“Can we pay in part payments?”

My experience being predominately in selling to those in construction I would often get asked by prospects if it is OK if they pay me in part payments. We did have an option whereby the prospect could pay us off over 5 months, interest free… This was setup with a third party finance company where we would receive the money upfront from them and the now customer would pay THEM off over the 5 month period.

I would usually try to avoid this if possible as it meant I would have to help the customer to register with the finance company which could be painful if the customer didn’t pass a credit check or perhaps couldn’t get one of the directors to provide information for example. This would make the process drag on for weeks, even months at times.

Here are my rebuttals to avoid allowing a customer to do part payments

1. Feel free to go into my Linkedin account and ring up any of my clients on there, they have all paid upfront, and we have delivered 100% as promised.
2. I can give you 3 senior directors numbers in the construction industry right now and I know for a fact they will vouge for us, without me even letting them know that you’re going to call. Would you like their names and numbers?
3. We provide a 100% money back guarantee in writing. All it takes is one promise broken, and you would go on Linkedin and with one post destroy our business. As a family business, we are not going to risk that for a measly 20k after 5 years of working our fingers to the bone.
4. Look we are a small family business. Yes, we are a successful boutique consultancy, probably the most successful in construction right now, but at the end of the day we have salaries to pay. Therefore we request that it is paid upfront, it will be a great help to our business. Without clients like you that support small business, we wouldn’t exist. So if you could take care of the account today, it will be of much help to us.
5. Unfortunately, we cannot take part payments as we are a small family business and can’t take on that kind of risk. We are a professional service that takes full payment upfront.
6. It actually doesn’t make sense to do part payment due to the speed at which we deliver the service, I honestly don’t have time to chase you up on payments every week.

Using a combination of these should go a long way to helping you to get payment upfront and avoid risky part payments.