How to Present Price in a Home Improvement Sale Without Flinching

He's been sat at the kitchen table for an hour and a half. Good chat. The customer's shown him the black mould in the corner of the back bedroom, told him about the draught under the patio door, and her tea's gone cold twice. Then he gets to the price. His voice goes up half an octave. He slides the paper across, and before she's read it he's off: "Now, that includes the scaffolding, and obviously that's before any discount, and we can always look at finance..."

She hadn't said a word. He'd already started negotiating with himself.

That's how a lot of price presentations go in this trade, and it's why so many good appointments fall over in the last ten minutes. If you want to know how to present price in a home improvement sale, it comes down to four things. Prepare them for the figure early, so it's never a shock. Recap their reasons, in their words, before you say it. Say the number once, plainly, and then stop talking. And don't fall over yourself to drop it the moment they breathe in.

The shock is your fault

I've been selling home improvements for more than 40 years. I started out door to door selling gas central heating, and even then I never talked about the product until I knew they could afford it, or that I could help them afford it.

Most reps do it the other way round. An hour on the product, then a big number dropped on someone who's got a figure half that size in their head. And they wonder why the room goes cold.

So condition the price early. The reason a lot of people call you in the first place is that they've no idea what this sort of job costs. Give them a general feel. "Jobs like this tend to land somewhere between this and this. Does that sound like the sort of number you had in mind?" If it's miles off, you want to know in the first twenty minutes, not at the end. And leave yourself a bit of a cushion in that range. Coming in under what they were braced for feels very different to coming in over it.

Hand their reasons back first

By the time you get to price, they should have told you why they want this done and why now. The back bedroom nobody can sleep in from November. The grandchildren coming for Christmas. Prospects drop bits of gold like that all the way through an appointment, and you should have been picking up every piece.

Now give it back to them. I think of it like a barrister in a court drama, circling back to the evidence before the verdict. "So just so I've got this right. You said the back bedroom's unusable from November, your daughter's bringing the kids at Christmas, and you're fed up heating a room you can't sit in. Have I missed anything?"

Then the figure. Now the number's sat right next to their problem.

I spend roughly 70% of an appointment on the why, 20% on the offer and 10% on the close. If you've done the 70%, the price is the easy bit. If you haven't, no clever wording at the end will save you. Price is only an objection where there's no value present.

Stop calling it a quote

A quote is something you get three of and line up on the kitchen worktop. I say, "I've worked out a costing for you." It sounds like work you've done for them, because it is.

And present it for what it should be, a price they can live with. Not the cheapest, not the dearest. People buy for three reasons: it's the right company, it solves their problem, and it fits a price and a timeframe they're happy with. Your costing has to answer the price part without wrecking the other two.

Say it once, then shut up

This is where most salespeople come unstuck. They say the figure and straight away start filling the gap. Justifying it. Explaining the VAT. Mentioning a discount before anyone's asked for one.

Say the number in the voice you used for the weather on the way in. Then stop. The sale is made in the silence. While you're talking they can't think, and they need to think. It might be ten seconds. It'll feel like a minute. He who speaks first loses, and I mean that. When they do speak, what they say tells you exactly where you are.

If it's a couple, give them some space. Pop out to the van for ten minutes to sort some drawings. They often just need to nod at each other without a stranger watching.

Don't jump

Own your price or it will own you. If you flinch, they'll see it. If they say "that's a bit more than we thought" and you leap straight in with two hundred quid off, you've told them the first number wasn't real.

I was role-playing this with a rep I coach a while back. I pushed back on his price and he came straight back with a lower figure. I stopped him. Too keen. He'd jumped. And if you ever do move, have a proper, honest reason for it. A discount out of nowhere makes it look like you tried to rob them with the first figure. Customers aren't daft.

Better still, find out what's really going on first. "Other than price, is there anything else that's bothering you?" More often than not the price wasn't the real problem. Something was missing from the conversation, and price is just the easiest thing to say.

When the price lands at the end of the right conversation

Another rep I coach sold 4 of his 6 presentations in one week, £19k, after we worked on finding the emotional reason behind the purchase and getting agreement up front to make a decision on the day. That's one person's result, not a promise. But it shows what happens when the figure turns up after the customer has already told you why they want it.

Presenting price sits in the Offer step of my 7 Steps to Sales Mastery, and leans on the Frame and the WHY before it. Get those right and the price is just the next thing you talk about.

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