The Most Overlooked Principle To Raising Your Prices By Abe Cherian Copyright © 2005

Finding customers isn't usually the hard part of selling. It's "closing" that can drive you crazy. You know the excuses. They want to shop around a bit longer, they're not sure they can afford the price, they need to get approval from a superior. The list goes on and on. Your challenge is to find ways to close prospects at a higher rate, and thereby speed growth and increase revenues.

One sure fired way to increase revenues without damaging your reputation, is to educate your customers into your price increase first before doing it. You don't want to be worried about raising your prices. Most people are afraid to raise their prices.

For example, one of my original companies operated at a marginal price just under the standard for the industry. We got a lot of business and kept the customers coming however, we didn't get much more business than the next guy whose prices were higher. We were always afraid to raise our prices and lose customers.

Finally, we did. We got just as many customers and increased our bottom line by 35%. We then decided to raise our prices again. Still - same amount of customers.

We ended up raising them even higher to almost double what we had originally started at. We did lose customers at that point. However, we had increased our fees so high that our margin was still much higher than it was before and we doubled our business. All by simply raising our prices.

We had already delivered quality work and were confident in our products and services. All we did was raise our prices. To overcome people just looking for price, educate them. What we did was let them know about some of our follow-up services, our customer service plan, things that we naturally included in our service that other marketing companies didn't. By educating them and showing them what they were getting, they were more than happy to pay our pnces.

Why would anyone pay more for the exact same thing? Once they found out what we were offering, they didn't perceive us as offering the same thing as the other marketing companies. When you don't educate them, they perceive you the same as the next business.

If all things are equal, they will choose the cheapest price. Once you convince them and educate them, you no longer have to worry about it. Price is simply what you pay for something. Value is what you get. The customer wants to know what he's going to get. Every customer wants to think they're going to get good value.

Your customers don't really care about the low price, especially if they're going to get bad workmanship and poor products or services. They want value. If you give them value, you might as well charge them for it.

Don't wait for them to tell you you're expensive or they can't afford it. If they're telling you this, it's too late. You haven't educated them on the value they will receive from your products and services. You need to educate them right from the beginning from the time they request your no cost book or report. Your customers are not automatically inclined to buy the cheapest thing they can get.

Raise your prices. Get paid. You're worth it. If you've built in a great guarantee, which should be one of your strategies, then you are on your way to deliver quality products and services to your customers at all times. You do great work, give them great quality, educate them, you're better than your competitors you should get paid for it. If you believe you're worth it, then your prospects and clients will believe it also.