Ask the Experts | ‘Cheaper Online’ Price Objection

Question: How should we deal with price objections? For example, “I can get it on Amazon for $30 and you’re charging $400. I’ll do it myself.”

Weldon Long; New York Times Bestselling Author

Well, this is a really common problem that we face, both on the sales side and on the service side, because people do know they can buy the capacitor or buy the igniter or something online for a very inexpensive number. But if a homeowner ever brings up with me, “How can you charge $400 for this capacitor? I can go online and get it for $30,” or whatever, you know, I always have a simple analogy that I use.

I say, Mr. or Mrs. Homeowner, the reality is you can buy every component you need for that car out there in your garage. You can go online and buy every single component you need to build that car from scratch. But the reality is it’s not the individual components that define the quality of the car, it’s the expertise of the assembly, the engineering, everything that goes into it. So Mr./Mrs. Homeowner I would just ask you to consider, when you look at the price of that part online, that that doesn’t include the price of someone putting it in their van and bringing it to you like I have; it certainly doesn’t include the training and experience I have over the 10 years of my career; it doesn’t include workers compensation insurance; it doesn’t include unemployment insurance, all the things we have to pay here to employ people; it doesn’t include the cost of inventory, I’ve carried that part in my van every single day.

So there’s just a variety of factors – you’re not just buying the part, you’re buying my 10 years’ experience, you’re buying my company’s guarantee that the part’s going to work properly — many companies have a guarantee that if a part fails in the first year, they’ll replace it free. So you’re not going to have that guarantee. You’re not going to have the assurance it’s done properly. And the reality is, Mr./Mrs. Homeowner, what I’ve found is that when a part fails, there’s another part causing it to fail, or there’s another part fixing to fail after this one. With my expertise I’m going to be able to diagnose this system, those situations and those problems, and I’m going to know exactly what’s going on. Because odds are it’s more than just the capacitor going on here.

So that’s just kind of the outline of the conversation I’ve trained guys to have. This is a situation that, a lot of us have a lot of different experience, and a lot of different ways to skin that cat. But the bottom line is you just have to explain to the homeowner that they’re buying a lot more than just that one individual part for $30.

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