A., & Kahneman, D. (1974). Judgment under uncertainty: Heuristics and biases. Science, 185(4157), 1124–1131. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.185.4157.1124