Before cutting your price, find out what’s holding the deal back.
Yesterday morning, I got a call from a client for a pricing diagnostic. They were considering cutting prices by 20%.
“How do I know if we’re too expensive without lowering prices? Maybe my sales team is right, and we should cut by 20%.”
Fair question. When prospects hesitate and your sales team keeps hearing “too expensive,” changing the number can feel like the most direct way to move forward.
But before discussing a new price, I asked:
“What would still make these deals difficult if you were 20% cheaper?”
That’s where the conversation became useful.
Because a lower price might help get a signature. It might also leave the reasons behind the hesitation untouched — ready to show up again on the next sales call.
What does “too expensive” actually mean?
A prospect says your offer is too expensive. Your sales team passes on the feedback. You consider a discount.
The missing piece is understanding what the buyer is comparing your price to.
Their available budget? A competitor’s offer? The cost of doing nothing? Or the value they believe they’ll get from your product?
Those are different problems, and they call for different decisions.
A buyer who understands the value but cannot afford the minimum commitment may need a different entry offer. A buyer who cannot explain your value to their CFO needs a stronger business case. A buyer who worries about an unpredictable bill may need a clearer pricing metric.
Lowering the price could influence each conversation. It wouldn’t necessarily resolve the underlying concern.
Before deciding how much to charge, investigate what makes the purchase difficult.
Four questions to ask before changing the number
1. Can the buyer see which offer fits their needs?
Look at your packages through the eyes of someone discovering your product.
Is there an obvious starting point? Do the differences between plans reflect meaningful differences in customer needs? Can buyers explain why they should choose one over another?
If choosing a package requires a detailed explanation from the founder every time, the offer may need work.
Each package should give a specific customer a clear reason to buy it. Adding more features to a comparison table won’t necessarily make that choice easier.
2. Can they justify the investment internally?
Your contact may love the product. That doesn’t mean they can get the purchase approved.
Can they explain what changes for the business, why it matters and how the expected benefit compares with the cost?
“Your team will save time” gives them less to work with than a credible estimate grounded in their workflow: which tasks, how often, for which people, and what that capacity could be used for.
Before reducing the price, check whether you’ve helped your champion build a case for paying it.
3. Can they anticipate what they’ll pay?
A pricing metric can make sense to your team and still create uncertainty for the buyer.
If customers cannot translate credits, usage or activity into an expected bill, they may struggle to commit — even when the initial price looks reasonable.
Ask them to estimate their spend under normal usage and as adoption grows. Where do they get stuck?
You may need a clearer explanation, better forecasting, or a different structure. A 20% reduction in the unit price won’t automatically make the total feel predictable.
4. Does the first commitment match the evidence they have?
You may be confident in the value your product delivers. A new customer has less evidence.
An annual contract, a broad deployment or a large minimum commitment can be difficult to approve before they’ve validated that value.
Consider whether a focused initial scope or a paid pilot would help them make a confident decision. Define what success looks like and how the customer would move into the full offer.
That creates a path to purchase while preserving a reason to expand.
What if the price really is too high?
Sometimes it is. A diagnostic should leave room for that conclusion.
But “we lowered the price and won the deal” doesn’t, by itself, establish that your previous price was wrong. You may have helped a particular buyer fit their budget, rewarded a negotiation, or compensated for uncertainty elsewhere in the offer.
Before making a broad cut, write down the hypothesis you want to test.
For example: customers in a specific segment understand the offer and its value, but the minimum annual commitment exceeds what they can approve.
That gives you something concrete to investigate through customer conversations, deal reviews and a focused commercial test. Decide in advance what evidence would support a change, and assess the effect on revenue and margin alongside conversion.
A 20% price cut means you need 25% more sales volume just to maintain the same revenue, assuming everything else stays equal. The decision deserves more than a few difficult negotiations.
Build an offer your team can confidently sell
At Mida, I work on segmentation, packaging, pricing metrics and price levels together because buyers experience them together.
They’re deciding whether this offer fits their needs, whether the value justifies the investment, and whether they feel comfortable committing.
Your price needs to make sense within that whole decision.
This morning, I got a text from that same client:
“OK — it’s not just about the price. We have a lot on our plate.”
We now had a clearer place to start.
Before approving your next discount, ask:
What would still make this deal difficult if we were 20% cheaper?
Pricing. Built to sell.
