What to do when somebody says you are too expensive

There's a particular pause on the phone. You've just said the price, and instead of a yes or a no there's a beat of silence, followed by some version of "right — that's a bit more than I was expecting."

Most people fill that silence badly. Some start discounting before they've been asked. Some get defensive and start listing their qualifications. Some go quiet and let the call die. All three are reactions to a sentence that, nine times out of ten, doesn't mean what it appears to mean.

"Too expensive" is almost never about the money

It's worth sitting with this, because everything else follows from it. When somebody says a price is too high, they're usually saying one of four quite different things.

"I don't understand what I'm paying for." The commonest by far. They've got a number and no picture of the work behind it. £1,840 is meaningless without knowing it's three days, two people and £600 of materials.

"I can't tell if this is the normal price." They've never bought this before. They're not comparing you to a cheaper quote — they're comparing you to a figure they invented in their head last week.

"I genuinely don't have it." Real, and it deserves a straight answer rather than a sales technique.

"I'm testing whether the price is real." Some people ask as a matter of habit, and what they're actually checking is whether you'll fold. If you do, everything else you've said becomes negotiable too.

Four different problems. One sentence covering all of them, and you can't respond usefully until you know which one you're looking at.

Ask, instead of answering

The most useful reply to "that's more than I expected" is a question, delivered without any edge to it.

That's fair enough — can I ask what you had in mind? I'd rather know now than guess.

It's a genuine question and people answer it honestly, because you've made it safe to. And the answer tells you immediately which of the four you're in.

If they say "I thought about eight hundred", you've got a gap you can talk about. If they say "another firm said £1,200", you've got a comparison to unpick — and it's usually not the same job. If they go quiet, it's often the third one, and you can be kind about it.

What you must not do is answer the question they didn't ask. Dropping your price to a number they never named is how businesses train their customers to always push.

Explain the price without defending it

There's a difference between the two, and customers hear it instantly.

Defending sounds like justifying your existence: qualifications, years in the trade, how good your reviews are. Explaining sounds like walking through the job: here's the three days, here's the materials, here's the bit that takes longer than it looks.

It's three days on site with two of us, about six hundred quid of materials, and the waste has to go to the tip twice. The hourly rate works out around what a decent plumber costs round here.

Now the number has a shape. A lot of the time that's the whole conversation, because the objection was never the price — it was the blankness around it.

Change the job, not the price

If there's a real gap, the answer is a smaller job, not a cheaper version of the same one.

Take something out. Do it in two stages. Let them do the prep, or the clearing up, or the decorating afterwards. Use a cheaper material and say plainly what's different about it.

I could do it for £1,400 if you're happy with the mid-range vinyl rather than the one we looked at — it wears a bit quicker in a busy bathroom but plenty of people go for it.

That protects your rate and gives them a real choice. Cutting £400 off the same job tells them your prices are made up, and they'll remember that on the next one.

Say no properly when it's no

Sometimes the gap can't close and the right answer is to let it go, warmly.

I don't think I'm your man on this one — I can't get near that number and still do it properly. If it were me I'd try one of the smaller outfits, they often come in lower on this kind of thing.

That costs you nothing and buys more than you'd think. People remember being treated well when they couldn't afford something, and a surprising number of them come back with a bigger budget eighteen months later, or send you someone who can.

The alternative — taking the job at a price that annoys you — produces a fortnight of resentment and, quite often, the bad review.

Most of this conversation should have happened earlier

Here's the pattern underneath all of it. The "too expensive" conversation happens at the end of a process where the customer has had no price information at any point until the number landed.

They found you, they liked the look of you, they got in touch, you visited, and the first figure they ever saw was the final one. No wonder it's a shock. They had nothing to calibrate against, so their expectation came from thin air.

Publishing rough ranges fixes more of this than any phone technique. "Most bathroom floors come in between £1,200 and £2,200 depending on what's underneath" costs you nothing, loses you the people who were never going to buy, and means the people who do ring have already accepted roughly what things cost.

That's exactly what hailera is for: you write the ranges and the conditions once, check them yourself, and publish them as an agent, so your website and the AI apps people now use can give an honest range before anybody gets in a van. A page on your own site headed "roughly what things cost" does a lot of the same job for nothing, so if you've never written one, start there.

Hold your nerve

The last thing, and the hardest. If your price is right, it's right whether or not somebody flinches at it.

Most owners undercharge, and most know it. The flinch is uncomfortable enough that it feels like evidence you've gone too far, when usually it's just evidence that you said a number out loud to somebody who hadn't heard one before.

Today: think of the last person who said you were too expensive. Work out which of the four things they were really saying. If it was the first one, your quote needs a breakdown, not a discount.

Written by the team at hailera — we help small businesses answer customer questions without being there.