One Of The Greatest Price-to-Value Lessons Of All Time
February 11th, 2021 // 1:19 pm @ Scott Manning
When I was a teenager I listened to Zig’s “Secrets of Closing the Sale” and I have to tell you it ought to be fundamental education to life – not just business. It’s what everyone needs to know when relating to people like learning the ABC’s in order to spell words. There’s just nothing like it and there wasn’t anything like Zig nor will there ever be.
I remember one of his greatest concepts was called “reduce it to the ridiculous” and it used examples of whatever you were going to buy with the lifetime expectancy of it or of you and then did a little easy math by dividing the two numbers into each other. You came out with your average daily investment to ‘enjoy’ the benefits of whatever you were purchasing.
“So, the real question is, Mrs. Jones, are you and your family worth just forty-three cents a day to know you are using the very best cookware to prepare the meals you’ll be creating a lifetime of memories from?”
I often joke about it, mainly because it’s hard to get my doctors to take seriously the example that every single patient they see should be measured against their life expectancy and factor in their “optimal health” investment by the days left. In essence, reduce the amount to the ridiculous and flat out ask with this one mouth they’ve got that there is no choice but to make it last for the rest of their life, isn’t that worth just a few dollars a day.
My point to all of this is… it’s not about the money – it’s about the value of what that money buys.
This is one of the most powerful lessons of all “selling” and “pricing.” It is important to position the price in comparison to the value they are receiving – it terms that make the most sense to them.
Since you are here, you will be very familiar with my “Future Focused” concept for goals and objectives, for blueprints and plans, for engineering your business, and for team member accountability, but future focused applies to everything – including selling.
When your customers, clients, patients are making buying decisions and when you are figuring out your pricing strategy for your fees, investments, price points of various things – always go to the future value not the present moment value. This will put it in perspective and you can leverage up your profitability – but don’t stop there.
Aside from an emergency situation (hole in roof, broken pipe in your house, flat tire, airlines lost your luggage or whatever other situations where price goes out the window because you just have to get something fixed – right now), everything has greater value as time goes on and accumulates forward into the future than it doesn’t just ‘right now’ in this immediate moment as a transaction.
Again, think…
Value of Future
Value of Experience
Value of Memories
Value of Longevity
All accumulated together build something to compare price to versus comparing it to pieces and parts of whatever it is someone is actually buying.
In dentistry we use health as the generic term. Who can put a price on their health? But no one takes this far enough. Everyone eventually gets nervous about how they come across “selling” when in fact there is less selling in being honest with people than there is with trying to make them believe whatever you are going to do for them is worth the money you are asking.
It gets even easier by the way, because you also have the ability to sell against alternatives, against not receiving benefits. Everyone either moves towards pleasure or away from pain – is motivated by gaining benefits or avoiding consequences.
What no one does enough of is painting the vivid picture of the crystal ball in someone’s mind and demonstrate that there is easily more costly and expensive consequences to not acting or not investing – albeit sometimes intangible and not money related.
Zig’s pots and pans example brings the long-term value into a daily price. When you hear something is just forty-three cents a day, your mind instantly starts thinking about all of your daily or weekly costs.
It also brings into perspective the cost of alternatives. How many nights of take-out after your current pans burn dinner do you need to experience before these new pans would have paid for themselves?
If Zig could justify this so long ago, you surely can figure out how to apply this to your business today.
If a new high-tech tv costs $2,000 and they guarantee it works for 5 years, it only costs about one dollar a day for a better entertainment experience. Imagine the move you’ll save by watching movies at home instead of the theater. In fact, skipping just one movie-night-out per month pays for your entire tv.
This strategy literally breaks down all of the barriers and gets the customer to be their own champion for moving forward. All because you were focused on moving people’s minds away from the price to something far more important – the value.
Category : Blog
