How much do you have to sell?

I almost always find myself in the position of being the highest bidder or at least one of the highest. But for a long time, I failed to understand what this means from a salesman's point of view.

If I gave someone a price of $25,000 for whatever it was they wanted and they told me that my price was too high, I always made the assumption that I needed to try to sell them on the entire project.

This meant that I had to make a $25,000 sale which is a lot of selling! What I did not realize was that I really only needed to sell the customer on the difference between what I wanted and what they were already willing to invest. So, If my bid was $25,000 but they were looking for a price of around $20,000, I only needed to make a $5,000 sale.

Once I discovered (realized) this, my life became a whole lot easier because I could always "sell up" a bit by pointing out the superior quality, attention to detail, in house control over all aspects of the job, etc. This was, as it turned out, a standard bit of knowledge for experienced sales people. But to me it was a revelation. Since I became enlightened, my standard response to a statement to the effect that my price was too high has been to ask what they expected to price to be. The difference between that number and my price was what I had to sell.

Of course, if that difference was great enough, it might simply result in my walking out the door laughing.

DD