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You spend two hours preparing for a pricing conversation.
You rehearse. You practice staying calm. You tell yourself this time you will hold the number.
Then they ask "what does this cost?" and you say a number that is already 30% lower than the one in your head.
They never asked you to lower it. You did it for them.
This is the move nobody talks about.
Not the negotiation with the client. The negotiation you have with yourself in the 48 hours before the call.
You run the math on what they might say no to. You imagine their face when they hear the real number. You build a case for why your original price was too high and you hadn't even said it yet.
By the time you get on the call, you have already lost.
The S&P 500 Has Become One Big Bet. It’s Only Getting Bigger.
The index's top ten stocks make up nearly 40% of its total value as of Q226. All have some connection to AI.
Now SpaceX is filing its IPO. Priced at 92x sales. Lost $5 billion last year.
Robert Arnott, chairman of Research Affiliates, called it "ludicrous" in the WSJ this month but said he'd gladly buy SpaceX anyway. His reason? Index funds have to buy it to avoid trailing the benchmark.
It’s becoming a very crowded boat, and moreso with Anthropic and OpenAI IPOs around the corner.
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Chris Do calls this the neediness energy.
You can smell it on people. The client smells it too, even if they can't name it. What they feel is: this person needs the deal more than I need the solution.
That feeling does not make them trust you. It makes them negotiate harder.
The price you say out loud is not the problem. The conversation you had with yourself beforehand is.
Here is the thing about the number in your head, the real one you talked yourself out of.
That number exists for a reason. It reflects what you know the work is worth, what it will take, and what results it produces.
The lower number is a guess about their reaction. You are pricing based on a reaction that has not happened yet, from a person who has not heard your offer, in a conversation that has not started.
You are negotiating with a ghost.
Their first after-hours call was a $20,000 job.
Air Texas was paying $2,000 a month for an answering service that couldn't close jobs.
Their first after-hours call with Podium’s AI Employee booked a $20,000 job.
Now no call goes unanswered after 5PM.
This week's micro-action: Before your next pricing conversation, write down the number you actually want to charge. Then notice how many reasons you can generate to lower it before you say it out loud. Count them. That list is not logic. That is the internal negotiation that is costing you money.