The Two Keys to Successfully Raising Your Prices Greatly

The Two Keys to Successfully Raising Your Prices Greatly
The Two Keys to Successfully Raising Your Prices Greatly

 

By Anubhav Srivastava

Most businesses are only able raise their prices in increments. In a world where most businesses compete purely on price and go for the high volume low price approach, raising prices is something that they are only able to do when the entire industry raises their price.

While the high volume low price approach may work brilliantly for businesses that have a lot of capital, the same may put small to mid sized companies with limited capital out of business. The reason is that competing on price means that the entry of any bigger competitor that can offer lower prices to your customer means your business model maybe threatened overnight. Because if you are already having low margins, you may not be in a position to offer further discounts and may go out of business.

The only sustainable business model for smaller companies is one that allows for healthy margins. But how do you get healthy margins in a marketplace that cares mostly about price?

There are two keys to be able to do so.

  1. Changing your positioning

You have to change your positioning from a lowest price solutions provider to a lowest cost/highest value solutions provider.  Now you may wonder isn’t lowest price and lowest cost the same thing? No it isn’t. Price is what you pay for something on paper. Cost is what you actually pay for it in the long run. Some of the lowest priced things can be incredibly costly in the long run if they keep breaking down or stop working when you most need them, leading to irreversible damage.

For example, if a machine is priced low, it may appear to cost less but the same machine can cost a company tremendously if it breaks down or is unable to produce enough output to fulfill a big order. A higher priced tag machine may appear to cost more but if that machine is robust, requires less maintenance and has a bigger output, that machine costs you tremendously less.

The only way to improve your margins is to switch from being the lowest price provider to the lowest cost/highest value provider NO MATTER what your price is !

2.  Changing who you sell it to.

While there are many customers who will go for a high value solutions provider, the truth is there are many people who want the lowest price, no matter what. If you only sell to people who are only concerned with the lowest price, you will always lose out in a market like that, unless you are the one who can provide the lowest price.

If you sell to a cheap market, the only way to make that work is sustaining huge volumes, which we know is not always possible. Also, cheap has nothing to do with how much money they have as even some customers with the biggest pockets can be tremendously cheap and be only concerned with price, not cost.

The only way to greatly raise your prices in such a situation is actually target a different market altogether. Now depending on your industry/business this may or may not be possible, but if it is and you are serious about greatly raising your prices, making the switch will play a tremendous role in determining if you are able to do so.

How to actually implement this?

Making a switch overnight to becoming value focused and changing your market is obviously not realistic and will lead to you losing existing customers. A better strategy would be to create new premium offerings for the value focused marketplace and test how it performs in the market. If it succeeds, you can scale it up and gradually make a switch to a value focused positioning. If it doesn’t, you still have your price focused customers and lower priced offerings to fall back (for now). But no matter what, remember, all great things lie outside your comfort zone. Only those who shoot for the moon, have a chance of landing among the stars. The question is do you want to go for something new or stick with the old? The choice is yours.

To get the most out of this article, do the following activity

  1. List down ways in which you can change your positioning to a high value focused solutions provider rather than a low price provider, if that is not your positioning already. Do you need to introduce new premium offerings or are there ways in which you can improve value in existing offerings?
  2. How can you improved the perceived value of your offering, in other ways, how will you change the perception of your services in the market? Remember if your perceived value is low, even if you deliver high value, you will not be able to raise your prices successfully.
  3. What are some value focused markets where you can command higher prices and get better margins? This can be serving different industries or different countries.

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How I Can Help Your Business

I, Anubhav Srivastava am a trainer and consultant who focuses on helping companies achieve transformational results by training/consulting on key areas that impact revenue. Would you like to develop a Dream Team that has top quality Leadership skills, knows how to channel stress positively, is adept at Sales and Negotiation, is extremely productive, constantly innovating in your Industry and is mostly highly motivated?

If yes, I am offering a 12 month program for companies that help their people achieve long lasting results in these areas, depending on requirements relevant to them. The best part is this program can even be conducted online which makes it  time and cost effective, especially if you are overseas.

The goal of this long term program is to get people out of their comfort zone and  bring about permanent change through implementation, repetition and accountability If interested, you may reach out to me at +919868889977 or anubhav101@gmail.com

Also, if you have requirements for a pre-planned speaking event, or want a short term crash course for your team, you can also get in touch with me regarding the same.

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