Somewhere on your shared drive sits quote_v1, quote_v2, and quote_v3_final. Same product in every version. Same cost, same lead time, same service. The price is the only number that moved, and pressure is the only thing that moved it.
V1 was never meant to survive. The seller built the concession in before the buyer asked for anything. And the buyer's procurement team is paid on savings, which are measured against your opening number. The room you leave in a quote is a line on someone else's bonus sheet.
A defended price is an opening bid. Buyers can tell on the first read.
Defend the number once and you have taught the buyer three things. There is room in it. Pressure finds the room. And you are not sure what the product is worth, so he may as well decide. Every price you send after that is provisional, and each negotiation opens where the last concession closed. Concessions do not expire. They compound, one renewal at a time.
Give 4% on price to close a deal that carries a 10% operating margin and you handed over 40% of the profit on that deal. A point of price falls straight through to profit, and profit is the number the company is valued on. The buyer spent one sentence to get it, "what can you do on price," the cheapest sentence in commerce. It works on any number the seller does not believe.
A number you would never lose a deal over is a suggestion.
That is the entire shift. A set price arrives with its reasoning attached, arithmetic the buyer can run himself, and with a seller willing to lose the deal. Buyers stop testing a number the first time the test costs them the configuration instead of costing you the margin: fewer options, a different volume, a longer lead time, the price unmoved. If you sell judgment instead of product, read fee for price. The mechanics do not change.
Pull the last ten proposals you signed. Write two numbers next to each, the first price you sent and the price you signed. The average gap is your concession rate. Multiply it by this year's revenue and that is the cost of the posture. Run it through your margin and that is what it took off profit. Then check where the next negotiation with each of those buyers opened. If it opened at the discounted number, the concession never expired. The buyer filed it as the price.
Your buyers already know which kind of number you send.