Money, Money MONEY!!!
Question: What did your parents teach you when it comes to talking about money with others?
Answer: “Don’t talk about money with others. Don’t ask them how much they make. Don’t ask them how much they paid for their house. Don’t ask them how much money they save. Just don’t talk about money.”
Now flash forward to your current role as sales professional. Suddenly your parent’s insistence that money is a taboo, private matter is suddenly getting in the way of you closing deals. You don’t like talking about the money. You avoid it and hope they don’t ask. You put pricing on the last page of the proposal. You don’t talk about it at all before sending them your quote and they fall out of their chair when they get your pricing.
So what’s going on here? Unfortunately many sales professionals suffer from ATTAM: Aversion to talk about money. If you’re one of them, you’re likely losing deals and opportunities because of it. So what to do about it:
Here are a few ideas:
1-Accept It: It’s the way you’re wired. You’ll need to face the fact that you don’t like discussing money before you can fix it.
2-Share Your Uncomfortableness With Your Prospect: Just be real and tell your prospects how you feel. “We need to talk about the money and I find that’s not always a comfortable subject.”
3-Make Yourself Talk About It: Make it mandatory to talk about the money before you leave the call. If you leave without it, call ‘em back and tell them you need to meet again. Don’t ever send pricing without talking about it first.
4-Relax: Money’s just money. It has no REAL value. It’s nothing more than a piece of paper or a computer screen with numbers. We humans are the one’s who put the emotion into it.
The best sales professionals put the Moose on the Table when it comes to talking money. It has to happen. Just realize that it may be counterintuitive to how you’re hard-wired. The good thing is, you can always change your thinking. And when you do, watch the money in your life grow exponentially.
Excellent points Brian. I had a proposal where I acknowledged that my prospect — a finance guy — was probably most interested in “the last page” so I put the price in the first sentence of the proposal. I broke the roles and expectations down later in the document, but with every word from then on, he knew what weight class he was in. I think it helped him recognive value. I got the work, multiple references, and have kept him as a client.
gp