MasterCard’s Priceless campaign has been going on for 17 years. It’s been parodied, subject to memes, and is a household catchphrase.

But underneath the praise of pop culture, it says something else. It’s something that many in the finance sector constantly ponder about every day: value.

When you’re qualifying finance leads, what do they tell you about value? Specifically, what does it tell you about your own prospect’s pricing?

What are the things they just deem priceless?

Putting a price tag on everything is never always a good idea. But before getting to that, that doesn’t mean you should avoid it altogether. It’s the first step to identifying the value of, well, anything. So what are usually the reasons why you, your customers, and your prospects like to list costs?

  • It’s for measuring expenses – Whether you’re auditing something, creating a report, or even investigating a loss, you need some numbers at least.
  • It’s for planning/budgeting – This is even more obvious. You can’t plan a set of buying decisions (and neither can your prospect) if you don’t know much you’ll be paying.
  • It’s for negotiating – Finally, this is where the need to price things finds itself questioned. However, you can’t raise or lower a cost if it hasn’t been set down in the first place.

Back to your finance leads, what do they tell you about your prospect’s attitude towards value? Do they exercise any of the habits just mentioned? If not, maybe because they understand value differently from yours and don’t just view things from the dollar perspective.

  • Some expenses are worth it – Just like the MasterCard ads, there are so many things you could buy with company budgets. But for all their expense, a startup’s success could be worth it.
  • Plans aren’t set in stone – Costs can change over time. Sometimes what’s cheap at first won’t be if it’s starting to bleed a business on a regular basis.
  • Non–negotiables – This goes along with the first. If a business goal is just worth (or not worth) far beyond the cost, not even a financial adviser is guaranteed a position to argue.

In short, there’s your way of understanding the price of things and then there’s the way of your prospects and customers. Your finance leads shouldn’t just stick to whether or not they can afford doing business with you. Tell your lead generators to at least ask a few more qualifying questions that reveal their way of pricing things.

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