CUSTOMERS DO NOT BUY CONFUSION

Most of the discounts your team asked you to approve last quarter were not won by the customer. They were conceded by a salesperson who could not explain, in one clean sentence, why the full price was worth paying.

That is the position I will defend, and I know some Heads of Sales will push back: customers do not reject your price nearly as often as your pipeline reports claim. What they reject is confusion. A buyer who cannot see exactly what they are getting, what it will change, and what happens if it goes wrong has only one lever left to protect themselves. Price. So they pull it, and your team calls it a price objection.

I have sat in enough deal reviews in Accra to recognise the pattern. A bank's procurement committee scores a vendor low because the proposal used innovative, customer-centric and solution-driven eleven times without once stating what would be different in the bank's operations twelve months later. An insurance team loses a corporate scheme to a cheaper competitor who simply wrote a clearer risk summary. A family-owned distributor in Tema prices at a premium the market would pay, then hands the negotiation to a rep who cannot say why the premium exists. The rep discounts. The owner blames the market.

In our environment this is sharper than the textbooks admit. Ghanaian buyers rarely say no. They say “let me think about it”, “send the proposal”, “we will revert”. Politeness disguises hesitation, and hesitation is the sound of a buyer still trying to make sense of your offer. This series has already named the silence after the pitch as the place where deals die. Confusion is what fills that silence. The proposal travels into the second room, where your salesperson will never sit, and if it cannot explain itself, the people in that room do the prudent thing. They pick the cheapest option they understand.

The Confusion Discount

Here is the model I use with client teams. Take your standard price. Take the average price you actually closed at last quarter. The gap between them is not your discount policy. It is your Confusion Discount: the amount you pay, deal after deal, for a message that did not land.

You close that gap with four answers, and every salesperson must give all four without notes, in under a minute, to a skeptical buyer:

1. Problem. What specific pressure does this remove for the customer, in the customer's language, not yours?
2. Result. What will be measurably different in their business, and by when?
3. Proof. Which client, what number, which outcome? Not a testimonial. Evidence.
4. Risk. What happens if it does not work, and what have you put in place so that the buyer is not exposed?

Product knowledge lets a salesperson describe. The four answers let a salesperson sell. Most teams I meet can give the first and improvise the rest, and improvisation is exactly what a finance director hears as uncertainty.

What to Do This Week

First, calculate your Confusion Discount. One number, from last quarter's closed deals. Put it in front of the team in cedis, not percentages.

Second, run the four-answer test on your top three products. Ask each rep, cold, in a room with peers. Where they reach for the brochure adjectives, you have found the leak.

Third, rewrite one live proposal so that the first page answers all four questions before it describes a single feature. Send that version.

Fourth, ban the empty words. Innovative, reliable, customer-focused and excellent are now prohibited unless followed by a number or a named client.

What This Means for the Organisation

For leadership, this changes what discount approval is for. Every discount request should arrive with the four answers attached. If they are missing, the problem is not the price, and cutting it only teaches the market that your list price was never real. Marketing owns the message, sales owns the translation, and the CEO owns the standard that neither hides behind adjectives.

So here is the question I would put to your next pipeline review: pull the last five deals your team discounted. In how many did the customer actually say “too expensive”, and in how many did they say “let me think about it”? Which sentence has your team been treating as a price objection?