Your Clients Don't Care About Price as Much as You Think

Most expert service providers secretly believe the same thing about their clients:

"They just want the lowest price."

For a few buyers, that is true. They shop for cheap, get cheap, and live with the consequences.

For most others, though, low cost sits way down the list. They care far more about what is at stake for them, the risks they are holding, and the outcomes they need.

Here are ten value drivers that routinely matter more than price:

• Higher odds the outcome actually happens and that the change is durable. They do not want a short-term bump. They want a result that sticks.

• Protecting reputation. They cannot afford to look foolish in front of a boss, team, board, or clients.

• The credible outside voice. They need someone with authority to lead a team to a necessary and sometimes painful conclusion and to carry the challenging messages.

• Clarity on the path forward. There are many ways to solve the problem. The expert knows the most effective way and can say, "Here is what we should do and why."

• Pattern recognition. The expert has seen this movie before, knows what tends to go wrong, and knows how to prevent it.

• Relief of handing off the problem. They want to give the problem to someone they trust and stop carrying it around in their head at three in the morning.

• Order instead of chaos. They are buying your steadiness where there was confusion and noise.

• Advancing a mission that matters. The engagement supports a larger purpose they care about, not just a line item in a budget.

• A visible win for their career. They want a result they can point to in reviews, board decks, and future opportunities.

• Leveraging their time and their team. They want their own time, and their team's time, freed up for other priorities.

There are countless others. Which ones apply depends entirely on the client you are sitting in front of.

When you assume clients are primarily price driven, you stop listening for everything else that actually matters to them. When clients talk about decisions they regret, they rarely say "I wish I had picked the cheaper option." They usually say some version of "I wish I had picked the option that actually solved the problem."

You do not lose business because your price is too high. You lose it because you never asked what else mattered.

What value drivers have you seen show up in your recent client conversations?

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I’m John, author of the five-star rated book, The Generosity Mindset. I show expert-service professionals how generosity creates the confidence, value, and relationships that grow a business and restore joy to your work. To read reviews of the book, follow this link, and feel welcome to DM me.