Michael Goldberg – Marketing Blog

More often than not sales organizations have the propensity to handcuff their sales team with strict enforcement of pricing. While its always nice to get the max price for your company, I think that if you have a person that is on the phone and willing to buy now for X% off you should absolutely go for it.

There are so many valid reasons to bend on pricing, but the single most important reason that I can think of is plain and simple, revenue is revenue and if you could not get them at full price, are you really going to not do what’s best for the company (and your paycheck) because of a price book?

Now, if you have start cutting deals on all of your sales, that could be a problem, but I think almost every company, and even manager will gladly accept a sale that is not exactly according to a pricing guide. After all, management needs to project revenue and have annual goals, if they don’t hit the numbers for something like price adherence they could be doing themselves a disservice.

Several months ago I was asked to take on a team that I managed for years and it was managed by 4 other people. Each of these people had this mentality of what their team should do when it comes to pricing. Some were more forgiving than others, but they all shared one common process, do not deviate to far from whatever the price book says.

I will be the first to claim, I am not your standard sales leader and that’s mostly due to the fact that I came up from the trenches and know exactly how frustrating it is to be held to a number and not have the flexibility to do what ever is necessary to hit that number. As such, I have one simple rule with pricing that I enforce daily with my team: “Anything greater than zero is OK by me.” Now that’s a bit of an exaggerated statement, but the team fully understands this statement really means, do what you think is best for closing the sale and don’t worry about the price as much as closing business.

In my model, these sales are mostly one and done, but there is millions to be had from these people in reoccurring revenue one to two years down the road. So if you cut X% up front, you can make that up on the back end anyway, so the loss is really nonexistent.

The real loss would be to stay strict on a pricing guide that potentially prohibits overall growth and sales for the company, team, and your wallets.