Why Price Isn’t the Problem (and What Really Is)
Why Price Isn't the Problem (And What Really Is)
Have you ever walked away from a sales conversation thinking, Maybe I'm just too expensive?
I hear this all the time.
You know you deliver a great product or service. You know you can help your customers. You know the results are there.
But somehow, the person on the other side of the conversation still isn't buying.
So naturally, you start wondering whether you need to lower your price, justify your price, add more bonuses, or do a better job explaining everything they get.
But here's what I want you to understand:
Why price isn't the problem usually has very little to do with the actual number you're charging.
The bigger issue is often that your potential customer doesn't clearly see how what you're offering solves the problem they actually care about.
And that changes the entire sales conversation.
Before You Change Your Price, Check Your Mindset
First, I want you to be careful about the story you're telling yourself.
Sometimes one person told us six months ago that we were “too expensive,” and we've carried that comment into every sales conversation since.
Other times, nobody has actually said we're too expensive.
We just think they think we're too expensive.
And without realizing it, we start communicating from that belief.
We become nervous when we say the price.
We over-explain.
We start discounting before anyone asks.
We throw more and more value at the conversation because we're trying to convince the other person that we're worth it.
Before you decide there's a pricing problem, make sure there really is one.
Because a value problem and a price problem are not the same thing.
You Can't Verbalize Value Until You Know the Real Problem
In my SERVICE framework for sales conversations, there are two pieces that matter a lot here:
R: Recognize the problem.
V: Verbalize the value.
And the order matters.
A lot.
One of the biggest mistakes I see in sales conversations is trying to verbalize value before we've correctly recognized the problem.
You start explaining your process.
You share testimonials.
You list everything that's included.
You explain your experience.
You talk about deliverables, support, bonuses, features, or results.
All of those things may be valuable.
But if you're attaching that value to a problem your customer doesn't really care about, it doesn't matter how impressive your offer sounds.
You're solving the wrong problem.
The First Problem They Mention Usually Isn't the Whole Problem
This is where salespeople and business owners get into trouble.
A potential customer mentions a frustration, and we immediately get excited because we know how to fix it.
They say:
“Our leads aren't converting.”
And we jump in.
“Oh, absolutely. We can fix that. Here's what we do…”
But you haven't finished understanding the problem yet.
That first answer is often only the surface.
What's happening because those leads aren't converting?
Are they missing revenue goals?
Is the owner working nights trying to compensate?
Is the sales team frustrated?
Are they losing good employees?
Are they worried the business has stopped growing?
Are they embarrassed because a strategy they pushed internally isn't working?
That deeper problem is usually where the real buying motivation lives.
And if you never uncover it, you're left trying to sell features instead of connecting your offer to something the customer genuinely wants to change.
Think About How This Works in Real Life
I believe our sales conversations should sound a lot more like our real conversations.
Here's an example from my own life.
My husband and I have been married for 18 years, and we have completely different ideas about what makes a great vacation.
I love the excitement.
I want to plan things months ahead.
Where are we going?
What are we doing?
Who are we going to meet?
What can we experience?
My husband does not care about any of that.
Lovingly, I can tell you he does not give a rip.
He wants to disengage.
He wants to relax.
He wants to rejuvenate.
So I could find an absolutely incredible activity for our vacation. It could even be free.
But if I'm selling it to him based on everything I value about the experience, he's probably not interested.
The price could literally be zero.
And I still wouldn't make the sale.
Why?
Because price wasn't the problem.
I misunderstood what mattered to him.
Your customers are doing the same thing.
They aren't evaluating your offer based on what you think should matter.
They're evaluating it based on the problem they want solved.
Stop Fixing. Start Validating and Clarifying.
So how do you uncover the real problem?
You slow down.
In your next sales conversation, when someone tells you what they're frustrated with, don't immediately try to fix it.
Give yourself five minutes.
Your job during those five minutes is simply to listen.
Then do two things:
1. Validate
Let them know you heard what they said.
That might sound like:
- “That sounds incredibly frustrating.”
- “I'm sorry that happened.”
- “I can see why that would be a problem.”
- “That sounds like it's created a lot of extra work.”
You don't need a scripted response.
Respond like a human being.
2. Clarify
Then ask questions that help you understand what the problem really means.
You might ask:
- “How is that affecting the business?”
- “What happened after that?”
- “How long has this been going on?”
- “How is this affecting you personally?”
- “What happens if this doesn't change?”
- “What would you want this to look like instead?”
Then listen again.
Validate.
Clarify.
Validate.
Clarify.
Most of the time, we get the problem wrong simply because we don't ask enough questions or give people enough space to explain what is really going on.
Once You Know the Problem, Value Becomes Easier to Explain
This is where verbalizing your value becomes much simpler.
You do not need to throw everything your company does into the conversation and hope something sticks.
