What Are You so Afraid of?
Do these customers threaten physical violence if they don’t get their cars fixed at a cheap price? Not usually; if anything they say scary things like “That’s too much money,” “the car’s not worth it,” “I can get it cheaper down the street,” or “I don’t have that kind of money.” Now, if those phrases have rattled you so much in the past that you are now at the point where you drop your price before you even present it to the customer, you are losing sight of a very important point. The customer who would try to negotiate down your price by giving you all those objections would do so no matter what price you started out at. He or she would have fought you no matter what. The problem is that if you started low out of fear, there is nothing more for you to do than go even lower or try very hard to fight off the onslaught of price objections to follow. Starting higher would at least give you some wiggle room if you couldn’t handle every one of their price objections and felt at some point that you would have to negotiate. Then even a negotiated price would be profitable.
