What do you do when you customer wants you to sharpen your pencil?

That is business speak for reducing your prices.

 

You can do one of three things.

 

First, you can reduce the prices as asked. This is always a bad precedent because now your customer will know you can do the job or furnish the product cheaper. This makes the requests for lower pricing come more frequently. Also what do you do about the customers who do not ask for lower prices? Just have two pricing scales and hope they never find out about each other

 

Second, you can reduce pricing while subtracting something from the service or product. Usually something of little significance but that way you are not selling the same thing you were before at reduced pricing. This has the same effect as above as well. Your customer now knows he can get substantially the same product for a lower price.

 

Third and this is really the way to deal with this situation, invest in finding customers who are willing to pay your price. Assuming you are not totally out of line with the market you can take the money that reducing the price will cost you and invest in expanding your market. The best way to do this is invest in some serious web marketing.

 

Web marketing is the least expensive and least used method of expanding your customer base to those who are willing to pay your price. Web marketing provides measureable results and if you find this hard to believe than you have never really been engaged in web marketing.