Selling the Price Increase

2The Five Fears

When it comes to approaching price increases, sales professionals tend to worry about five potential outcomes. They fear that their customer will:

• Defect to a competitor, and they will lose the account.
• Stop buying or reduce purchases of a particular product or service.
• Bring up past service deficiencies or product-quality defects as an objection to the price increase.
• No longer like or trust them, and the once-friendly relationship they had with the account stakeholders will disintegrate.
• Get angry, argue, or pummel them with hard objections and rejection.

Though these five fears are not completely unfounded, at the heart of each one of these worries is the deep-seated fear of conflict and rejection. These fears cause you to hesitate, procrastinate, hide from potential conflict, and make excuses. They cloud objectivity, leading to anxiety, insecurity, and worry.

Worry is a byproduct of the human safety bias. Our brains are programmed to be hypervigilant in detecting and avoiding risk, so we are almost always focused on what could go wrong rather than what could go right.

In my first experience with price increases I wasted a lot of energy and time wrapped up in fear, anxiety, and worry over pending price increase conversations. My fear caused me to procrastinate until it was almost too late, which ultimately made those price increase conversations much worse than they had to be.

But, despite the worry and fear, it was still my job to sell price increases, ...