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Posts Tagged ‘pricing’

Every consumer wants to know what’s in it for them.  If he gives a bit of his hard-earned money, what will he get in return?  If she donates an hour of her valuable time, what can she expect to receive?

Whether the consumer donation is money, time, or loyalty, those consumers want to know that what they’ll receive will greatly outweigh what they invest.  Dan Kennedy put it well when he referred to this concept as, “Selling money at a discount.”

This is the duty of your teleseminar’s registration page.  Not only should your registration page name a common problem, agitate it, offer a solution, give benefit bullet points, and offer simple registration and payment, but it should quell fears, silence objections, and calm arguments…with a call to action that springs to action, even before those objections are formulated.  Before your prospect has a chance to ask him or herself, “What’s in it for me?” or, “How is this going to better my position?” or, “How is this going to save me money?”, you need to thoroughly answer those questions for them.

You can quantify the cost of any topic. No matter the subject matter, you will always be able to find proof that you will save your customers money, time or grief.  Consider these examples:

• If your topic is business related, and the foreseeable objection is price, include a statement like this:  “For an investment of X, you’ll get the information to avoid the problem of Y, which if left unchecked, will cost you 100 times X.”  For example, you can show your readers how spending $50 will save them $5000.

• If your topic is weight loss related, you can quantify the cost in this manner:  “You’re already spending money on this problem, in the form of high insurance premiums, gym memberships, weight loss programs, and clothing.  You’ll spend far less than all of this to participate in this teleseminar, which will eliminate the need for most of your current money spending.”

• If your topic revolves around parenting, consider presenting your quantification this way:  “How much money are you spending on guilt gifts for your children?  What if a great parent/child relationship was to replace those gifts?  You would save money and gain what you really want.”

• Or, if your topic has little to do with money, and a lot to do with emotional cost, you can quantify your clients’ investments like this:  “Isn’t it worth X to never feel Y again?”

You must calculate the actual monetary amounts for your registration page readers.  Don’t expect them to do the math – they may click away without ever seeing the true monetary benefit that you’re offering.

Even if you’re not able to attain a sign-up from every reader, a good call to action will break through denial, and push those people closer to a sign-up next time you host a teleseminar with a similar topic.

Even if you’re hosting a free teleseminar, you must use your call to action to convince prospects that their investments of time will save them money, time or angst.  In other words, you must convince them that participating in your teleseminar will literally make them money, or trap the money that they already have in their pockets.  You must convince them that investing one hour can save them five hours of work.  Or, convince them that investing one hour will save them hours of sleepless grief.

Your call to action should do just that:  call for action to be taken.  In fact, it should be so powerful, so undeniable, and make such good monetary sense, that your readers won’t be able to help but spring to immediate action.

Bernadette Doyle specializes in helping entrepreneurs attract a steady stream of ideal clients. If you want to get clients calling you instead of you calling them, sign up for her free weekly e-zine at http://www.clientmagnets.com

When you’re thinking about revealing the price of your product or service, think about your target audience. If you don’t, you, you could be pricing yourself out of your audience.  I recommend tailoring your product or services to different audiences.  By doing this you can build several price points into your offerings.

Start with the High Price Points First
When you’re thinking about your target audience, there’s a good chance you may be looking at more than one group of people. If your product or service can appeal to many different groups of people with only a little modification, you’ve got a very valuable product on your hands. In the event that multiple groups may be interested in your product, start with the high price points first.

When you start with a high price point, you can discuss custom solutions, coaching packages and high-cost products with your audience. An audience that can afford to pay a high price point is probably expecting a lot from your product, including some personal attention. For example, you might want to offer a complete coaching package and book about marketing at a high price point.

Then, after you’ve ran your coaching program or presented your executive conference, you can create a package targeted toward a lower price point. Starting with the highest price point first gives you many benefits: it helps you fully-develop your product or services, it gives you an opportunity to ask for more, and it helps to justify the cost when you offer a lower-priced version to other audiences.

Offer Less for a Lower Price Point
After you’ve offered your high-price-point solution to the audience that can afford it, tailor a package for your lower-price-point audience. For example, if you offer a 5-day coaching package to your high-price audience, you may offer a weekend workshop or half-day coaching packages to a mid-range price point. If your product has enough diversity, you could even consider a lower-range price point consisting of just the written materials and a DVD or CD recording of your high-cost event. There’s no shortage of ways you can modify your product or services to suit a lower-cost audience and still capitalize on using the same materials and techniques.