Instead, connect what you do directly to what they just told you.
They told you the problem.
They told you how it's affecting them.
They told you why it needs to change.
Now you can explain how your solution helps solve that specific problem.
That's value.
Maybe someone tells you they've had terrible experiences with customer service.
Maybe they were promised a high-touch experience before, only to have the onboarding completely fall apart.
In that situation, the thing they value most may not be one of your core deliverables.
They may care more about communication.
Reliability.
Trust.
Knowing they're not going to feel forgotten after they sign the contract.
If you don't uncover that concern, you could spend 20 minutes explaining features they don't care about.
But once you understand the real problem, you can show them exactly how working with you addresses it.
That's Why Price Isn't the Problem
When someone truly understands the connection between their problem and your solution, the conversation around price changes.
That doesn't mean everybody will buy.
It doesn't mean budgets don't exist.
And it doesn't mean price never matters.
But before you assume you're losing sales because your offer costs too much, look at the conversation that happened before the price came up.
Did you really understand their problem?
Did you let them explain it fully?
Did you uncover the impact behind it?
Did you connect your value directly to that problem?
Or did you start solving too early?
Because you can add testimonials, bonuses, deliverables, features, and benefits all day long.
If you're adding value to something they don't care about, it's still not valuable to them.
Recognize the problem first.
Then verbalize the value.
That's when the price conversation gets a whole lot easier.
Want to Know What's Really Happening in Your Sales Conversations?
If you're hearing “too expensive,” struggling to communicate your value, or wondering why good prospects aren't moving forward, your sales conversation itself may be giving you the answer.
My Sales Conversation Assessment will help you identify where your conversations are working—and where you may be losing momentum.
Take the assessment here:
https://buildingmomentum.info/assessment
Because sometimes you don't need a lower price.
You need a better conversation.
Why Price Isn’t the Problem (and What Really Is) | Show Notes
Episode Summary:
Are you hearing “you’re too expensive” more than you’d like? It might not be your pricing—it might be your pitch. In this episode, Brooke Greening unpacks how most pricing objections stem from a deeper issue: unclear value. Using her SERVICE framework, Brooke walks you through how to identify the real problem your client is trying to solve and how to connect your offer to what actually matters to them. If you’ve ever struggled to explain your worth, this one’s for you.
What You’ll Learn:
- Why layering on value doesn’t work if you’ve misdiagnosed the client’s true problem • The simple mindset traps that make you feel too expensive—even when you’re not • Brooke’s “validate and clarify” approach to finding what truly motivates a buyer • How to talk about your offer in a way that makes pricing nearly irrelevant • A real-life example from Brooke’s marriage (yes, really!) that perfectly mirrors sales conversations
Resources Mentioned:
- The SERVICE Sales Framework • Tips on handling pricing objections with confidence and care
☕️ Join the Conversation:
Got a tricky pricing or value question? Submit it anonymously and Brooke might answer it in a future episode. https://buildingmomentum.info/anonymous-sales-questions/
Follow Brooke on LinkedIn for more no-pressure sales strategies that help you serve and sell with heart. https://www.linkedin.com/in/brooke-greening/
Why Price Isn’t the Problem (and What Really Is) | Full Transcript
Brooke Greening: Some people tell me I'm too expensive and I need help figuring out how to better share the value of what I'm offering. Do you have a framework to think through this? This comes from "More Value Please." Do you have a framework to think through how to be able to build value? Well, I've got my matcha, so let's get going.
The answer is to "More Value Please" is yes, I have a framework. I have a whole SERVICE framework that I use in regards to how to lead sales conversations, and in the V of that framework is verbalize the value. And so we are going to talk about that in just a minute. How do you make sure that you're able to verbalize the value because you're not alone in this.
I bet you people who are listening to this right now are absolutely shaking their heads and they're like, yes. I know I deliver a great product. I know I can help my customers, but there is some sort of disconnect because they're not working with me, and so we're going to be talking about that. Before we do, I just wanna encourage you because you actually had about two different questions in this one.
You're saying people are telling you you're too expensive, and then two, you're trying to figure out, well, how do I actually verbalize that value and that I'm not too expensive and that they can work with me? And I just wanna encourage you when things go on like that in regards to where we think that we're too expensive and we're saying, people are saying we're too expensive.
Mindset can come into a play, can come into play when this, when this happens. And so one, maybe we were told like months ago that we were too expensive by one person. And so that's like resonating in our head. And so we think that we are. Or two, maybe no one's really told us that, but that's just what we think, and we're unintentionally now showing that to our customers, and that's beginning to come back to us.
So I'm not gonna go into that in a full spiel right now, but if you have other questions about that or the mindset of what's going on with pricing, please ask and I'll be happy to answer that in future episodes. But for right now, let's talk about verbalizing your value. This is the one thing I want you to take away right now when you're listening to this and you're like, okay, how do I verbalize my value?
