Jeb Blount | Selling the Price Increase

In today’s episode of The Sales Evangelist, Donald is joined by frequent guest and CEO of Sales Gravy, Jeb Blount, to discuss an important (and often avoided) topic: selling a price increase to clients.  The price increase conversation is awkward, especially if you’ve never done it before. A seller’s main priority is to get the increase without losing the customer or order. Increases are good for the health of an organization. They’re essential to ensure you get the resources to sell more deals, help prevent layoffs, and service quality initiatives.  Understand what kind of price increase is occurring: Defensive increases are smaller and leveraged across the entire company. In addition, having a relationship with the customer makes discussing a price increase easier. The status quo means it takes a lot of work for a buyer to leave - many customers are likely to stay with you despite the price increase.  Popular narratives sellers can use to discuss: In an inflationary period with supply chain issues, price increases constitute an economic fairness narrative. Costs have risen, impacting your ability to serve customers. Future value narratives occur when you add features, services, and additional expertise that justify the price increase. Project-based narrative - To successfully meet a particular benchmark, timeline, or quota, you need additional funding.  Weave narratives together to weave a custom reason for your client - it should be whatever best helps them explain the increase.  Connect with Jeb on LinkedIn for more content and information. You can find his new book, Selling the Price Increase, on Amazon, and a free downloadable companion guide at salesgravy.com/resources. Finally, tune in to his podcast, the Sales Gravy Podcast, on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and anywhere else podcasts can be found.  This episode is brought to you in part by Skipio. Are you sick of crickets? As a salesperson, the pain of reaching out with phone calls or emails and not receiving a response is real. But all text messaging is not created equal. 85% of people prefer text over email and phone calls because they want to engage in a conversation, not listen to bots. Be more like people and start having conversations that end in the conversions you want. Try Skipio at www.Skipio.com. This episode is brought to you in part by Scratchpad. Are you tired of a digital workspace cluttered with notes, folders, files, and half-filled spreadsheets? (Not that we’re speaking from personal experience.) Luckily, we’ve found the solution. Scratchpad is the first Revenue Team Workspace specifically designed to adapt to each salesperson’s workflow, so you don’t have to change your habits. Scratchpad creates a streamlined workflow that allows everyone to be a little more productive each day without the hassle of updating a database with whatever info you can find. Get Scratchpad free at Scratchpad.com.  This episode is brought to you in part by the Outbound 2022 Sales Conference. Are you looking to learn actionable and practical ways to improve your sales performance? Do you or your team want to experience a fantastic professional development opportunity full of expert and high-quality speakers ready to help you reach your sales quotas? Attend this year’s Outbound Conference! Visit outboundconference.com to learn more, and use code MANGO10 at checkout to take a portion of your final ticket price. As one of our podcast listeners, we value your opinion and always want to improve the quality of our show. Complete our two-minute survey here: thesalesevangelist.com/survey. We’d love for you to join us for our next episodes by tuning in on Apple Podcast, Google Podcast, Stitcher, or Spotify. Audio provided by Free SFX, Soundstripe, and Bensound. Other songs used in the episodes are The Organ Grinder written by Bradley Jay Hill, performed by Bright Seed, and Produced by Brightseed and Hill.