There really only are two commitments that need to be made for a sale to occur …
YOU must commit to delivering the promise you make … there must be some evidence of this commitment in your ACTIONS during the sales process and especially during the closing stages of the sale.
THEY must commit to the payment of the investment needed to access that promise … in other words, your fee! There must be an ACTION during the closing stages of the sale that demonstrates that commitment.
These are NOT mutually exclusive – you make a promise to your customer and they make a promise to you. Every sale is really an exchange of promises.
The problem is that there is often an underlying suspicion involved … too many people have had too many bad experiences as customers and this creates a desire to “get a great deal” in order to offset some of that suspicion.
However, the more elegant you make your selling and the more elegant and noble you make the way you talk about money, the easier it is to ask for the price you deserve.
Don’t reduce the way you sell to clumsy “deal making”, instead, make sure you sell in a way that makes it all about framing value.
More importantly, recognise that the ability to talk about price in an elegant way, has as much to do with how you STRATEGICALLY set your price, as it does with how you position price in the sales dialogue.