“Match their price and the order is yours.”
Early on, I matched. We discounted to win a large order against a cheaper competitor and told ourselves it was a foot in the door. The customer haggled every reorder after that. They were gone within the year.
The discount didn’t just cost us margin. It taught the buyer the product was worth less than the number on the box. Once you’ve said that out loud, you can’t unsay it.
Here’s the part that took me longer to understand. You cannot out-cheap a competitor whose entire strategy is being cheap. The moment you justify your price against theirs, you’ve accepted their framing, and their framing is one you lose. The work isn’t defending your number. It’s changing what the buyer is comparing. Not what the product costs, but what the problem costs. The failed lock. The system that couldn’t scale. The cheap hardware replaced twice in five years.
And the maths is more brutal than most teams realise. A small improvement in price moves profit several times further than the discount appears to cost. Run it in reverse and a 10% cut to win a deal can wipe out the margin that made the deal worth having.
My latest piece for Forbes Business Development Council is about selling premium in a market that opens every conversation with price. Why you should qualify harder than feels comfortable. Why sellers reach for the discount button, and what to hand them instead.
The next time someone asks you to match a lower price, ask what you’re really being asked to discount. It usually isn’t the product.
Read article: https://www.forbes.com/councils/forbesbusinessdevelopmentcouncil/2026/07/13/how-to-sell-a-premium-product-in-a-market-that-starts-with-price/
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