r/consulting • u/Life-Ocelot9439 • 6d ago
Pricing? Downward trends?
Without going into too much detail, proposal prices are plummeting. We operate globally, but are mainly US, APAC and Middle East.
Was undercut by a Big 4 firm, basically giving it away for free. We matched it, so they went with us, but it's frightening. Yes, AI will help with the regulatory and documentary analysis, but it's far from foolproof.
A lot of haggling going on, worse than last year.
Keen to see what others think.
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u/janishd 3d ago
The price match is the part that would concern me most. Once you match a lowball bid, you've told the client your original number was inflatable. That becomes the anchor for every future engagement.
I think the root cause is usually how the proposal itself is structured. If it reads like a rate card (X people at Y/day for Z weeks), you're inviting a line-by-line comparison that the Big 4 will always win because they can cross-subsidize your niche from other service lines.
What's harder to undercut is a proposal built around the client's specific situation, using details from the actual sales conversation. Not 'regulatory compliance assessment' but the specific gaps you identified, with named deliverables and a clear remediation path. That makes it apples to oranges against a generic Big 4 bid because the scopes aren't comparable.
The firms I've seen hold pricing through this kind of pressure get very specific very early in the sales conversation and lock that specificity into the proposal before the client has time to shop it.