When buyers ask for concessions, they’re usually asking a different question:
Where does the risk live if this goes wrong?

If the answer is “with the customer,” the price will look cheap until it isn’t.
If the answer is “with the vendor,” the number tends to hold.

That difference matters more than the discount.

There’s a misunderstanding I see over and over again in sales, and it’s one I used to make myself when I was younger. When a buyer asks for a concession, most people assume the problem is price. That assumption is usually wrong.

In this case, the company wasn’t small, but it wasn’t huge either. They had capital. They also had discipline. They were trying to map the next 24 to 36 months and understand what that future actually costs. Payroll. Systems. Compliance. Growth. They weren’t trying to squeeze anyone. They were trying to avoid stepping into something they couldn’t unwind later.

So when they asked if there was anything we could do on the proposal, it wasn’t a negotiation tactic. It was a stress test.

They had already decided what they could and could not afford over time. What they had not decided yet was where risk should live. Should it live in the price, or should it live in the execution?

That question is almost never asked out loud.

Instead, it shows up as shopping around. It shows up as comparison calls. It shows up as, “Can you sharpen your pencil?” Not because the buyer doubts the value, but because they are trying to figure out whether the value is real or just well-presented.

This is where a lot of vendors panic. They hear the objection and assume they are about to lose the deal. So they move first. They lower the price. They offer a shortcut. They give something up before they understand what the buyer is actually afraid of.

But when you do that, you answer the wrong question.

The buyer is not asking, “Can this be cheaper?”
They are asking, “Is this solid enough to hold when things get hard?”

Price becomes the proxy because it is the only lever everyone understands. What they are really testing is whether the vendor believes their own structure. Whether the number was thought through. Whether the scope actually matches reality. Whether the confidence stays intact when pressure shows up.

The objection is not about money.
It is about credibility under constraint.

That distinction matters more than most people realize.

There’s a reason this moment felt familiar to me, and it has nothing to do with software or ERP. I learned this lesson a long time ago, long before I had any business being confident about anything.

I was in my mid-twenties, on the phone with someone I was trying to sell to. They objected. I panicked. I lowered the price. I did what I thought I was supposed to do in order to “keep the deal alive.”

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a phone book flying at my head.

I ducked just in time.

Tony, who I worked for at the time, didn’t yell. He didn’t lecture. He just looked at me and said something that stuck harder than the phone book ever could.

“Don’t ever drop the price when someone objects. The moment you do, you tell them you were inflated.”

That was it. No theatrics. No sales theory. Just a simple truth.

If something is worth X, you ask for X. If someone pushes back on X, you don’t immediately move to X minus two or X minus five. You talk about the value. You ask what the real concern is. You fix the problem, not the number.

Because once you move the number without changing the scope, you’ve told the customer everything they need to know. You’ve told them the price wasn’t anchored in reality. You’ve told them the value was flexible. And you’ve told them they should keep pushing, because it worked once.

That lesson stayed with me.

Years later, I’m still in sales in one way or another. The titles have changed. The products are more complex. The stakes are higher. But the dynamics are exactly the same.

When that company came back after shopping around and asked if there was anything we could do on the proposal, I could hear that old moment echoing in my head. Not because I was defensive, but because I knew the real test had just started.

This wasn’t the moment to negotiate.
This was the moment to clarify.

They eventually told me what I already suspected. A competitor had come in cheaper. Not dramatically cheaper, but enough to make it feel tempting. A few thousand dollars less on implementation. Faster access. Quicker path to getting the system in their hands.

On the surface, it looked reasonable. Attractive, even.

What mattered more was how that price behaved under pressure.

It didn’t collapse immediately. That’s important. If it had, the decision would have been easy. Instead, it held just long enough to sound credible. But when we started walking through what was actually included, the structure began to show cracks.

So I slowed the conversation down.

I didn’t attack the competitor. I didn’t argue about features. I asked questions.

Do they migrate your data?
No.

Do they train your team?
Probably not.

How do they handle compliance during cutover?
They weren’t sure.

What happens when you realize you need help two weeks in?

Silence.

That’s when the conversation shifted. Not emotionally, but intellectually. Because this was no longer about who was cheaper. It was about what was being deferred.

Cheap upfront pricing is rarely cheap. It is usually incomplete. It moves work downstream. It converts readiness into a future invoice. It assumes the customer will figure things out in production, in a live environment, under real constraints.

I walked them through it plainly.

You save X today. That’s real. But next week you need data migration. That’s another invoice. Then you need training. Another invoice. Then you realize you need help structuring workflows, managing compliance, explaining gaps during audits. Those costs show up quietly, but they show up fast.

What looks like five quickly becomes sixteen.

Not because anyone is dishonest, but because the original price never included the full job.

We then flipped the lens.

I showed them what shaving pieces off our proposal would actually remove. What it would replace. What risk would come back into their business if we did that. And what that risk would cost them to fix later.