Because you hear it all the time. Layer the value. Make sure they know the value because we know if someone is saying no. Or if they think it's too expensive, there's a great chance that they don't understand the value. They're not seeing what we call the return of their investment. They're saying, okay, I'm gonna give you this amount of money, but what am I actually getting back?
They're not seeing that. And so that's what we mean when we say we wanna kind of verbalize the value, but there is a problem. Because no matter how much value you're adding, no matter how many great testimonials you have, no matter how many great things that you know that you can do for your new potential customer, if we get the problem wrong, it doesn't matter.
So in my service framework, I have R for recognize the problem, and then V verbalize the value. What happens so many times is we try to verbalize value and layer value onto something that they don't care about. And so what I mean by this is it can happen in two ways. One, we don't even know their problem.
We've just assumed we know what their frustrations are, and now we're trying to fix it, and now we're gonna add value in regards to how to do that. That's not going to work. Or two, they've shared one problem. We get really excited and then we try to solve it immediately. And that doesn't work either because most of the time when they share their first problem, that's usually never the one that's going to motivate them to buy.
That is the emotion behind their buying decision. Yet we hear that one problem and we try to fix it immediately. So that's what happens. We get the problem wrong. So it doesn't matter how much value we're adding 'cause it doesn't mean anything to them. So let me just give you an example. In my real life.
In real conversations going on in our house because I believe that our sales conversations should reflect our real life conversations and be just as authentic. So many times we tend to be like, okay, this is how I talk in my regular world. But when it comes to sales conversations, that's different. And I would argue it's, it's not supposed to be.
So let me just give you an example. My husband and I have been married for 18 years. Love him to death. We have bipolar views of what vacations should look like completely, and we probably didn't even know this, probably going into your like four or five. And then we started realizing, oh, this is really getting frustrating when we try to schedule vacations because we're not seeing eye to eye.
So no big surprise. I love all the excitement, thinking about things, preparing for things like for months, trying to figure out, okay, what are we gonna do? Where are we gonna go? Who are we gonna talk to? What strangers are we gonna meet? Like all of these fun things that I get super excited about and that I wanna talk to and I wanna build.
My husband on the other hand, doesn't care. Lovingly, I would lovingly say he doesn't give a rip because he wants to disengage, he wants to relax, he wants to be able to rejuvenate. He does not wanna talk to a bunch of strangers or do a bunch of crazy stuff. So this is what happens. I get all excited and it doesn't matter if I found it for free, if I'm giving it to him and I'm saying, okay, this is what we're gonna do and this is gonna be great for our vacation and this is gonna be amazing.
He's not gonna be interested 'cause that's not really the problem that he has. I missed it. I didn't understand truly what was motivating him for a vacation as opposed to what's motivating me. Okay. It's the same thing for our customers. We can miss what they're, what they're under underlining questions, concerns are.
Because we're so focused on us being able to show them what we can do, or they've maybe shared one problem and we just dive into it. So the way that we solve this is we wanna validate and we wanna clarify, okay? So in the next sales conversation you go into, you are going to listen and you're going to hear what they're frustrated with.
Or you're gonna ask them a question in regards to what's frustrating them about their business. And they're gonna start talking. And you're gonna look at the, you're gonna look at the clock and you're gonna say, okay, for the next five minutes. I'm not gonna try to fix it. I am just going to listen. I'm gonna validate and say, oh yeah, that sounds terrible, or, I'm so sorry that happened, or whatever the appropriate validation is.
And then ask clarifying questions. How does that affect da da da da? How is that affecting your personal life? How is that, how did that affect your business? Oh, I'm so sorry that that happened. What happened afterwards? Like you're just asking clarifying questions, validate, clarify, validate, clarify. The reason we get the problem wrong is just we don't ask and we don't give space for people to be able to share it.
So that's what I want you to do because once they are starting to actually share the real problem and what's motivating them to buy. Then you bring in what you can do to be able to solve it, just what they've shared with you, not a whole bunch of things, and hoping that that can resonate with them, but just they've shared the main problem.
You validated, clarified, we're, we're solid. This is what it is now, how can you help with that? That's how you verbalize the value, and when you do that correctly, when you truly understand what their problem is and you can verbalize how you can help with that exact problem. Okay. Then price usually becomes irrelevant.
So they may come and they may say they had horrible customer service. They may say that they thought they were getting this grand experience and the onboarding was awful. It probably is not going to be the exact deliverable that you're going to give them that is going to bring that value. There is more to it.
They're trusting you to help them grow their business, fix their business, whatever the case is. And so you have to know what are those underlining concerns to be able to bring in to how you can help with that. When you do that, then that's when pricing is not really an issue anymore. All right. You had a great question.
Thank you so much for asking it "More Value Please." let me know what other questions you have and let's just remember everybody needs a little bit of help with their sales.
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