5 Price Hacks That Will Make You Sell More

Good Morning. Judge Judy recently gave her advice on salary negotiations, and her biggest tip is: make yourself indispensable. And I think she’s worth listening to, considering she negotiated a $47 million a year pay package for herself. In sales, becoming indispensable is pretty easy to define… Close a bunch of deals, and make the company a bunch of money, and they’ll need you more than you need them. Easy as that. Now let’s get into today’s Follow Up. (:

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5 Psychology Tricks For Discussing Prices

Your brain plays tricks on you when you see prices.

A $5 coffee at Starbucks feels normal. The same $5 coffee at McDonald's feels expensive. Same product, same price, totally different feeling.

That's psychology at work.

Smart salespeople use these mental hacks to make their prices feel more attractive and get more prospects to say ‘yes’.

So today, we're breaking down 5 proven tricks you can use to make your deals feel irresistible.

1. Use an Anchor

The first number your prospect hears becomes their reference point for everything else.

This is called anchoring.

Adam Galinsky, a Columbia professor, says that “Even when people know that a particular anchor should not influence their judgments, they are often incapable of resisting its influence."

Here's how it works: If you quote $50,000 for the top package first, then offer a package at $30,000, it feels like a deal. But if you start at $30,000, the $30K package feels expensive.

Always set the anchor yourself. Don't let prospects do it first.

Start with your premium package. "Our enterprise solution runs $45,000 per year." Then pause. Let them process that number.

Wait for them to give you their thoughts, and then say, "However, if we remove some features you might not need right now, our standard package is $19,000."

Suddenly $19K feels reasonable compared to $45K.

Same final price, totally different perception.

2. The “Decoy”

Sometimes you need a bad option to make your good option look great.

Researchers call this the “decoy” effect.

You add a third choice that nobody would actually pick. But it makes the other options look better by comparison.

The Economist magazine tested this theory with its subscription pricing.

Their original pricing offered two options:

• Online-only access for $59/year.

• Online & print magazine for $125/year.

Most customers opted for the $59/year option because it looked cheap next to the higher price.

Next, they tried adding a decoy offer:

• Online-only access for $59/year.

• The print magazine for $125/year

• Online & print magazine for $125/year.

With 3 choices, almost everyone picked print-plus-online for $125. The useless print-only option made the combo look like a steal.

You can do this with your pricing tiers. Create one option that's clearly a worse value than your target package. Prospects will see the comparison and pick what you want them to buy.

3. Let Them Own It Before They Buy

People value things more once they feel like they own them.

This is called the endowment effect.

In 1990, a trio of behavioral economists proved this with a coffee mug experiment. In the test, students who got a mug wanted twice as much money to sell it compared to what other students would pay to buy it.

Just holding the mug for 30 seconds was enough to make them feel like they owned it and put a much higher value on it.

In sales, this means free trials are your friend. Let prospects use your product with their real data. Have them set up workflows and invite team members.

After two weeks of using your solution, walking away feels like losing something they already have.

4. Create Real Urgency

Scarcity makes people want things more.

A study of 130+ research papers found that limiting offers consistently boosts purchase intentions. When something might disappear, our brains pay more attention.

But the urgency has to be real. Fake deadlines backfire when prospects figure them out.

Try these:

• "We only have 3 implementation slots left for Q1."

• "This pricing expires when our new rates kick in next month."

• "The early-bird discount ends Friday."

Make sure you can back up every claim. If you say the offer ends Friday, it better actually end Friday.

5. Break Big Numbers Into Small Ones

A $1,200 annual fee sounds expensive. But "$100 per month" sounds reasonable.

Same amount, different feeling.

Some people refer to this as the “pennies-a-day” effect.

Chicago’s NPR station used this when they asked people to join their “dollar a day club.” Rather than asking to donate $365/year, they framed it as just a dollar a day, about the price of your cup of coffee.

This same framing can be used for big-ticket items: "That $50,000 investment breaks down to about $137 per day for your entire company. Probably less than your daily coffee budget."

The key is picking comparisons that make sense for your buyer.

A small business owner might relate to "the cost of your internet bill each month." A large company might relate to "less than one employee's salary per year."