What Do You Really Sell?

I get new readers pretty regularly, so you might not have been here last week for my discussion of avoiding comparable products.

Short version: if you’re a Thought Leader who sells information products of some kind (and you should be), you want to be careful about selling a product that can be easily compared in format or structure to an everyday low-priced product.

The example I used is a book. Everyone who buys books has a certain price in their head about what a book should cost. And if you want to sell your book for much more than that, you’re going to have to do some work to disqualify that comparison in the minds of your buyers.

The even shorter version is that we price our products based on value, not the market price of a commodity, like a book.

The writer Christopher Morley had a great quote about this. He said, “When you sell a man a book, you don’t sell him 12 ounces of paper and ink and glue — you sell him a whole new life.”

I went through all that explanation to get to answer this question:

How do we determine the value of our product?

Sometimes, the answer is fairly easy. If you help businesses get more customers, you determine the value of your information based on a multiple of the average customer value of the kind of business you’re helping.

Other times, you might be a Thought Leader that just helps people enjoy life more or see things a little differently, and there is no financial outcome tied to the transformation you help with.

And while that’s more difficult, it’s okay.

One thing you have to do in every thought leadership situation is gauge the passion of your audience. And you’re going to notice varying levels of passion.

What you don’t want to do is to let the highly passionate person scratch their itch for only twenty bucks. They want to invest at a higher level than your less passionate customers, and you have to have something for them to buy at an appropriate price point.

Likewise, your less passionate people are going to want to limit their spend, and, depending on the size of your market, you may or may not want to have something for them as well.

Whether you’re very passionate or only a little passionate about becoming a Thought Leader, I have an incredible price point for this offer to you: it’s free! Just go to You Can Be A Thought Leader and sign up for my?free daily emails?that are all about helping you achieve the impact and reward you deserve.