A buyer sits across from you, or types from somewhere you cannot see, and says the sentence every trade dreads: that is more than I wanted to spend. Most sellers hear a verdict on their price. It is almost never a verdict on the price. It is a report on a sum the buyer has just done in their head, and that sum had two sides, only one of which was your number.

The letters teach this by story. Here it is as a working method, because the price conversation is the one place where a small business most often gives away money it did not need to give away.

What the sentence actually reports

Nobody buys a price. They buy a ratio: what it costs set against what they can see it is worth. When a buyer says your price is too high, they are not reporting the left side of that scale; they can read the left side perfectly well, it is printed. They are reporting that the right side came up short in the eight or nine seconds they gave it.

Which means the objection has several honest cures, and only one of them costs you money. You can lower the price. Or you can raise what is visible on the other side: the scope they had not understood, the comparison they were quietly making, the risk they were silently carrying, the timing they could not admit to. The seller who reaches straight for the discount has chosen the single most expensive answer available, and has usually chosen it before finding out what the question was.

There is a second cost, less obvious and worse. A price that moves because someone frowned tells the buyer what your first price was: a hope. Everything you say afterwards is then negotiable too, including your terms, your timeline, and your standards.

The four things hiding behind it

In practice, the sentence is a lid on one of four quite different problems.

  1. Too expensive for what I understood. They priced a smaller job than the one you quoted, because your quote listed the deliverables and not the work. This is a clarity problem wearing a price costume.
  2. Too expensive compared with something else. There is always a comparison, and it is rarely your named competitor. It is the cheap alternative, the nephew who does websites, the software they already pay for, or doing nothing at all, which is the most popular rival in every market on earth.
  3. Too expensive this month. They want it, they can afford it across a year, and they cannot afford it before the invoices land. A cash-timing problem, and discounting solves precisely none of it.
  4. Too expensive to risk. They would pay the number twice over if they were certain. What they cannot pay for is the chance of paying and getting nothing, which is what they did last time, with somebody else.

Only the second is genuinely about money, and even then it is about comparison rather than cost. The other three are answered with words, terms, or a guarantee. So the first job in a price conversation is never to justify: it is to find out which of the four you are holding.

The question that finds out

There is one question, and it is short.

Too expensive compared with what?

Ask it plainly and without defensiveness, as though you are genuinely curious, because you should be. Then stop talking. The silence after that question is the most profitable four seconds in selling, and most sellers cannot bear it, so they fill it with a discount nobody had asked for.

What comes back is your instruction. “Compared with the other quote we had” is a comparison problem. “Compared with what we usually spend on this” is a category problem: they have filed you in the wrong drawer. “Well, we could probably manage without for now” is doing nothing, and now you know that your real rival is inertia, which never sends an invoice and never fixes anything either. “It is not the amount, it is this quarter” is timing, and you have just been handed a date.

Five answers that are not a discount

Once you know which problem you have, the answer is nearly mechanical.

  • Re-cut the unit. The same number, honestly expressed in the buyer’s own frame: per month, per job, per member of staff, per year of use. Nothing is invented; the arithmetic is simply done for them, which is work they were never going to do themselves.
  • Price the problem instead. Ask what the situation is costing now, in money or hours, and let the two figures sit side by side. A buyer comparing your fee with nothing will always find it dear. A buyer comparing it with a year of the current mess rarely does.
  • Sell less, not cheaper. If the budget is truly fixed, cut scope to fit it and keep the rate intact. A smaller piece of work at full price protects the number for every buyer after this one, and often becomes the audition that wins the rest.
  • Carry the risk. For the buyer who is afraid rather than skint: a guarantee, a paid pilot, a first stage with a decision point at the end of it. You are not reducing the price; you are reducing the chance of loss, which is what they were actually objecting to.
  • Move the money, not the amount. Staged payments, a deposit and two instalments, a start date next quarter. Timing problems take timing answers, and the buyer will thank you for hearing what they were too polite to say outright.

Notice what every one of these has in common: the price holds. The thing that changes is what the buyer can see, when they pay, or how much they get.

When to let them go

Sometimes the sentence means what it says, and the honest answer is that this person is not your buyer. Say so without grievance: the work costs what it costs, here is what I could do within your budget, and if neither suits, no hard feelings and my door stays open. Then leave the door genuinely open, because budgets change and memories are long.

A price that nobody ever objects to is not a triumph; it is a signal that you are priced below the point where anyone has to think. Some resistance is the sound of the number doing its job, which includes choosing your customers for you. The aim is not to abolish the objection. It is to stop answering it with your own margin.

Do this today

Take the last three enquiries that stalled on price. For each one, write down which of the four problems it actually was: understanding, comparison, timing, or risk. Then write the single sentence you would send now, knowing that. Send it to the warmest of the three before the day is out, and you will learn more about your pricing in a week than a year of guessing at it will teach you.

Also in the archive: The Fourth Lever, The Hay in the Field and And What Comes Back For It.