Over the past month, I wrote nine reflections on holding your price, and I just turned them into a long-form essay.
Let me give you the essence.
The first discount is one you gave yourself.
Ask a founder why their price is their price, and the answer is usually “It’s our list.” And that list got built the way lists get built: the competitor, minus a bit. Cost, plus a margin. Or in comparison to the other modules in your product suite.
What’s often totally missing: The customer.
So if your price is “competitor minus a bit”, you’ve already discounted, before you ever meet a customer and before anyone pushed. By the time procurement leans on you at quarter-end, you’re not defending your price, but discounting a discount. And they can smell that.
“It’s too expensive” means two opposite things.
From a buyer who never saw the value, it’s a signal you missed something. From one who saw it fine, it’s just a game they play. They use the same words, and if you can’t tell them apart, you’ll fight to hold a price on a deal that needed more work, or you’ll drop a price that was fine as it was.
Worth knowing: they’re not making it up as they go. It’s a script they follow. Quarter-end timing, the multi-year commitment play, the push for a fast signature — those are published buyer tactics, and there’s an industry selling benchmarks and playbooks to the other side of your table. Realize this. Because once you know it’s a script, it stops feeling personal.
The best sellers never argue for their value.
Niels, one of the CEOs and sales leaders I quote in the essay, sells software to hotels. He lets the buyer do the math out loud, long before he even mentions a price, and doesn’t give any proposal until his prospect confirms the value themselves. And Chris, who runs a healthtech business, made it his habit to ask: ‘If our price were identical, would you still pick us? Why?’ And then listens to the list they give, to then respond: ‘That’s the difference in the price.’
Both are doing the same thing. Getting the buyer to say why you’re worth it, so the price doesn’t need defending.
That’s three. Six more are in the essay. For a lot of sales-led software companies, this is the difference between hitting their forecast and having to explain why they didn’t.
The full essay is here: Holding your price
Question for you to reflect upon:
Think about the last discount you gave. Was it because they needed it, or because you couldn’t say why your price is your price?
The Remarkable Effect is when your price is the price.
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