The other day I was sitting in my office looking out of the window for inspiration when I spied the grass being cut on the field opposite my window. Now, this is nothing unusual at this time of year. What caught my attention was the speed at which the grass was being cut. Now being of an engineering mindset (I originally trained as a radio engineer back in the day) I was shocked.
The reason I was shocked was the speed the operator was driving at. You see he must have been going 30mph, doesn’t sound much but when you’re in a small grass cutting tractor with the blades down and expecting to cut the grass then this speed is excessive.
If you think about the speed of the rotas versus the speed across the ground it only takes a few seconds for you to realise that at that speed it’s impossible for the operator to do a good job. The rotas would miss a significant amount of grass and they wouldn’t be cut, leaving a clumpy, tufty field, which is exactly what happened.
Now, what does this have to do with handling price objections I hear you ask. Well if our operator friend had been rewarded for the quality of their work rather than the speed at which it was performed do you think we’d have ended up with a dog’s dinner of a field like we did?
So I’m guessing that our grass cutting operating friend was told that they needed to cut a certain amount of grass each day, however, nobody mentioned the quality of what was to be produced, just the distance that needed to be covered at a specific price.
The thing is you can either have things cheap, fast or good. What you can’t have is all three, so you can have cheap and cheerful, you can have cheap and fast and you can even have fast and good but it won’t be cheap. So you can’t have cheap, fast and good it just doesn’t compute.
Once your prospects understand this simple dynamic you can have a sensible conversation.
- So Mr prospect you want it cheaper, what do you want me to leave out or,
- Mr prospect you want me to do it quicker, how much more do you want to pay? or
- Your prospect says “your competition is much cheaper” and you can counter with “what are they leaving out, because at that price they can’t be delivering on the quality that you informed us you wanted”.
Understanding this dynamic between quality, speed and price makes it relatively easy to answer price objections.
Now going back to our grass cutting operative, you might be saying to yourself, maybe this has nothing to do with price, they could have a) just been in a rush to ‘get the job done’ or b) just plain poor at doing their job.
Either way it comes down to price, if they were rewarded for the quality of what they produced as well as the speed they produced it, then ‘in a rush to get the job done’ doesn’t make it as they won’t have met the necessary quality criteria and if they were just plain old poor at doing the job then the necessary quality checks would have pulled this up, however I suspect that the necessary quality checks weren’t performed because of the additional costs associated with them, which are only an issue when the price wasn’t right.
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