When I was a kid with a bunch of siblings and a single no-income mother, in Parramatta we were beyond broke. My mother would do some weekly ironing for the local baker, and he would give us a garbage bag with yesterday’s bread. I would get one bread roll per day, or sometimes the orphans would throw their sandwich crusts on the playground.
One day after school I went to a German kid’s house. He handed me a red frankfurt with Dijon mustard wiped across it. I couldn’t believe the opulence. Meat as a snack and Dijon that had no real nutritional value but was purely a cosmetic addition. An entire olfactory sense opened up like those videos of kids hearing for the first time.
To this day, Dijon mustard tastes like success and opulence. That is not rational, and it does not need to be. It is personal, emotional, and completely anchored in my own value system. You might not like Dijon mustard at all. I don’t care. You might think it is overrated or unnecessary. I don’t care. In my value appraisal, it is opulence.
Discounting
If your sales team is telling you that your product is too expensive, what they are often telling you is something far more dangerous. That they don’t understand the value of what they are selling, how to articulate it, or why your customers value it, and worse, they are quietly projecting that perception onto your customers. I always say, ‘bad reps discount.’
They say ‘a good salesperson buys off a good pitch’. Sales is a human thing; people can feel a salesperson’s discomfort. If they are enthusiastic and genuine, it conveys comfort and trust. If they are skittish, nervous and applogising for the price then the red flags go up. This can be as subtle as one wrong word or awkward half pause. But the basic lesson is if your rep doesn’t believe in the value, neither will the prospect.
Reps will say all day as a crutch, ‘it’s too expensive, people don’t want it.’ You don’t fix that with a cheaper product. You fix it by changing how value is understood and communicated.
That is how pricing works. In fact one of the ten foundational principals of economics is that ‘something is worth, what someone else will pay for it.’
Internal Value Systems
Value is not objective. It is not a neat calculation of features versus cost. It is contextual, emotional, and often deeply personal. When a salesperson looks at a product and decides it is too expensive, they are not making a market assessment. They are exposing their own inability to connect what they are selling to something that actually matters to the buyer. It is a form of hubris, because they are substituting their judgement for the customer’s, it is selfish, because it centres their own worldview instead of the prospect, the very person they are meant to be serving.
They are saying my perception of this product, is more important that your perception of this product.
You see this everywhere once you start looking for it. People spend extraordinary amounts of money on things that make no sense to someone else. There are buyers who will spend millions on Pokemon cards, classic cars, collectables, or memorabilia that hold no intrinsic value to me. I struggle to understand why someone would pay a fortune for a rare stamp or a vintage toy, but that is irrelevant. The market does not care about your personal valuation.
In fact one of the foundational ten economic principals is that ‘Something is worth, what someone else is willing to pay for it’, this is based on their internal value system.
Discounting then becomes the crutch. It feels like progress because it moves the deal forward, but it is false progress. All it really does is tell your prospects that the product is expensive. Just giving a price without a value package is like saying ‘do you want to buy a car for a hundred thousand dollars?’ Like what car? The rep has only given one piece of information the price. How can they make a judgement based on that?
What’s it worth to you?
I saw a perfect example when my father was running sales training for a Mercedes Benz in the United States. He was observing one of their reps walking a prospect through a vehicle, listing engine capacity, leather interior, zero to sixty ability, style, prestige, while the buyer stood there bored. We call this pitch vomiting. Can you see the hubris? the rep was so full of their own expertise and sales skill, it was all about them.
My father stepped in and asked the prospect a simple question. ‘Why are you considering Mercedes Benz?’
The prospect paused and said he had two daughters, one had died in a car accident, and he wanted the safest car possible for his other daughter.
He didn’t think protecting his surviving daughter’s life was expensive. Nor did he care about the seat warmer or V8 engine. The hundred thousand dollars for a car seemed trivial.
My father turned to the rep and told him ‘you tell this man every single feature about safety you can, and nothing else.’
Take away
The price to you is irrelevant. Your product knowledge is irrelevant. Your perception of the value is irrelevant. Stop being selfish and lazy by discounting. Understand your customers’ value system and hold the value high.
If you want to sell me an expensive steak? Forget telling me all the details you know about grass fed, wagyu, longhorned, back paddock beef.
Find out that Dijon mustard makes me feel like that kid that ate orphan scraps of the floor and experienced taste for the first time.
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