What to do when buyers ask you about pricing on the first call

Why they ask, how to respond and cue cards to practice your answers

The common practice in sales is to follow a linear process with your buyer where you start by finding a problem you can solve, then find the impact and deadline, then prescribe the solution and finally present a proposal with pricing.

Like this:

However, this doesn’t align with how prospects approach buying.

Instead, they start out by realizing they have a problem, then figure out how much they can afford to spend on fixing it, then narrow their search to vendors who fit with their budget, then evaluate solutions (demos + proposals) and finally select one to partner with.

Like this:

There’s clearly a mismatch between buyers and sellers over who needs what information at what point.

If your pricing is not displayed on your website, your prospective buyers will likely ask you about it early in your sales process, earlier than you planned for, often during your first call.

Q: “What’s the pricing?”

The ABSOLUTE WORST thing you can do is to try to dodge the answer with something like this:

A: “Oh, it’s based on the number of seats and a few other factors. We’ll get to that on the next call. By the way, what’s your budget?”

Instead try this: