If you run a small firm, or perhaps your firm is you, you’ll sometimes find yourself competing against bigger firms. This can feel intimidating. These firms have more people, bigger budgets, slicker marketing, and often dedicated sales people. If you … Read More
competitive pricing
Who is the competition and what are the rules of the game?
How often have you been in the end stages of a sales cycle, you think you’ve laid out a great case against the competition, only to find the prospect goes dark? The first step to beating the competition is to … Read More
Taxes, Architecture, and Your Business
There’s a fascinating short piece by Kurt Holdstedt at 99PercentInvisible on how taxes and regulations shape the architecture we associate with cities like Paris, Amsterdam, and more. (I also learned that those distinctive Parisian roofs are called “mansard roofs”.) The mansard … Read More
Pricing pressure? It could be your proposal
I’ve heard a lot of people complain about how their market is getting commoditized and how there’s no way to achieve good price points. What happens when we look at the proposals the sales teams are sending out? They’re terrible. … Read More
2 Sentence Pricing Advice for Small Business Owners
1. Be better, not cheaper. If someone in your market doesn’t think you’re better, you’re a commodity and have no pricing power. If you’re small, you probably have less costing power than the your larger competitors. Commodity pricing + uncompetitive … Read More
You’re Not Getting Enough Price Objections
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 … Read More
Amazon Enters the Tablet War for Real, and at $199
As expected, Amazon this week launched a new media tablet, the Kindle Fire, at a $199 price point. This immediately started the debate about whether the Kindle Fire was an iPad killer. Indeed, this debate overshadowed the overhaul of the … Read More
Do Pricing First, Not Last
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. … Read More
Price Optimization 101
I get a lot of questions about price optimization, so I just wanted to make it really simple. Write down your costs. Of course, you won’t know your real costs, so just use estimates, preferably from 2-5 years ago. These … Read More
Value-based Pricing: When can I stop asking questions?
How do you know when to stop asking questions about value? Couldn’t this go forever, asking “Why? Why? Why?” until we end up in a philosophical discussion? You want to ask questions until you no longer get meaningfully different answers. … Read More