The Worst Sources for Guidance on Your Pricing

As a services provider, where’s the worst place you can go to get feedback on your pricing?

It’s family and close friends.

Yes, those who are your biggest fans. They are too close to you and love you too much. Your spouse, a lifelong friend, a parent, grandparent, or some vital person in your life is the worst source of possible help with your pricing.

Alternatively, you may have an authority figure in your life who has filled your head full of messages of inadequacy, that you’re not good enough and never will be. Maybe you’ve separated yourself from such an individual, but those messages still ring in your ears.

Whatever their intent and the nature of your relationship, friends and family members have a perspective which is misaligned. They are looking just at you, and however they view you, that’s all they see.

And starting with “you” isn’t the place to start the pricing journey. It’s with your target clients.??

The most essential perspective to effective pricing of your services is the window you open which allows you to become intimately familiar with the problems, dreams, dysfunctions, and hopes of those target clients. It’s that understanding which helps you, as the service provider, determine both the tangible and intangible value of the transformation you bring. Friends and family don’t understand the value of your work expressed in those terms.

The one exception I can think of may be a family business you’ve grown up in, but even then, you may have a static pricing environment controlled by “we’ve always done it this way” thinking.

The only effective starting point for pricing excellence is with perceived client values of the outcomes you foster. Any other place leads you astray, even if that source is someone who you count on as your most enthusiastic supporter.

#friendsandfamily #pricing #value #professionalservices #pricevaluejourney

(Photo credit:??“Crazy Family”?by?Katia Strieck?is licensed under?CC BY 2.0)

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John Ray?advises solopreneur and small professional services firms on their pricing. John is passionate about the power of pricing to change the trajectory of a business and the lifestyle choices of a business owner. His clients are professionals who are selling their “grey matter,” such as attorneys, CPAs, accountants and bookkeepers, consultants, marketing professionals, and other professional services practitioners.

John’s book,?The Price and Value Journey: Raise Your Confidence, Your Value, and Your Prices Using The Generosity Mindset Method, will be released later this year. The book covers topics like value and adopting a mindset of value, pricing your services more effectively, proposals, and essential elements of growing your business. For more information on the book, as well as John's podcast,?The Price and Value Journey, go to?pricevaluejourney.com.