So you quote a price that is high, but not so high as to destroy the relationship. I call it "plausibly-deniably-high".
You also have to gauge the context of the other party in the negotiation. This technique works best when you accompany the quote with some kind of description matching the personalities. Some people are swayed by a description of the additional time it takes (the billable hours mentality). Others are swayed by a description of the additional risks you are bearing on their behalf to deliver the outcome. Still others are swayed by a description of the de novo technical challenges that no one else has ever attempted before. The list goes on, and is a fascinating study into people.
This is where a real salesman (as opposed to an order-taker) earns their keep, where they know how to read a room and craft a response, messaging and after-meeting socializing that takes into account all those perspectives simultaneously from the point of view of the other party.
For what it is worth, if a customer of my previous (salaryman-heavy) employer asked for this, we'd tell them an actual no, which is extremely rare in client relationships in Japan. A contextually appropriate "no" for something which is less absurdly wasteful of engineering time to no purpose would be "That sounds difficult. We could explore options to do it, but perhaps you could accept an hour of downtime in the dead of night" then bargain down to 15 minutes.
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[1] https://www.networkworld.com/article/2220097/what-microsoft-...
A friend of mine with a consulting biz was requested by IBM to handle a job in Turkey. He didn't want the gig & told them so repeatedly. He finally decided to tell them the most ridiculous price he could think of (like appending two zeros to the number). He said they didn't even flinch and he was on the plane to Turkey the next week for six months. But he did say that it was pretty much worth it in the end (but only because of the pricing).
Seriously, this sort of dynamic is why the world works as well as it does.
Yet they are not a panacea.
They suck at preventing problems related to:
* tragedy of the commons - tend to create & magnify it
* long-term disaster planning / tail risk - e.g., stockpiling resources for natural disasters, pandemics, etc.,
* preventing foolish development, e.g., on cheap land subject to flooding
* self-creating safety systems for workers, consumers, environments, etc. -left to their own devices, markets always do too little-too late
Market systems literally often need to be saved from themselves, e.g., when overfishing will literally kill an industry by driving extinct the very thing it depends upon
Price gouging is nowhere near a reliable method of disaster preparation as actual expert planning.
The stockpiles you speak of are usually just ordinary current inventory marked up by an order(s) of magnitude.
Also, stockpiling goods is not the only thing needed for disaster preparation. One must also stockpile services, i.e., have the right people recruited, trained, equipped, and ready to respond. Prime examples are military and firefighters, who spend a much time & resources training, and little time actually fighting the wars or fires.
Yes, but funding allocation is hard.
That'd be the case only if it was sudden. If entrepreneurs had the time to think and plan, they'd come up with stockpiles that they rise the sale price for when the time comes, calculating to use that future sales price increase to offset the increased bound capital and storage expenses of their large(r) inventory.
Military is a bad example, but firefighters do train a lot. But that's also due to them needing to respond within hours at best, instead of weeks/months for most wars. I'm referring to the majority/bulk of them, not the leadership hierarchy.
And now I know that Coldfusion is absolutely miserable to code in (and the client tried to dodge their bills!).
I am having trouble finding a reference to it now, but I've heard patio11 refer to this as "the Japanese no". Don't ever say "no" directly, just quote an astronomical price.