Many business owners and sales reps hate price objections. They view price objections as some kind of faux pas that they should have avoided, an awkward situation, best resolved quickly (and often with huge damage to profits). Do you like price objections? When was the last time you heard one? (I recently spoke to the [...]
Last week, we looked at how preparing a pricing battle plan increases your sales and profits while decreasing your stress. This week, let’s look at another example, a service business with about 10 professionals. To protect the guilty, we’ll call it Smiley Services, which helped companies with various process and legal issues. Service companies often [...]
How many businesses build a cool product, then figure out what to charge for it? How many companies decide what to quote on a proposal after they’ve written the proposal? If you make your pricing decisions then, you are at your most emotional and least rational point, and likely to mis-price (usually underprice) your offering. [...]
Creative people love making things– widgets, software, knowledge, service calls. A lot of businesses and product lines get started this way. Someone has a cool idea to make something. Skeptics shoot down the idea. The founder or engineer makes it. Eureka! Triumph! Now, how to price it? At this point, you’ve done the hard work. [...]
Many small business owners consider pricing some kind of dark voodoo that you can only get right with the appropriate incantations, or access to a pricing consultant who knows the right incantations. At risk of hurting my own business, I’m going to tell you that pricing doesn’t have to be so hard. In fact, customers will [...]
Groupon has taken the local deal market by storm, growing quickly to $2B in revenue (depending on how you define “revenue”). The local deals company has also created massive buzz and is now preparing for one of the largest IPOs in history. As a “pricing person”, I get a lot of questions from small business [...]
As a small business owner, you don’t have big pricing departments or teams of PhDs with fancy algorithms to set prices. Pricing is often the last thing you want to think about (we’ll talk about why this is a big problem in another post). You want to put a price on a quote, website, menu, [...]
In my line of work, I encounter a lot of small business owners who set their prices by copying the “going price” in “the market” or by sticking their fingers in the wind. This is unfortunate, but fixable. What really frustrates me are when those same people, years down the road, are trying to figure [...]
In a previous post, called Be Better, Not Cheaper , I talked about how important it is to differentiate elements of your offering other than just your price. Here’s a great example of executing that strategy from Austin and San Antonio-based Red Velvet Events. The big value drivers for her clients are increasing sales results [...]
