Making Customers More Valuable [Part 4 of 5]: Price Profitably
August 23rd, 2017 // 3:04 pm @ Scott Manning
If there is one thing I love talking about, it’s this. I write about it often not only because I like talking about it, but also because it is the single greatest leverage point to profitability when it comes to individual customer value.
There is no way to make your customer worth more to you faster than to increase the value of how much they pay.
I would love to spend time on ways to get someone to pay more and for you to be so valuable to them that they are happy, willing and excited to do it – than to go about trying to multiply the number of your customers.
Simply put: the higher the price (all things considered equal to and the same as they are now), the greater the profit.
If you grow customers, which is fine and you should, you also do in fact grow overhead and variable expenses.
If you grow price, then you grow upside without increasing overhead (depending of course on the deliverables and promises made to get the price to go up).
There is a critically important lesson to know about price…
It’s arbitrary. Made up. Unless you are completely regulated by the government (which you are not), there is no set fee you must charge. Of course you can choose to be controlled by industry norms and regulations but in all industries (at least the ones reading this), there are specific ways to ensure you are in total control of your fees and what you charge.
That very well may mean you have to change the way you do business or sell or control your customer but you are not held hostage to the pricing structure of others – you choose.
So, that means all you have to do is find a way to be worth more to your customers and increase the real value they receive and you can continue to leverage up your price.
You also have the power of the law of supply and demand. If you follow what we talked about last week and you put that into your business literally, then you will create a positioning that gives you more demand than you have supply and you have a fulcrum to increase your price as you see fit.
Whatever someone will pay is the price that you are able to charge. Never under value yourself. Never. You can’t get back the time, effort and often pain and frustration that you give and sacrifice to a customer.
There is no value that can be placed on your experience or your education. And remember this: everything we all do here (whether its teeth or money or health or buildings or whatever), once your work is done your customers go on with their lives and they reap the benefits of what you have done for them long after you have been paid. I always say I really should get a royalty on happiness let alone wealth in the future because every customer tends to be very shortsighted in their own mind when they are the ones writing the check – but they are always very longsighted when it comes to wanting paid.
You get paid for what you have done your whole life living up to this moment and there is no price on that. The customer moves on forever keeping your interaction and the value of it far into the future.
Never be bashful with price. You get what you confidently believe you are worth because that is the main reason why a customer believes they should pay you.
Category : Blog