If you had called the office supply chain where I previously worked and I was being very strictly attentive to policy "Is that your best price?" would not have been the magic words but probably would have gotten you the accommodation I'm about to describe from 99% of our CSRs.
Basically, we sell the same stuff via a variety of channels, and the catalog you have in front of you (if you're a regular customer) is systematically above the prices available to other customers like, e.g., schools districts, small businesses in California, people responding to our fall circular, etc etc. The actual software mechanism for this was a three character catalog code, which would cause the system to reprice everything when it was changed. If you were ordering from CAT (the big published book that 98% of orders came from, and you said the magic words -- canonically, "Can you do anything about lowering the price?" -- I would tell you that we had a competitive bidding process and, if you'd give me one second, the computer would come up with our best competitive bid for your business deletes CAT, writes BID ahh, I see we can knock 10% off the order)
There was actually a Bids group, but you'd have to be ordering office paper by the truckload (literally -- some people do) to be worth their attention. The folks in charge of things had long since decided that it was cheaper to just give 10% to anyone who asked than to involve the folks in Bids on $400 accounts or lose business because a law firm secretary decided to do price shopping prior to placing her order.
Of particular note: there is literally nothing you can say, starting from "You're placing an order in CAT", that would cause you to pay more money than the CAT prices. Savvy purchasing managers understand this, which is why purchasing departments almost without fail spent the extra 5 seconds asking for a discount.
... which is why nobody can quote a real price on a website when selling to big companies; they all have purchasing groups that are required to secure discounts.
Which is why you need to keep your price under the purchase authority for department heads if you do want to sell to big companies via a website.
AKA "The Atlassian Model":
Scott realized that to get adoption, the software had to also be inexpensive. This meant there was often no need to get approval from the C-suite.
Another key was the simplicity of the sales process. “We have a standard contract and there are no discounts,” said Scott. “We do not want to waste time and money on legal."
I've done a fair amount of negotiating (on both sides) and to me saying that telegraphs "I'm going to buy but please throw me a bone so I can keep my pride".
I use the same technique in reverse to get a few extra bucks out of a buyer sometimes so as to not screw an already good deal (when looking a gift horse in the mouth).
Say someone is willing to pay $5000 for something and I would gladly accept. I don't want to loose the deal so I say "do you think you can do $5500??". If in their mind they have money on the table they will normally do the deal but it gives me the ability to accept the initial or latest offer if they won't. It's like a Rorschach test in a way interpreted differently depending on the mindset of the other party.
It seems that most/all of our competitors work this way, and I wonder why they're so inflexible. We negotiate different rates for every customer (although it turns out that in practice, most smaller customers work out essentially the same).
There's much more to pricing than just "you get 10% off regular price". It may come out that a company who replaces their computers less frequently, is more concerned about software costs than hardware, so we can adjust according to those categories. And, of course, in the realm of large customers, there are the licensing agreements that they negotiate directly with the manufacturers. So every one of our customers has a customized catalog reflecting their specific needs.
I happen to be responsible for the systems that maintain all this catalog data. Updating all of this (our master product list is well over a million products, multiplied by the costs offered for various customer types [e.g., education frequently gets a lower underlying cost] from all of our various suppliers, is a mountain of data) in a timely fashion, when our distribution costs and inventory levels change nightly, is a real technical challenge.
Basically, we sell the same stuff via a variety of channels, and the catalog you have in front of you (if you're a regular customer) is systematically above the prices available to other customers like, e.g., schools districts, small businesses in California, people responding to our fall circular, etc etc. The actual software mechanism for this was a three character catalog code, which would cause the system to reprice everything when it was changed. If you were ordering from CAT (the big published book that 98% of orders came from, and you said the magic words -- canonically, "Can you do anything about lowering the price?" -- I would tell you that we had a competitive bidding process and, if you'd give me one second, the computer would come up with our best competitive bid for your business deletes CAT, writes BID ahh, I see we can knock 10% off the order)
There was actually a Bids group, but you'd have to be ordering office paper by the truckload (literally -- some people do) to be worth their attention. The folks in charge of things had long since decided that it was cheaper to just give 10% to anyone who asked than to involve the folks in Bids on $400 accounts or lose business because a law firm secretary decided to do price shopping prior to placing her order.
Of particular note: there is literally nothing you can say, starting from "You're placing an order in CAT", that would cause you to pay more money than the CAT prices. Savvy purchasing managers understand this, which is why purchasing departments almost without fail spent the extra 5 seconds asking for a discount.