Price is an important communication tool, because it either reflects the benefits of such a relationship, or highlights their absence. That s about listening, not telling. You have to have a good reason to start higher, and the best reason is that you re simply worth it in the customer s eyes. Selling is not telling. It is his or her job to collect information.
Information is value, and it is power.
In the end, it is what customers pay for beyond the incremental cost of production, and that is because it is worth the price. The least valuable salespeople are those who give away lots of irrelevant information and collect nothing with which to establish relevance. Therefore, they establish no context in which to add order to chaos, to create value. So their companies represent capacity as a result of operating in the dark, instead of value. If you make a concession, it should be in exchange for something.