You walk into the negotiation already planning your fallback position. You have decided, before the buyer says a word, what discount you will offer if they push back, what terms you will loosen, what you will give away to keep the deal alive. This is negotiating against yourself, and it is quietly costing SME owners more margin than any buyer ever has.

This shows up hardest in FMCG and retail supply relationships, where a stockist or distributor holds real leverage — shelf space, listing fees, payment terms — and the supplier walks in assuming they must soften the deal to get in the door. The named enemy is not the retail buyer. It is the supplier's own pre-emptive concession, made in their head before the meeting even starts, based on a fear that has never actually been tested in that room.

The pattern is identical in professional services and trades: a founder quotes their real price, senses hesitation that may not even be real, and immediately drops the number — before the prospect has raised a single objection. You have just taught every future buyer that your first price is negotiable, and you have done it for free.

The fix is a disciplined sequence that forces the other side to make the first concession, not you.

1. State the full price first, in full confidence, with no qualifying tone — Say the number and stop talking. Silence after a price is not a problem to fill; it is the buyer doing the thinking you want them to do.

2. Let them name the objection before you respond to one — If they say nothing, the deal may already be closer than you think. If they push back, you now know the real obstacle, instead of guessing and discounting against a fear that was never there.

3. Trade, never give — If a concession is genuinely warranted, it comes attached to something in return: volume commitment, faster payment terms, a longer contract. A concession with nothing attached teaches the buyer that your price was never real.

“Kevin has some amazing ideas around marketing, things we would have never thought of ourselves. He also helped us through the process of getting into supermarkets. He has gone above and beyond what he needed to!”

— Amy Nixon, Icehouse Coaching Programme

Most SME owners know intellectually that they should hold their price. They do it anyway because the fear of losing the deal feels bigger in the moment than the cost of the margin they are quietly giving away. Nobody sees the discount that was never necessary — it simply disappears into a lower number on an invoice, quarter after quarter, until it has cost the business tens of thousands of dollars nobody ever flagged as a loss.

This is where an outside eye on your sales conversations changes the outcome. A coach who has sat on both sides of the negotiating table — buying and selling — can hear exactly where you are conceding before you have even noticed you are doing it.

If you can already picture the number you will drop to before the buyer even objects, that is the first habit Kevin helps you break.

...and you become the owner who holds your price and trades for every concession.