Selling the Price Increase. Jeb Blount
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is for this reason that elite athletes and elite salespeople employ visualization to preprogram the subconscious brain. When you visualize success, you teach your mind to act in a way that is congruent with actualizing that success.
Unlike emotions that are activated without your consent, self-talk and positive visualization are completely within your control. You make the choice to think positively or negatively. To pick yourself up or tear yourself down. To see a glass half-full or half-empty.
Before going into a price increase conversation, sit quietly and listen to your self-talk. Then resolve to change those words and what you see in your mind to support how you want to act, how you want to feel, and the outcome you desire.
In your mind's eye, go step-by-step through each part of the conversation with your customer and every potential scenario. Focus on how it feels to be confident. Imagine what you will say and what you will ask. Visualize yourself succeeding. Repeat this process again and again until you've trained your mind to manage the disruptive emotions that derail you.
Preparation calms the mind and builds confidence. You'll find that when you take the time to visualize success and practice, the actual price increase conversation seems much easier than what you worried about. Your mind is prepared to anticipate disruptive emotions, rise above them, secure the price increase, and protect your customer relationship.
Exercise 5.1 Visualize Success
Take a moment to reflect on an upcoming price increase conversation that is causing you concern or worry.
Account Name:
Key Stakeholders:
Situation Narrative: How much is the price increase? How is it being applied? Why now? Why do you need the price increase?
What are your specific fears and worries about approaching your customer with the price increase? Listen to your self-talk; what are you telling yourself about what could go wrong?
Think through the unique situation and practice visualizing a positive outcome. Begin by focusing on your breathing. Slow it down.
Then in your mind's eye, go step-by-step through each part of the conversation.
Focus on how it feels to be confident. Imagine what you will say, what you will ask. Visualize yourself succeeding.
Repeat this process again and again with different conversation scenarios until you've trained your mind to rise above your fears and feel that you can approach the conversation with relaxed, assertive confidence.
Part One Wrap-Up: Reflections
Before moving to the next lesson take a moment to reflect on what you have learned and answer these questions:
1 What are your biggest fears about selling price increases to customers?
2 What do you feel holds you back from effectively following through on price increase conversations with clients?
3 What can you do to become more comfortable with selling price increases, and overcoming other fears in life?
For a deeper dive into rising about your fear of rejection and becoming rejection-proof, read Objections.
6 Relationships Matter
Here is a blinding flash of the obvious: The effort you put into selling price increases doesn't matter if you lose your customers or their future orders in the process.
Chasing your good customers and high-value accounts into the arms of your competitors is bad business. But, so is allowing profits to suffer because you are afraid to get the prices you deserve, for the value you are delivering, because you worry you'll lose your customers.
Price Increase Initiatives Are Dual Focused
No matter if you are involved in a broad price increase campaign or selling a price increase to a targeted account, your mission is to get the highest prices you can, AND retain your customer and orders. To accomplish your mission, both of these things must be true at the same time. It is a dual focus. This can be a delicate balance, which is exactly why your company needs YOU to sell these price increases.
You are the one person with the most intimate knowledge of and deepest relationships with your customers. You are a professional who can sell the price increase and get customers to accept it while protecting the long-term relationship.
But, you already know this. Therefore, my objective in this section is to help you gain awareness of the various pitfalls you'll face when approaching customers with price increases that can cause them to:
Argue you out of it.
Negotiate it down.
Refuse to pay it.
Stop ordering.
Leave you for a competitor.
Navigating Imperfection
Let's get this straight from the get-go. You do not work for a perfect company. Your product, software, or service is flawed. There have been quality issues, delivery issues, service disruptions, and shutdowns.
Your customer success team, service delivery team, warehouse, billing department, help desk, technicians, engineers, programmers, and installers, have made mistakes, shown up late, and said stupid things to your customers. From time to time, your team has managed to piss off your customers, leaving you to clean up their mess.
You have more customers and more on your plate than you can manage. Because of this, you've missed calls and haven't been able to get to some of your customers as quickly as they'd like. Some of them are not happy with you.
Your customers make unreasonable demands even though sometimes they don't see it that way. Some of your customers demand more of you than you can deliver. Many of these same customers consistently point out product imperfections, call about service deficiencies, and inform you that your competitors have better quality at lower prices.
This is reality. The real world. Yet, in spite of it you will still be required to navigate these imperfections and sell the price increases. That's also the truth.
There are few unicorn situations in which all the stars are aligned and customers are so satisfied and happy that they willingly agree to every price increase with zero pushback. Of course, if everything was perfect and it was this easy, you would be unemployed because your company wouldn't need you.
There is nothing easy about approaching customers with price increases. You don't want to sell it and they don't want to buy it. Therefore, you must get past your own fears and influence your customers to accept price increases that they don't want in spite of these imperfections.
We Feel, Then We Think
Price increases don't happen in a vacuum. Instead, they are woven into the fabric of an imperfect and flawed business environment AND human emotions. No matter the situation, emotions – yours and those of your customer – play a deciding role in the outcomes of your price increase conversations.
Science is stacking up one study after another demonstrating how emotions exert power over the choices we make. Human decision-making is driven by our emotions. Although we might be certain that we're making choices based on rational logic, our own best interests, or organized facts, science says that we usually don't.1