THS #145 - Pain Before Price

“We don’t really talk about price,” one of my coaching clients told me two weeks.

He’s right. He doesn’t.

He also doesn’t really talk about pain, and in that we have a problem.

He’s a sharp guy. Diligent. He has a list of questions for every discovery call. He runs through them. He listens. He nods. Then he goes into the pitch, overview of the firm, how they work, what makes them different. He sends the proposal. A week later, the prospect goes quiet. Two weeks later: “We’re going to hold off for now.”

He thinks it’s a price problem. It’s not. It’s a pain problem.

What kept coming up as he walked me through it was this. His prospects already know they have a hiring problem. They’ve told him so. They wouldn’t be on the call if they didn’t. He thinks that means he can skip the part where he makes them feel it. I made the same mistake countless times in my career.

You can’t skip pain before you get to the price.

If a prospect tells you, “Yeah, we’re struggling to find a Superintendent,” and you go, “Got it, this is how we work,” you just skipped the most important conversation of the call.

The one where they have to say out loud, in their own words, how long the role has been open, what it’s costing them, what they’ve already tried, what didn’t work, and what happens if it doesn’t get filled in the next 60 days. That conversation is what makes everything you say next worth listening to.

I told him: your biggest competitor isn’t another recruiter. It’s status quo. We’ve always done it this way. We’ve got someone on it. We’ll figure it out.

That’s what you’re selling against. Not another firm. The version of their company that doesn’t hire you and limps along for another six months. If you don’t make staying expensive, your price doesn’t have anything to be compared to.

I will tell you the same story I told my client to emphasize the point. Turn on any sporting event, or really any live TV for that matter, and I bet you will see a GLP-1 commercial sometime.

Ozempic. Wegovy. Mounjaro. You don’t know what any of them cost. You don’t even ask. By the time price would come up, you’ve already pictured yourself 30 pounds lighter chasing your kids around the yard. You’ve watched the actor look in the mirror like she finally recognizes herself. You’re not buying the medication. You’re buying the version of yourself that exists on the other side of it.

Price becomes an afterthought.

Now imagine the same commercial flipped. “This drug is $1,200 a month. Anyway, this is what it does.” You’re out before the second sentence. Same product. Same outcome. The brain hit the number first and now everything else is being weighed against it.

That’s what’s happening on your discovery calls when you skip the pain.

Even if you never say a number out loud, the prospect is doing the math the whole time you’re talking. Nothing you’ve said has given them a problem worth that money. “Expensive” is meaningless without context.

A 25% fee is laughable if the role is costing them $200K in lost productivity and a key client about to walk.

A 25% fee is outrageous if you never made them admit any of that out loud.

So the call I had him drill into his head: pain, pain, problem, problem, then solution, then price. Twist the knife twice before you ever say what you do. And when you do say what you do, tie it directly back to what they told you. Not your generic pitch. Their pain, played back.

The practical move on the call looks like this. When they tell you the role’s been open for four months, don’t say “got it.” Say, “What’s that costing you?”

When they list what they’ve already tried, don’t nod and move on. Say, “What didn’t work about that?”

When they say their internal recruiter is on it, ask, “How long have they been on it?”

Every one of those questions is a small twist. By the time you get to your offer, they’ve been the one describing the problem for 20 minutes. You’re not pitching. You’re prescribing.

And when the prospect tries to jump ahead, “So what do you guys charge?”, you don’t answer. You redirect. “Happy to walk through that, but before I do, I need to understand what we’d actually be solving for. Tell me more about what’s been open and what you’ve tried.”

Anyone who refuses that conversation wasn’t going to buy from you anyway. They want a quote so they can put it in a spreadsheet next to two other firms. That’s not a prospect you want to work with. That’s a prosepct out there looking for a vendor, not a partner.

The next time someone asks you your rate before you’ve earned the right to give it, picture the Ozempic commercial. Hook the transformation. Twist the pain. Make staying expensive. Then, and only then, say the number.

Otherwise you’re selling a price tag. Not a future.