If your business is like most, your customers are constantly pressuring you on price. Of course, it’s not that they enjoy making your salespeople’s lives hard (well, not all of them do). Rather, it’s that they’re feeling pressured themselves. By their sales. By their budgets. By their cash situations. So they’re rightly focused on the total price of an equipment or software purchase. And they’ll make sure you know it. They don’t really have a choice.

When a customer asks for a lower price, the thought at the heart of that request is often I can’t afford this. Not comfortably, anyway. So your job is to make the purchase affordable. One way—not the best way—to do that is to reduce your price. Another—better—way is to hold the line but offer affordable monthly payments that take the focus off the total purchase price and put it on the value you’re providing.

Customers want to acknowledge the value you provide; otherwise, why would they have walked in the door in the first place? But with no option but to buy equipment and software outright, they can’t afford to. Financing relieves budget and cash flow pressure. It affords your customers the opportunity to acknowledge your value and still comfortably fund their purchases.