How to Price Your Services and Identify the Market That Can Afford Them

Not all markets are created equal when it comes to pricing your services. Many times, you may find yourself wasting marketing dollars because you’re targeting low growth market segments where it becomes very difficult to differentiate your service from your competitors. This has devastated more companies and marketing specialists because they forget that they are going after a limited pool of clients while not realizing that they haven’t priced their services appropriately; let alone not positioned their service appropriately.

When looking at markets, you need to differentiate your service from your competitors. Sometimes you will offer the same service at different price points to different market segments by positioning the service unique to each market.

The next thing to look at is the attractiveness of the market. If you are targeting small businesses with limited resources and quoting prices that you arrived at due to your costs and not their ability to pay, you set yourself up for failure and most times you blame that misstep on everything but yourself.

You first need to start with the size of the market and what part of it can not only afford your prices but be suffering enough pain to move quickly. Time is a killer to making deals. The more time it takes to close a deal, the more things that can go wrong.

It’s worth the time to perform a simple “Problem Analysis”. It’s very easy to do. Speak to several of your best or “Perfect Clients” and find out what made them choose you and also look at the sales process for each sale. Many times, you did something right without ever having a “Process”. Countless times we have seen that the sales person did a hell of a job bonding with the client and identifying the pain while all the while reminding the client of it.  There are also times when your timing was right; nothing more.

The key is to create a process that everyone follows that identifies targets with the resources to afford you and then follows that process religiously.

The most important part of pricing your services is making sure you solve a problem and you identify who can afford to pay you to fix it. Every day I see marketers burning money targeting customers that can’t afford their services and the smaller the client’s company the harder it may be in most cases.

Package your service to be unique. We used to call this a USP; unique selling proposition. If you’re a professional and think you can’t differentiate, you have already lost. Look at your competitors, their branding or advertising and find the hole in the market where you can become the most desirable and only target the patients or clients that can afford to pay you for the best! 

There are plenty of platforms out there that can target based on net worth; Facebook and LinkedIn are just a couple.  Don’t be afraid to charge more than you have been. Would you rather have five clients paying you $2000/month or one client paying you $10,000/month? You may be surprised that there is no difference in the amount of service you need to provide for $2000 or $10,000 and historically, the $10,000/month client is far more fun and rewarding to work with and the cheaper client expects more for the $2000 and is much more of a challenge to satisfy.