The unusual thing about discounts

…is that discounts can be unusual things

I heard a lawyer advising some recruitment leaders that they should put a time limit on their discounts. 

It’s pretty handy advice. If you don't have a time limit, a client can refer back to an offer that one of your ex-consultants made years ago that gives them 50% off what you were hoping they’d pay.

And you just know that ex-consultant only lasted six months with you and billed the best part of nothing… yet their discounts still haunt you to this day.

But simply putting a time limit on your discount is to miss the bigger opportunity: you need to treat your discounts as unusual.

Recruitment consultants get pushed on price by almost every client. They’re also allowed - encouraged, even - to offer discounts to win business.

So consultants see discounts as a normal part of winning business in recruitment. Some of those consultants become managers, some of those managers become business owners… and you can see why much of our industry thinks discounting is perfectly normal.

The big - huge - problem here is that discounts are flung around all over the place in the name of getting jobs on. Which means we’re haunted by old offers, not to mention paid less than we’re worth.

When I run focus groups, consultants regularly tell me they skip the negotiation step and just offer a low fee from the start. Unsurprisingly, I find consultants are rarely confident in the rates on their terms of business… and if the consultants don’t believe in them then you can bet their clients aren’t going to pay full price.

Now I said the lawyer’s advice was useful. But there’s a danger that telling your consultants to put time limits on their discounts simply reinforces their belief that they should be discounting. Which digs you deeper into the hole you want to climb out of.

To make a real impact, you should work on making discounts feel unusual to your consultants and clients.

Now I’m not saying you stop discounting completely. After all, there are good reasons to agree a lower rate with a client when you’re getting something valuable in return.

But when your consultants see discounting as a specific tool to achieve specific goals, you’ll realise that many of your clients are perfectly capable of agreeing to much higher fees.

If you want to make discounting an unusual practice in your business, drop me a line and I will talk you through the steps you can take to make it happen.

Jon

P.S. I began my career in recruitment, so I always assumed discounting was normal practice for B2B sales.

So imagine my surprise when I set up my own B2B consultancy and was only asked for a discount three times in the first three years!

Now I appreciate that being a pricing specialist might discourage people from negotiating with me. But my point is that discounting can absolutely be an unusual experience for you, if you set yourself up right.

If you want to make discounting an unusual practice in your business, drop me a line and I will talk you through the steps you can take to make it happen.