I get this question most weeks, from freelancers and small business owners, in almost the same words. The client asked what it costs, I told them, and then they vanished. What did I do wrong.
The advice they usually get is either offer instalments or never give the price first. Both are tactics built on one assumption, and the assumption is that the person was making a buying decision when they asked. In most cases they were not, and that has a completely different consequence.
The question arrives in a different stage than you think
Google published a body of research called Decoding Decisions, carried out with The Behavioural Architects, describing the space between the moment somebody realises they need something and the moment they buy. They call it the messy middle. The part that matters here is that people in that space are not walking in a line. They are looping between two mental states.
The report itself separates them in one clean sentence: exploration is an expansive activity, while evaluation is inherently reductive. When you explore you add options to a list in your head. When you evaluate you remove them. The research argues the two are cognitively distinct with different reward systems, and therefore need different treatment.
The scale is worth knowing. The study recruited 31,000 shoppers who were genuinely in market and intending to buy, each completing ten purchase simulations, for a total of 310,000 purchase scenarios. This is not an inference from one person’s experience.
Now apply that to the message you received. What does it cost, asked while they are still widening the list rather than narrowing it. The price at that moment is not a decision criterion, it is one piece of information filed next to four others collected this week. So when you reply with a number and nothing else, you hand over one item for the list and they carry on exploring. The disappearance is not a rejection. It is the continuation of something you were not part of.
Which explains something that used to puzzle me
Everyone who complains about this describes the same shape: quick replies up to the price, then silence. If price were the problem you would expect negotiation. People who have a problem with your price negotiate. They tell you it is expensive, they ask for a discount, they compare. Someone who goes quiet never reached the stage where negotiating made sense.
That is the distinction that resolves the question. Negotiation is a sign of evaluation. Silence is a sign of exploration. Your answer to a price question should differ depending on which one you are in, and most of us give the same answer to both.
I wrote separately about why customers buy knowing someone cheaper exists, in price is not everything. That piece is about why they buy. This one is about why they ask.
Three other real reasons, before blaming the offer
Not every disappearance is about stage. Three others come up constantly, and separating them matters because the fix differs.
- There was never a budget. This happens a lot and it is not a failure on your side. People ask the price of things they cannot buy in order to find out how far away they are. That is an information question, not a buying question.
- The person asking is not the person deciding. They are collecting prices for someone else. If you answer with a bare number, that number reaches the decision maker with no context, and gets compared against a competitor’s number which also has no context. You lost that one without being in the room.
- You answered a different question. They asked what it costs and meant will this fix my problem. The number is the easiest answer within reach, so we give it, and it is not the answer.
The third is the one worth working on, because it is the only one of the three you control.
The order that changes the outcome: problem first, then number
What years of training and client work taught me is that the price question is often the first question because it is the easiest question, not because it is the most important one. The client has a problem they cannot describe, so they ask about the thing they can describe.
The reply that works is not withhold the price. I am not from that school, and hiding it makes people tense and makes them leave faster. The reply that works is to answer the question and add one question after it. The number, plus a question about the problem.
One question, and a simple one. It starts from this, and it moves with the size of the job. What is the specific problem you are dealing with right now. That does two things. It moves the conversation from comparing numbers to describing a situation, and it gives you the material to build an actual offer.
If they answer, you moved them from exploration to evaluation with one sentence. If they do not, they were genuinely exploring and they have no claim on your time this week.
They are asking about the offer, not the price
The conclusion I keep arriving at: people do not disappear because of a price, they disappear because of a number with no shape around it. The identical figure inside a clear offer produces a reply, and outside one produces silence.
By offer I do not mean marketing language. I mean something specific: what gets done, in what time, what is in and what is out, and what the result looks like. I broke those elements down in how to build a strong client offer without cutting price, and they are the difference between quoting a price and making an offer.
If you are convinced the real cause is a competitor charging less, that is a different problem with a different answer, which I set out in competing with a cheaper competitor without cutting price.
And when disappearing is the good outcome
Here is the part nobody says. A share of these disappearances is a favour, and the job would have cost you money if it had continued. The client who wants a number and nothing else, and will not spend two minutes describing their problem, is frequently the same client who later pays late and expands the scope because in their mind they have already paid.
That is arithmetic rather than optimism. It took me years to accept that part of my job is letting people leave early. The practical side of it, prevention before escalation, is in dealing with a client who does not pay.
If you sell to companies rather than individuals, the same situation takes a different shape, because the price objection comes from a buying committee rather than a person. BDG Labs wrote that version up in detail in how to handle price objections in B2B without discounting.
Honest limits
First, and it matters: the Google research above used purchase simulations rather than real purchases, and a UK sample rather than an Egyptian one. Google writes in the report that simulation results can only ever be indicative and should not substitute for your own in-market testing. So I am using the idea, the split between exploring and evaluating, and I am not using its numbers and claiming they describe your client.
Second, I have no figure for what share of enquiries disappear normally. Anyone who tells you seventy percent is normal is quoting an average they saw, and it varies by service and by price point. I am not going to invent one for you.
Third, the one question above is not a trick that works every time. It raises the chance of getting back into the conversation. It does not give a budget to someone who has none. And if you try it twenty times and see no difference at all, the problem is probably not the reply, it is who is reaching you in the first place, which is the subject of defining your target audience using real buyer data.
Most businesses buy a solution before they know what they actually have. That is why my book Growth Engine starts with diagnosis rather than tactics, and ends that first step with one positioning sentence that has to pass a test: could your competitor say the same thing? It is all in Part 1, Analysis: where are you, free, and written in Arabic.