If your value only works when no one asks hard questions, it was never value to begin with.

At that point, the comparison stopped being emotional. It became mechanical.

Value that survives pressure is value you can trust.

This is the part most proposals never talk about, and it’s the part that matters the most once the excitement wears off.

In aviation, compliance is not a feature. It is the backbone. Everything touches it. Inventory. Documents. Transactions. Training. History. If you get this wrong, you don’t just create inefficiency. You create gaps you can’t easily explain later.

When you take the cheaper route and get immediate access to a system, it feels empowering. You have the keys. You can click around. You can start experimenting. But that freedom comes with a question no one wants to answer up front.

When do you cut over?

If you are running one process today and another process tomorrow, how do you account for the overlap? How do you explain that transition during an audit? How do you show continuity when your data is split across systems and time periods that don’t quite line up?

That’s where things start to break.

Data that isn’t migrated creates blind spots. Transactions that start midstream lose context. Documents live in multiple places. People follow old habits longer than they admit. And when someone asks six months later why a record looks incomplete, the answer is never satisfying.

I’ve seen this go wrong when companies tried to explain non-consecutive records during an audit and realized the system couldn’t tell a clean story because the cutover itself was never designed, only assumed.

Training gaps compound this. Without structured onboarding, people invent their own workflows. Those workflows work until they don’t. Then someone leaves, or an auditor asks a question, or a customer requests traceability you assumed was obvious.

Now you’re reconstructing history instead of operating a system.

I walked them through this slowly. Not to scare them, but to make the consequences visible. Compliance is about telling a complete story. A clean cutover, proper data migration, documented workflows, and trained users allow you to do that.

Skipping those steps doesn’t eliminate the work.
It just delays it and makes it harder to defend.

Cheaper implementations don’t fail on day one.
They fail when someone asks you to explain what happened on day one.

By the time we reached this part of the conversation, the energy had changed. We were no longer talking about discounts. We were talking about decisions.

They asked again if there was anything we could shave off. Not because they were trying to win a concession, but because they wanted to understand what was negotiable and what was foundational.

That distinction matters.

So we treated it like an engineering problem, not a sales one.

If you remove training, here is what replaces it. Confusion, inconsistency, and delayed adoption. If you remove data migration, here is what replaces it. Parallel systems, reconciliation work, and audit explanations. If you remove guided implementation, here is what replaces it. Trial and error in production.

Every line item removed had a corresponding cost that did not disappear. It just changed form.

This is where pricing gets misunderstood. Price is often framed as a negotiation outcome. In reality, it is a declaration.

It says what you are willing to stand behind.
It says what you believe the work is worth.
It says who carries the risk when something goes wrong.

When you lower price without changing scope, you are not being flexible. You are shifting responsibility silently. You are telling the customer that parts of the job are optional, even when they are not.

That may feel generous in the moment, but it creates confusion later. Teams assume coverage that doesn’t exist. Expectations drift. Accountability blurs. And when issues surface, both sides feel misled.

We didn’t change the number.
We clarified what it represented.

That was the turning point.

Because once the price was understood as a commitment to readiness, not just access, it stopped feeling expensive. It started feeling deliberate.

The agreement came back signed the next day.

There was no victory lap. No dramatic close. Just a short note thanking me for walking them through the concepts clearly and for shooting straight about what they were actually buying.

That message mattered more to me than the deal itself.

The decision wasn’t driven by price.
It was driven by clarity.

That’s the part I want to leave with, because this lesson cuts both ways.

If you’re a buyer, especially one planning 24 to 36 months ahead, the cheapest option is rarely the safest one. The real question is not what you can afford today, but what you are willing to explain later.

What story will you tell when someone asks why a system was implemented the way it was? Why certain data doesn’t line up? Why certain controls were assumed instead of designed?

Saving money upfront feels responsible.
Paying for cleanup later rarely does.

And if you’re a seller, this is the harder truth. Every time you cave on price without changing the work, you are teaching your customer how to value you. You are also teaching your own team what you believe matters.

Over time, that erodes more than margin.
It erodes trust.

Holding your price is not arrogance.
It is respect for the work.

It is respect for the complexity your customer is actually dealing with. And it is respect for the downstream consequences that don’t show up in a proposal.

The best deals I’ve ever been part of were not the ones where everyone felt like they won something. They were the ones where everyone understood what they were committing to.

Price is not the problem.
Unexamined tradeoffs are.

That’s the lesson I learned years ago. It’s still true today. And it’s one worth remembering the next time someone asks, “Can you do anything on the number?”

And if you’re reading this, you know who you are. Thank you for choosing clarity over convenience.

Also, for context, a phone book was a thick printed directory we used to keep near desks. It was heavy, inefficient, and very effective at ending bad habits quickly.

Some lessons stick longer than the tools that taught them.