This post is a follow up to a comment I posted over at Sales Training Advice.

You're going to have slow days where no one seems to be buying.

As the day winds itself out, and you haven't reached your daily quota of sales, you start to panic. You've got one more call to attend before you can go home, so you convince yourself that you're going to close a sale with this client.

The client seems to be really interested in your service, and then tells you that you're price is too high. Trying to salvage something from the day, you offer the client a deal.

What started out as a miserable day just got a lot worse.

Why is that? Because you just gave away 14 dollars.

Let's say that the service being sold costs $157. Your materials are $10, and you earn a 24% commission. After the job is complete, you earn $35.28.

Looking through your pricing guide, however, you see that if you write the job up as a call out fee, you only have to bill the job out at $98.

Billing at $98 with the same materials and commission, you are only adding $21.12 to your sales volume. You cheated yourself out of $14.12. The price of the materials hasn't changed. The only thing that has changed is that there is going to be less money in your pocket.

You are now faced with an unfortunate side effect of underselling yourself: your client has friends.

They will gladly talk about how they got the service at a reduced price, and will tell them all to call into your dispatch center to ask for you so that they can also get a reduced price. Figuring your client has 2-4 direct neighbors, that's $30-$60 in lost profit.

It's very easy to get into the habit of reducing your price to secure the sale. Instead of lowering your price, invest some time into learning some closing techniques, so that you won't have to give yourself a pay cut.