It’s Easy to Avoid Conflict About Pricing—Just Lower Your Price

There’s no avoiding the fact that safe and compliant promo products come at a price. Rarely is a product that has been manufactured and shipped in a socially responsible and safe manner without a competitor in the marketplace at a lower price. In an industry that has long been driven by price, doing the right thing for your customer will at some point lead to conflict with them—whether you are a supplier, a distributor or an end-user.

Some of the pricing conversations I have heard of late are focused on product testing, and whether or not the supplier should bear all of the costs, or share it with distributors. There are clients who now recognize the high expectations of accountability aren’t free and who expect that full supply chain transparency will show up as part of the unit cost, even itemized on the invoice. As product safety awareness increases in our industry, those clients are still unfortunately too few and far between.

Trusted Advisors Are Brave Enough to Have the Difficult Conversations

If you are totally focused on transactional selling, then it’s really easy to avoid conflict. Simply lower your price. But that avoidance of conflict comes with its own price. While you might gain the sale in this one instance, as a result, you lose any hope you have of presenting yourself as a value-added representative of your product. Trusted advisors engage in the difficult conversations, and that’s especially important when the subject turns to product safety. For more than just the transactional costs, there are many more risks to consider by choosing a cheaper, unsafe product alternative. The potential losses generated by recalls, lawsuits, governmental penalties, brand damage, PR failure and loss of goodwill will linger much longer than the memory of a cheap price.