You will practise naming a price and handling the first reaction in a recorded role-play.
You can understand everything in this module and still freeze the first time a real buyer raises their eyebrows at your price. The words you planned leave your head, the silence feels unbearable, and you hear yourself offering a discount nobody asked for. What gets you past that is having done it out loud a few times before it counts.
This exercise is a recorded role-play of the price moment. You will run it twice with a partner, review the recordings and decide one change. Set aside about forty minutes, and keep at least ten of them for the review. The worked example is Priya, who rehearses the price conversation before her real meeting with Joel.
You need a partner, a phone to record, and a short brief for your partner to read. The brief tells them who they are, what their problem is, the impact they agreed in discovery, and one instruction: react to the price with surprise.
Priya's brief for her friend Aisha: "You are Joel. You run two cafes in Tiong Bahru. You worked out that the books cost you about S$6,500 a year in your time and extra accountancy. When you hear the price, look surprised and say something like 'Oh, that's more than I expected.' If she asks why, say a friend pays his bookkeeper less. If she holds firm, ask for a discount."
Keep your partner's brief realistic. The point is to practise the reaction you are most likely to meet, not to win against an impossible buyer.
Write your own price sentence on a card before you start, exactly as you will say it. Priya's run-up and price are the ones from lesson 3.1, Make the value clear before you say the price, using her example figures: Joel's impact, then what option two does, then S$450 a month.
Start the recording and play the last few minutes of the proposal walkthrough. Follow the order you have learned in this module.
Recall the value first, using the buyer's impact figure in their words. Then state the price plainly and once, as in lesson 3.2, Say the price plainly, then stop talking, and hold the silence until your partner speaks. Before you answer their reaction, ask what is behind it. A clarifying question works well here: "When you say more than you expected, what were you comparing it with?"
When Priya runs it, Aisha says, "Oh, that's more than I expected." Priya waits, then asks what she was comparing it with. Aisha says, "A friend pays his bookkeeper about two-fifty." Priya asks what the friend's bookkeeper does. It turns out the friend has one outlet and no till checks. Priya can now compare scope rather than defend her number.
If your partner asks for a discount, trade rather than give, using the limits you set in lesson 3.3, Trade concessions instead of giving discounts. Near the end, Aisha asks for fifty dollars off. Priya offers fortnightly instead of weekly till checks at a lower fee, and Aisha, playing Joel, decides to keep the weekly checks at the full price.
Stop when the price conversation reaches a natural end: an agreement, a next step or a clear objection to come back to.
Brief your partner to react differently the second time. Good alternatives are silence followed by "Hmm," a question about terms such as "Do I have to pay for the year up front?", or a straight request: "Can you do it for four hundred?"
The second run tests whether you are following the method or a script. If you find yourself answering a question your partner did not ask, that is worth noticing.
Listen to both recordings and check four things.
First, filler words around the price. Count every "only," "just," "around," "investment" or "um" in the sentence where you state the price. Priya found two in her first run: "it's just S$450 a month, roughly."
Second, the silence. Time how many seconds passed between the end of your price sentence and your partner's first word. Then check whether you broke the silence yourself. Priya held for about four seconds in the first run, then filled it with "and that includes the catch-up work." In the second run she held until Aisha spoke.
Third, whether you asked what was behind the reaction before answering it.
Fourth, whether you traded or gave. Any concession you offered should have come with something in return.
When you have listened to both, write down the single change that would have made the biggest difference. Resist listing everything you noticed, because a list of five gets ignored. Priya's: "Drop 'just' and 'roughly' from the price sentence, and look down at my notes after saying it so I don't fill the silence."
Two recordings of the price conversation, each with a different buyer reaction. A note of the filler words you used and how long you held the silence in each. And one written change to how you present price, specific enough that a partner could check next time whether you made it.
Find your partner, hand them a brief with the first reaction, and start the activity below.
Record the role-play twice with different buyer reactions and write one change you will make to how you present price.
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