What "too expensive" is telling you

It is the third discount this quarter. You are in the parking lot of a private school group’s maintenance building, and the facilities director has just said what the last two buyers said: it is more than they budgeted. You take fifteen percent off before he finishes the sentence. He shakes your hand. You win the contract, and you do the math on the way to the truck.

If your margin on that contract was thirty cents of every dollar, fifteen percent off the price takes half of it. You carry the same trucks, the same techs and the same insurance on half the profit. Do that three times in a quarter and the work you are proud of starts to feel like a job you are doing for the building.

You ran facilities for a hospital system for ten years before you started this commercial HVAC maintenance company. You know what a failed unit costs a building, and you know your service is good. You also know that three discounts in a quarter is a pattern, and the margin you cut does not come back at renewal.

What does “too expensive” usually mean?

In my experience the person has usually weighed the whole trade, and the trade reads wrong.

I treat affordability as a perceived trade. When someone looks at closing a gap your way, they weigh money, time, energy, effort, and the resources around them. Then they set that against what the gap is costing them now, or what some other way of closing it would cost. Price is one line in that column.

Look at your facilities director that way. His gap is real. Every July he risks a failed unit in a classroom. What would closing it your way cost him? A new vendor means onboarding, key-card access to the mechanical rooms, after-hours calls routed to a new number, and a board member who liked the old vendor. It means putting his name on the change if something goes wrong. And the money has to come out of an operating line that is tight this year.

You cut the price. That moved one line. His time, effort and exposure stayed where they were. So the next buyer says the same thing, and you cut again.

Why do I think of it as a trip, not a fare?

Houston to Dallas is about four hours by road. In a light airplane it takes roughly half that, and the airplane costs far more per mile. A business traveler who flies it is not ignoring the price. The drive costs a morning and a meeting, and the flight buys both back. Another traveler on the same route, with a free calendar, drives. Same trip, same distance, and two different readings of what it costs.

That is the buyer in your parking lot. The number on your quote is the fare. What he weighs is the trip: the hours, the effort, the exposure and the money together. When you cut the fare, you changed the one line he was not stuck on.

Is it really an affordability problem?

Check the other two gaps first. A person may not know you exist, which is awareness. They may know you but not be able to reach you, which is access. Affordability is the third. If none of the three explains a lost sale, write “other” and go ask. Trust, fit, timing and quality live there, and the buyer will tell you which.

The closing tool is different for each gap. You close awareness with marketing and sales. You close access with distribution. You close affordability by changing the trade. More marketing aimed at an affordability gap makes it worse, because it creates more people who want something that reads as too costly.

Here is how that sounds in a room. “Preventive maintenance program” is your word for it. His word is “I do not want a call at six in the morning in July.” If the proposal speaks your language, he has to translate it, and a translated gap reads as more effort. If it speaks his, the same service reads as relief.

Changing the trade has more levers than price: terms and financing, packaging and bundling, pricing structure, phasing, and the words themselves. The first affordability failure is often the owner describing the gap differently from the way the person is living it. Put the value inside the gap as they carry it. The more urgent that gap is to them, the more ways there are to make the trade doable.

Where does the money actually land?

A school group has two pots of money. The operating line pays for maintenance, and it is tight. The capital budget, funded by a bond the district already passed, is landing on construction and equipment. In my experience, money that has already landed is easier to spend than money that still has to be found.

So you restructure. You propose a one-building trial with a clean exit after twelve months, which cuts his effort and his risk. You pull the equipment upgrade into the capital project, so the operating line barely moves. And you stop describing “preventive maintenance.” You describe what he told you in July: no failed units during state testing week.

The deal closes at your full rate. Smaller scope, longer fuse. The margin holds, and the trial becomes the reference for the next building.

The buyer got a smaller, safer, better-timed trade, and the number on the quote stayed where it was.

The move for this week

Pull your last five “too expensive” conversations, lost deals or discounted ones. Call each person and ask one question: besides the money, what would it have cost you to say yes?

Write each answer in a five-column table: money, time, energy, effort, resources. If the answer is about trust or timing or fit, write it under “other.”

Look at which column keeps filling up. Then pick one open proposal, hold the price, and change one element of the trade. Shrink the first phase, move the cost to where the money has landed, rewrite the first paragraph in the buyer’s words, or offer an exit.

The Three Gaps are yours to use freely. Run the three questions in order, then change the trade and leave the number alone.