You’re buying patient education materials for your wellness center. Naturally, you want to make sure you’re getting the vendor’s best price and terms.
These seventeen tips make lower prices a virtual certainty for health clubs, yoga studios, health clinics and wellness centers:
1) Open-ended opportunity
“Is there something more that BigMedia can do for us so we feel good about this from a financial standpoint?”
2) You’re disappointing me
“This price isn’t what we were thinking about spending on patient materials – is there any further price assistance you can offer?”
3) Blame it on your boss
“You know, my manager just won’t pay more than X for these chronic illness brochures and takehomes. Would your boss consider Z instead?
4) Try for a trade-in
“If we can get a trade-in allowance on the patient materials we didn’t use last year, I think this would work for us.”
5) How about competitive discounts?
“We currently use SouthMedia’s patient education materials. Does BigMedia offer a competitive discount if we switch to you?
6) Offer them the use of your money
“What additional pricing help would be available if we opened a credit account with BigMedia?”
7) Establish a ceiling
“Is there any way to get the total price of the cancer, diabetes, and arthritis materials under X?”
8) Pay now, pay later
“This package of patient education brochures and videos would work for us if we can pay in two installments. ”
9) It’s not over til I say it’s over
“OK, we can handle $X for three cartons of new baby brochures if you can include three additional sets of the ‘Daddy and Me’ guides.”
10) Negotiate line-by-line
“Okay, I understand your total price for all the patient materials we’ve listed. Let’s go through the pricing for each item individually.”
11) Make it happen
“We can give you a yes right now if we can get the price to X.”
12) Split the difference
“We need to get in under X. We really want to work with you, but your price is Y. Why don’t we split the difference?”
13) Future price breaks
“We’ll buy the full set of healthy living self-care guides for X right now if we can agree that all future purchases of the guide will receive a discount of Y.”
14) Consolidate vendors
“We want to buy men’s health brochures from you. We’ve been buying healthy aging tip sheets from your competitor. What price break can you give us if we start buying both of those products from BigMedia?”
15) Volume discounts
“We’ll pay X for these five cartons of hypertension brochures, if we can get a discount when we order more than five cartons.”
16) Offer a testimonial or case study
“If the overall pricing works for us and if our experience with your patient education program is excellent, we’ll be happy to speak at your customer conference next year and let you feature our center in a case study.”
17) Good payment practices
“What discount is available if we pay for the entire order upfront (or within X days – a prompt payment discount)?”
