Business Growth Ideas #283-This week: Decisions decisions, Price negotiations , Yelling
GREG’S BUSINESS GROWTH NEWSLETTER #283
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Quick notes to help you grow your business in less time with less effort. . . sometime next week.
In this issue:
– Techniques for FIT
– Being Human
– Random Stuff
Techniques for FIT
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- Pretending the robots/algorithms don’t help us make better decisions isn’t helpful. I’m not advocating for you to outsource your decisions altogether, just to look for opportunities to use the robots for help.
- Describing the learning process your people will be going through is much different from how they experience it in real time. “Why didn’t you just tell me this from the beginning?” Sometimes they have to wallow in the muck a bit.
- Options in abundance at the start of a decision process will lead to a better decision. If your people are stuck in a binary yes/no loop, break them out of it by adding options.
- We tend to be less alert in the afternoon. Corporate raider T Boone Pickens was rumored to schedule important meetings for the late afternoon after his naps. He would be alert and the other party feeling the afternoon drag. Big decisions early in the day is a decent rule to follow.
Being Human – The price is the price
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(image: wikihow)
I’ve talked about how in sales the topic of money comes in two flavors. One is early in the decision process, ball-parking, and one is late in the process, negotiating. If you’ve done a good job at the front of the sales process and designed a solution designed to match the opportunity there tends to be little negotiation. That said, most sales in the professional services space are complicated, communication is always a challenge, and time pressure creates gaps in the solution.
Negotiation happens.
The advice I give is the price is the price, so if you’re going to offer a concession, find a good reason. If you don’t, the price really wasn’t the price, and we’re training clients to always negotiate. Dysfunctional.
Since the price is the price, if the dollars required to do the job are reduced it has to show up in your business somewhere. I suggest you find the place to charge it and let the client know. For instance, if there is a price concession, and you normally offer terms, get payment up front. Tell the client you are charging the difference to accounts receivable because they don’t need to follow up for collections. Or if the client is willing to give a video testimonial and serve as an on-call reference, charge the discount to marketing. You have no idea if your marketing is working anyway, might as well take that budget and use it on clients.
Find a place to account for discounts and explain it to your clients. Otherwise, the price isn’t the price, it’s a suggestion.
Random stuff
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We were not the first people to live in this house. I’m not sure about the number of previous inhabitants but when we tore out a wall the plaster was signed by someone named R.B. Swift in 1941. He also left an empty bottle of bourbon in the wall. Nice touch.
In the kitchen one of the previous inhabitants decided to put the microwave at my eye level. I find this useful because the reflection in its door serves as a mirror on occasion, but my lovely bride at 12-13″ lower to the ground finds taking piping hot liquids out to be a dangerous activity.
Someday we’ll have to tear it all down and discover what’s behind the kitchen walls, but in the between time we needed a new microwave. It’s nice but the time clock is, um, bright. The oven right below the microwave has a pleasant dull green clock, but this one is an aggressive white. If the lower clock says, “Greg, if you’re wondering, it’s 9:27,” the new microwave says, “IT’S 9:27 MOTHER CUSSER!!”
I’m sure I’ll get used to it.
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