When you call a contractor or specifier to tell them the price is going up, the person most likely to cost you the account isn’t on the call. It’s the QS, sitting in a budget meeting three weeks later, using your number as the excuse to reopen the value engineering review. We think about a price increase as an account conversation: margin to hold, relationship to protect. On a project where you’ve already been specified, it’s a substitution conversation. The number is the trigger; the substitution is the outcome you’re trying to prevent.
Here’s where that risk actually lives, and what changes if you plan for it.
The audience for the call isn’t only who’s on it. The contractor picks up. The specifier hears about it. But the person who actually decides what happens next is usually the QS, and their job is to find a saving whenever a supplier gives them a reason to look. A price notice is that reason. That doesn’t make the QS the enemy; it makes their reaction predictable. If your rep goes into the call thinking about the contractor’s reaction, they’ll optimise for the wrong person. If they go in knowing the QS will run the numbers on Monday, they’ll bring the right proof to the call and, more importantly, leave it behind in an email.
By the time the rep is on the phone, it’s too late to build the case for staying specified. That case has to already exist on the account, in writing. We mean specifics: the technical support hours your team put in on the last variation, the compliance work during design, the site visits, the install issues you helped the contractor solve, the warranty position, the delivery record. Anything real and provable, on this project. Without that record, the price is the only new data point the QS has to work with, and a number with nothing next to it is easy to swap out. A number sitting next to a page of proven value is a much harder conversation to reopen. A small habit that helps: keep a running value log for each key account, one page, updated by the rep after every meaningful interaction, so when the increase notice comes down from finance nothing has to be reconstructed from memory.
Then think about the order you tell people. If the contractor or QS hears the number first, the specifier is playing catch-up when substitution comes up in a project meeting. They haven’t been briefed, they don’t have the story, and they’ll often stay quiet rather than defend a choice they weren’t consulted on. Flip it. Call the specifier or your technical champion inside the client 24 to 48 hours before the formal notice goes out. Walk them through what’s changed, why it’s changed, and what hasn’t. Leave them with the proof from the value log. Now, when the substitution question lands in the project meeting, the specifier is on record, early, as saying the spec still holds. You’re not asking them to fight for you; you’re making sure they’ve heard the argument from you before they hear the price from someone else.
Before your next increase notice goes out, pull the three specified accounts you’d least like to lose and try to list, in specifics, the proven value your team has delivered on each of them this year. If you can’t, those accounts are already exposed – a price increase is just the moment that exposure becomes visible. Start the value log there. Ahead of the next round, you’ll be glad you did.
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