Sales Strategies in Order of Price Point
When you start with a high price point and then offer a product to an audience in a lower price point, you can actually use the high price point to justify your price. Saying things like “People paid $5,000 for this product, but I’m not going to charge you that” gives you the ability to offer your target audience a “great” deal. Likewise, if you offer less for your less-expensive price points, the high-price audience doesn’t need to feel cheated or disappointed, because they got more for their higher price.

Consider whether your product appeals to people in multiple price points, and create custom packages that cater to each price point. By offering a high-priced version to an audience that can afford it, and creating a lower-price version for a different audience, you can increase your earnings exponentially with hardly any extra work!

Bernadette Doyle specializes in helping entrepreneurs attract a steady stream of ideal clients. If you want to get clients calling you instead of you calling them, sign up for her free weekly e-zine at http://www.clientmagnets.com

Consider your role as a consumer. When you’re shopping, do you look at the products first, or the price tag first?

If you looked at the price tag first,
retailers would pick up on that and simply offer a collection of price stickers inside the front door. You would choose what you could afford, and then the actual product would be a surprise – possibly an unpleasant one.

You don’t shop that way, and neither do the people that you have identified as your perfect clients.

Prospects want to know your prices, but unless your prices are preceded by the benefits that you’re offering, consumers will have nothing to gauge those prices against.

Follow these four steps to eliminate your fears in revealing your price. Gain the confidence you need to make the most out of your requests for cash:

1. Present what you’re offering. Answer the timeless questions: Who? What? When? Where? Why? How? Keep it simple. If you make it too complicated, those raised hands might start to return to laps.

2. Summarize the benefits. Because you’re offering specific solutions to specific problems, this step should turn on light bulbs in your prospects’ minds. This is the step in which you convince them that you are their answer.

3. Introduce the price. By now, your listeners or readers are absorbed in what you’re offering. The benefits are foremost in their minds, as is the question of price. Reveal your pricing while the question is still in their minds; and before it reaches their lips. Perfect placement of price revelation makes it comfortable for you and acceptable to your audience.

4. Map out a direct route for the money. Make it crystal clear how easy it will be to sign up, jump on, or join in on your program. Prospects should leave your teleseminar, your sales page, or your conference without any questions about how to participate. Or, better yet, they should leave already having signed on. Make it possible for them to sign up immediately. Make it easy for them to do so.

When your appeal is placed correctly, while all of the most fantastic points of your product or service are fresh in the minds of your audience, you will not only feel more confident in asking for money, but your prospects will have more confidence in their spending.

After you identify your sea of raised hands (those people whose problems you can solve, and whose interests you have piqued), you’ll need to devise an effective method for telling them how much cash they will need to jump onboard.

The steps I’ve outlined here make up an excellent plan for starting to ask for money. As you proceed, you will learn to tweak your own presentation to meet the needs of the people in your particular niche. You will learn to identify the exact moment in time when they are most receptive to pricing, and when your presentation best complements that revelation.

When considering how to properly sandwich your asking for money in your presentation, consider your own shopping habits. You see the product. You consider how it could benefit your life. You look at the price tag. You proceed to the check-out. You leave the store with the satisfaction of knowing that you fashioned your own shopping experience.

Give your prospects that luxury. Take the time to learn about what price placement gets the most lucrative results for your business. You’ll soon discover that timing is everything – especially when it equates to money on your pocket.

Bernadette Doyle specializes in helping entrepreneurs attract a steady stream of ideal clients. If you want to get clients calling you instead of you calling them, sign up for her free weekly e-zine at http://www.clientmagnets.com

As one of the largest expenses of planning an event, venue pricing is extremely important. With the right venue pricing, you can host an event and still realize a good profit. If you pay too much for the venue, you cut into your revenue for the event, or you may even end up paying more than the venue is worth, or more than you can afford to pay. These tips can help you get the best possible venue price.

Find out the Room Price
In order to get the best possible venue price, you must start by finding out the venue price. Some venues may want to avoid quoting you an exact price, so they can get the most possible income from you if you quote a price higher than their rate. Try to find out the venue’s price before you discuss money.

