Latest / Sales Leadership with Fexingo: Quota Carriers, Sales Managers, and Revenue Teams / How Top Sales Reps Handle Price Objections After the Proposal
Transcript
- Lucas: You spend weeks building rapport, uncovering pain, tailoring a solution. You send the proposal with genuine confidence. Then the email comes back: 'Love the approach, but the pricing is way beyond what we budgeted.' Luna: That moment. The stomach-drop moment. Every rep knows it. Lucas: Right. And here's the hard truth — most reps mishandle it. They jump straight to justifying the price, or worse, they start discounting before the prospect even asks. So today I want to drill into one specific move that top performers use when the price objection lands after the proposal is out. Luna: Before we go deep — quick honest thing. A handful of listeners chip in monthly through buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo, and that's literally what funds making this many episodes ad-free. If these conversations have moved your work forward in some small way, that's the channel that keeps it going. Lucas: Yeah. Appreciate that. And for everyone else — let's get into the reframe. Lucas: So the common instinct when a prospect says 'too expensive' is to defend the sticker price. You start listing features, ROI calculations, competitor comparisons. But the rep who handles this well does something counterintuitive: they validate the shock first. Luna: Validate the shock? Meaning you say 'I get it' and then what? Lucas: Exactly that. A simple: 'I hear you — that number lands differently when it's on paper. Let's walk through what's driving it.' No defense. No qualification of whether the budget is real. You just acknowledge the emotional reaction and open a conversation about the gap. Luna: I've seen reps try that and then the prospect still says 'but we only have X.' So the validation doesn't always solve it. Lucas: No, it's step one. The real move comes next. Top reps pivot from defending the price to reframing the cost. They don't talk about what they're charging. They talk about what the problem is costing the prospect every month they don't solve it. Luna: The classic 'cost of inaction' argument. Lucas: But with a specific hook. I worked with a rep at a mid-market SaaS company who was trying to close a $340,000 annual deal. The prospect came back and said 'We budgeted $280,000.' That's a sixty-thousand-dollar gap — real money. The rep's first instinct was to cut the price, but we talked through a different approach. Luna: What did he do? Lucas: He went back to the discovery notes. The prospect's operations team was wasting 120 person-hours per week on manual data entry. That's six full-time employees' worth of time. The rep calculated the annual salary cost of those six people — roughly $360,000. Then he said: 'I understand the $340K price feels high. But you're currently spending more than that on a problem this software eliminates. So the real question isn't whether you can afford the software. It's whether you can afford to keep spending $360,000 a year on manual processes.' Luna: Oof. That reframe is powerful because it flips the conversation from expense to investment. Lucas: And it's honest. The rep didn't fabricate numbers — he used data the prospect had already given him. That's the key. If you try this move without real numbers from discovery, it feels hollow. But when you can point to a specific figure the prospect themselves confirmed, it's hard to argue with. Luna: What about when the prospect's objection isn't 'we don't have the budget' but 'your competitor is $20K cheaper'? Lucas: That's a different animal. But the same principle applies — don't get drawn into defending your price relative to theirs. Instead, ask: 'What does the competitor's solution not do that ours does? And what is that gap worth to your team?' Usually the prospect will admit the cheaper option lacks a feature or level of support that matters to them. Then you've got a value difference, not a price difference. Luna: So you're not competing on price — you're competing on scope. Lucas: Exactly. And sometimes the prospect genuinely can't afford the full solution. In those cases, top reps are willing to walk away. They don't slash the price to force a fit. They say something like: 'It sounds like this isn't the right time. Let's revisit in six months when the budget might align.' That preserves margin and dignity. Luna: But walking away is terrifying for a rep who needs this quarter's number. Lucas: It is. And I'm not saying you should walk away every time. But there's a difference between discounting to close and discounting because the prospect genuinely can't afford it. If the gap is small — say ten percent — you can find creative terms like a longer payment schedule. If it's thirty percent, you're not solving a price objection; you're selling to the wrong buyer. Luna: That's a good boundary. So let's recap the three-step move: validate the shock, reframe around cost of inaction, and if the gap is too wide, be ready to walk. Lucas: That's the framework. And the reps who nail it are the ones who do the work before the proposal ever goes out. They've already surfaced the cost of the problem. They know what the prospect values. So when the price objection comes, they're not scrambling for an answer — they're just reminding the prospect of what they already agreed on. Luna: It's almost like the objection handling happens in discovery, not in the negotiation. Lucas: A hundred percent. The best closer I ever worked with used to say: 'If you get the price objection, you missed something in discovery.' That might be too absolute, but there's a lot of truth in it. Luna: I think that's a great note to end on. Next time you're staring at an email that says 'too expensive,' remember you've probably already got the ammunition to handle it — you just have to use it. Lucas: Exactly. Thanks for listening.