“Can you send me your trade price list?” — how to answer in five minutes, not five days
A customer asking for your price list is a buying signal, and the businesses that answer it same-day win work from the ones that promise it next week and then forget.
Decide what “your price list” means before you build one
It almost never means the whole catalogue at every tier. What the customer wants is the prices they would pay, for the products they actually buy or are considering. Sending 4,000 lines at four tiers is not generous, it is unusable — and it tells every customer what every other customer pays.
The four decisions
- Which tier. Theirs, and only theirs. If they are not yet assigned to one, assign them first — that decision has to be made anyway.
- Which products. Their buying history if they have one; your core range plus anything they asked about if they do not.
- Tax in or out. Trade lists are conventionally shown excluding tax, but say so explicitly on the document rather than leaving it to be assumed.
- How long it holds. Put a validity date on it. Without one, a list you sent eighteen months ago is still, in the customer’s mind, your price.
Produce it as an export, not a document
The trap is treating this as a design job. It is a data job: filter to the tier and the product set, export, send. A clean CSV or PDF that is unambiguously current beats a beautifully laid-out list that is three months old, and it takes minutes rather than an afternoon in a word processor.
If you find yourself editing last year’s list, stop — that is how prices that no longer exist end up back in circulation.
What to do the moment after you send it
Put a note in the diary to follow up. A price list sent is a quote in all but name, and it goes cold the same way — see the quiet revenue leak. A short message a week later asking whether anything is missing from the list opens more conversations than a second copy of the list ever will.
When the request is really something else
“Send me your price list” from an unqualified enquirer is sometimes a price-shopping exercise across a dozen suppliers. That is fine — send it — but it is a reason to send the tier they qualify for today rather than the best price you could theoretically do, and a reason to state your minimum order value on the document.
B2B Price Tiers exports any slice of the catalogue at any tier as CSV, so “their list, their prices” is a filter and an export rather than a project. Find out more → · Minimum order values that get enforced
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