Remember that there is always room to negotiate a price, and what the venue tells you is just a starting point; not the final room price. If the price is significantly higher than you want to pay, it’s worth trying to negotiate even if you think the venue won’t budge. The worse that can happen is that the venue may stick to their pricing, and you may have to look elsewhere, but you might also find that the venue is willing to negotiate down to your price.

To Get a Better Price, Ask for a Better Price
One of the simplest ways to get a better price on a venue is to ask for a better price. There are a few techniques you can utilize to negotiate a better price. First, you can flat out ask. Some venues are fairly willing to negotiate. You could also try telling the venue that you’re on a budget, and can only pay X dollars, but that you’re looking for a long-term partner for many events. Some venues are willing to drop prices to build good ongoing relationships. You may also be able to negotiate a price near your ‘budget’ if you drop extras from the venue cost, such as snacks or supplies.

Look for Other Methods of Compensation
If you can’t get a venue to come down to your budget, explore other methods of compensation. For example, if you’re planning a training, marketing or customer service event, you might explore the option of putting venue staff in your event. The venue could then gain your services to the tune of whatever you’re charging for the event, and may be more willing to negotiate a lower rate, or give you the venue for free. If you’re using a hotel as a venue, you may be able to negotiate a lower venue rate based on booking hotel rooms through the hotel for attendees.

Key Things to Remember When Negotiating Venue Price
Remember: the venue wants to fill the room. If the room doesn’t get filled, the venue doesn’t make any money. The closer you get to the date of the event, the more negotiating power you have. The closer you get to the date of the event, the more the venue wants to fill the space. Negotiate the best possible rate to keep your venue prices low and boost your revenue.

When you’re planning your first event, or even if you’ve been planning events for a while, it’s important to get into the right mindset to host a successful event. Beginner event planners often find themselves questioning their abilities or the event, and even experienced event organizers may have moments of doubt and may ultimately undermine their success. Create the right mindset, and your event will be successful.

Think about Your Goals and Overall Strategy
When you’re thinking of planning an event, consider the event as part of your overall road map for success. Think about your goals for the event itself, and how the event fits into your career. Is the event the culmination of years of experience in a field, or a launching point for a new career? What do you have to offer your attendees, and how does your offering fit into your overall strategy? You can’t think of an event as a one-time revenue generator that has nothing to do with your long-term strategy; you must evaluate an event and how it fits into your overall plan.

Don’t Allow Your Beliefs To Limit What is Possible
One classic mistake that people make when they’re planning events is to let their beliefs limit what is possible. When you’re planning an event, you may feel that you’re not capable of handling an event for more than 20 people. In reality, you’re probably capable of handling far more; it’s your beliefs that are limiting what is possible. If you never attempt to host an event for more than 20 people, you’ll never prove yourself capable of hosting an event for more than 20 people. If you believe you can host a large, successful event, you can host a large, successful event. Set yourself up for success by building positive beliefs.

Audience Size and Price Point
Audience size and price point are two key areas in which people often limit themselves when planning an event. If you have a good marketing strategy and plan the right event, you can fill virtually any size room. If you don’t have much of a list and don’t know how to market an event, you might need to start with smaller events and work your way up. General convention has it that people can almost always generate and handle a larger audience for their events than they attempt to handle.

Price is another area where people severely limit themselves. It’s common to think “People won’t pay this much for this event.” Generally, people will pay far more than you’re asking for an event. The key is to think of how much you think is reasonable for the event, and then raise the price.

Ultimately, planning an event is as much a mental process as anything else. You must go into an event with the right mindset to create a successful event. If you don’t believe you’ll create a successful event, or don’t believe that people will register or pay what you’re asking for an event, you’ll have trouble filling the room.

My advice – apply these tips, create the right mindset and believe!  If you do that,   you’ll have a brilliant event that will be successful and extremely profitable!

The process of justifying your price has two components: giving your prospects a reason to pay your price, and overcoming their objections to your price. If your price is in the high end range, I recommend offering  payment plans -  break up the payment into monthly payments or another payment installment plan. This enables you to overcome client objections about price, and increase your conversion by capturing more of your prospects.

When you’re offering a high-end product, some of you prospects may have a mental barrier to your price point based on their income, their cash-on-hand, or a variety of other factors that are beyond your control or your ability to predict. In many cases, this mental barrier can be overcome if you use monthly payments to justify your price. For example, if you’re offering a $1,000 workshop, someone looking at your materials might think $1,000 is more money than they have at the moment, or more money than they can afford to pay for a workshop.

