You have done a superlative job qualifying, establishing value and ROI, and have the customer’s agreement to both. Now price is the issue? You have invested time, effort, expense, and you’re frustrated, disappointed, and appropriately ticked off.

Don’t show your pain. Grin and bear it, because you’re at the beginning of the negotiations, not the end. When the buyer argues price, what they’re really telling you is, “I want what you have, and I need your help to justify this purchase.”

While in the midst of fear of losing a sale, we lose site of the customer’s own frustration and disappointment. Abandon fear and refocus attention on the reality that they have invested more time, effort, and expense than you. They have worked with other salespeople, researched the market, written justifications from cost analysis spreadsheets, and had too many meetings. They have a lot of skin in the game and they want to walk away with something for their effort just like you.

Price is the easiest solution, but you don’t have to take the easy way out.

There is absolutely, positively nothing more powerful to leverage during negotiations than the buyer’s want of that “one thing.” The secret is finding out what that “one thing” is. One method that serves me well is offering a horse of a different color. Remove an option or feature, scale down the offering, or suggest something completely different.

• Can you live without a saddle?
• Would our smaller horse work?
• How about this nice mule?

If they consider any of the alternatives, problem solved, price is no longer the issue. And when the answer is, “No, I really want that “one thing” bingo! The buyer has given you the lever to close the deal. Even if they are stuck on one feature, you have successfully shifted the negotiations from price to the most important mechanism in sales, want.

Frank Bettger illustrated this in a story that when I read it over thirty years ago, changed my life and became a seed that grew thousands of healthy sales. A Chevrolet PR executive named William Powell bought a home in Detroit and said the realtor “was one of the smartest salesmen I have ever met.”

The realtor listened intently to Mr. Powell and discovered that he had wanted to own trees all of his life. The realtor drove Powell to a house in a wooded suburb that had eighteen gorgeous trees. Powell told the realtor to sharpen his pencil, because he could buy similar houses for less money. But they didn’t have the trees and the realtor continuously pointed to, and counted all of the trees.

“He sold me eighteen trees and threw in the house. That is real salesmanship.” – William Powell

A new customer named Steve visited our warehouse to inspect two near identical Cincinnati machine tools. They weighed over 60,000 lbs each with identical footprints of something over 20’ X 15’. One could machine a part 100” X 40”, the other 100” X 60”. At over 12’ tall, the 20” difference in height seemed negligible to Steve and the 50% higher price was difficult for him to swallow. Price became the battleground, for him.

He adamantly insisted that he “had to have the larger machine.” Steve told me that “one thing” to win the battle over price.

“The extra height is extremely rare” I explained. I recommended the smaller machine and offered him the same capacity in a lighter duty machine from another manufacturer, sidestepping price.

We went out to eat, talked about family, sports, politics, and everything and anything other than the deal. After dinner, he said he’d take the larger machine, full price. We became friends and did business together for years.

Find out what the “one thing” that the buyer wants, clamp on to it like a pit-bull, and don’t let go.

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