Selling the Price Increase

23The Ledge Technique

Everything you have learned up to this point is designed to help you approach price increase conversations with relaxed, assertive confidence, reduce customer resistance, and gain acceptance without losing your customer.

The good news is, the system works. When you follow the processes, frameworks, and methodologies you learned in the previous chapters, most customers will accept price increases and you'll get responses similar to these:

• “Thank you for letting me know. You guys do a great job for us.”
• “OK, I get it. I'm not happy about it, but I understand.”
• “We're being forced to do the same thing to our customers.”
• “Thanks for letting us know about this early so we have time to plan for it.”
• “This stinks, but I guess we don't have another choice.”

The bad news is that some customers are going to push back. Others will say anything to get you to back off the price increase. At times, their price increase objections may be harsh.

• “There's no way we are paying that much.”
• “Your service sucks and now you want us to pay more? You are out of your mind.”
• “It's just like a big company to pick on little guys like us when you know we have nowhere else to go.”
• “How can you possibly justify this?”
• “Your competitors aren't raising their prices.”
• “Please don't do this, we can't afford to pay more. You'll put us out of business.”
• “No problem, I'll just start buying from your competitors.”
• “We have a contract; you can't do this.”
• “Your competitor is here every day ...