Archive - Originally posted on "The Horse's Mouth" - 2009-01-21 16:25:04 - Graham Ellis
Here's an email I wrote in answer to a request for a discount earlier today.
Many training companies quote high(er) prices, with the full anticipation that they can offer a wide range of discounts to their major customers, to students, to big companies who they would like to have an 'introductory offer', to last minute bookers to help them fill places, to people who book early and help them plan ahead ... resulting (in the end) with very few people actually paying the full price.
A long time ago, we took a policy decision that we would NOT inflate our list prices just so that we can knock them back down again via discounts to where they should have been in the first place. So - I'm sorry - we can't offer a student discount off the price; we just don't have the scope to do so.
It's always difficult to say "no" - but it's also difficult to justify to a delegate who has paid full price for a course why others who are there with him have been given special prices and he's just about the only one to pay the full amount. I have been place in the position of having to justify a "raise prices so that we can then discount" policy like this for a former employer and, quite simply, it's not our style. From Well House Consultants, you get a darned good course at a darned reasonable price ... and it becomes even better value when you consider that we keep the number of delegates on our public courses down to 8 so that you get plenty of attention to your own questions, and we keep our courses short and intensive rather than stretching them out.
I learned a lot from listening to the author of an Open Source product that competed with a Commercial one. He was describing how it's the TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) that counts, rather than any individual prices and components. In the training world, which is best - a full price course that runs for 3 days and costs you 800 pounds, with 5 delegates, OR a course that's listed at 1595 pounds, discounted by 20%, and has been stretched to a week so that there's more time for the provider to make money, and to answer questions from the 24 delegates.