Why nobody wants to talk about budget first (and why they should)

Darren Rod was my first guest after moving to Queensland. I'd met him a few weeks earlier on a whilwind tour of QLD integrators with the great Gary Barr. Darren has spent 12 years in AV across South Africa, Singapore and now Australia.

About half way through our chat I asked him a fairly simple question. With so many products and brands out there, how do you actually decide what to put in front of a client?

His answer came down to three things;
- The client's budget, once that's set, everything else gets evaluated against it. He made the point that there's no reason to sell a top-tier solution if the project doesn't need one, comparing it to driving a Ferrari in a 60 zone (I'm not sure I fully agree, sometimes you want the Ferrari, but I see where he's coming from).
- What the client actually needs and expects, not just what they've asked for.
- Support from the vendor. Darren only likes working with brands that have a real local presence, because when something goes wrong, it needs to get sorted quickly.

The part of the conversation I keep coming back to though, is what he said about budgets. A lot of people treat it as confrontational, like asking about money is somehow rude. Darren's take was simple and I agree. The longer you leave off the conversation about budget, the more difficult it becomes. The longer an integrator and a customer go without discussing it, the harder that conversation gets later.

There's one exception, if you know the customer extremly well, you can sometimes read the room without asking directly. But for most relationships, he suggested just asking, directly or indirectly: what do you want to spend? What's the budget? What do you think something like this costs? And if the answer makes it clear the budget genuinely doesn't align with what's needed, that's a legitimate moment to walk away and wish them well, something we'd actually touched on earlier in the same conversation, about knowing when to say no to work.

It's one of the most important questions in the first meeting. Don't make the budget talk an awkward part of the job, it's the part that makes everything after it easier.

That's just one part of a longer conversation. You can listen to the full episode with Darren Rod for more on picking the right solution and knowing when to walk away from a job.