On the other hand, if you offer them four easy payments of $250, that mental barrier of seeing the $1,000 number goes way down. It’s the same paying $1,000, but people don’t tend to think of it as $1,000 – they think of it as $250. This simple technique can go a long way toward overcoming the initial mental barrier about a price, and reducing your barrier of entry for potential clients, thus increasing your conversion rate.

In addition to using payment plans to overcome the mental barrier that prospects might have to buying your product, you can also use payment plans to increase registrations at your next event.   Use your payment plan options to encourage early registration. For example, if your event costs $600, you could give people the option of paying four easy payments of $150, or three payments of $200 or two payments of $300 getting closer to the event. While this all ultimately adds up to $600, many people, when given the option of paying $150 or $300, will choose to pay $150. This means you can get people registered earlier, as well as getting income from your registrations earlier, which can help you pay many of your event fees and costs before the event itself.

Recently one of my clients posted a query on my Mastermind Forum about payment plans.   They were concerned that a lot of people may register but fail to make all the payments. In my experience, very few people register, make one or two payments and then drop out. It’s very rare for this to happen.    Most people who register and make a payment,  stick with the plan and pay it all, or contact you to work out any difficulties. Using a payment plan isn’t administratively a lot more difficult than taking one payment up-front.

When you’re pricing your product or event, consider offering your prospects a payment plan. A payment plan can go a long way toward overcoming the mental barrier against your price, and can help you increase your conversion rate and get more people registered for your event!

Bernadette Doyle is a marketing specialist who helps entrepreneurs become client magnets and attract a steady stream of their ideal clients. She publishes a free, weekly newsletter for trainers, speakers, coaches, consultants, complementary therapists and solo professionals. If you’d like to receive invaluable tips and advice on how to attract clients with ease, register at http://www.clientmagnets.com

When you’re marketing your product, you must spend some time establishing your product’s value. Before you explore pricing with your sales prospects, you must convince them that your product is truly valuable for them. They need to feel like they want your product, or no price tag will make them buy. If you do a good enough job of presenting your value proposition, you can charge far more than you think you should charge, because you’re letting your product sell itself; you’re not relying on the price to sell your product.

Establish a Problem
First, you must establish a problem that your potential prospects face. For example, one of my students offered pain solutions for back pain sufferers. In her case, the problem that her clients faced was back pain. Think about what you’re trying to sell, whether it’s a seminar, class, or product, and what problem it addresses. That’s the problem you want to establish in your sales material. By introducing the problem that your product solves, you’re setting yourself up to provide the solution.

Show How Your Product Solves the Problem
Once you’ve established the problem, show your potential prospects how your product solves the problem. For my back pain student, her product reduced and eliminated back pain – chronic back pain that her clients simply couldn’t eliminate. Talk about how your product does what it does, and what your client will gain by utilizing your product. If possible, talk about other solutions to the problem, and why your product does it better.

Add Testimonials to Build Value
If you have them, this is a great point to add testimonials. After explaining how your product solves a problem, let one of your clients show the value of your product by including a testimonial about how they had success with your product. For pain sufferers, a good testimonial might be someone saying something like “I had back pain every day before I used this product, but after only a few days, I’m pain free! No more expensive chiropractor visits, endless pain pills, and living every day in pain!” Adding testimonials helps to build the value of your product and add credibility.

Quantify What People Gain
Don’t assume that people will inherently see the value in your product once they know what it does. You have to tell them why your product is good. Quantify what they gain. For back pain sufferers, they gain an end to back pain. But they’ll also be able to stop spending a lot of money on expensive chiropractor visits, pain pills, specialists and other expensive pain-related products. Spell all of this out to your prospects so they’ll see what they gain in writing; don’t just expect them to figure it out for themselves.

Present a Value Proposition for Every Product
You must present a value proposition for every product you sell. Whether you’re selling e-books, coaching programs, seminars, workshops or physical products, you must always establish a value proposition. If you do it well, your product will sell itself – you won’t have to convince people to buy, because the product will convince them!

Value is a subjective term, a relative feeling.  If someone perceives the value of a product or a service to be high, he or she will naturally be willing to sacrifice more (time, money, etc.) to take advantage of its value.

So along that vein, if you want to build the price tag of your teleseminar (and I’m sure you do), you must increase its perceived value.  Consumers naturally think in a “what’s in it for me?” manner.  When you create a belief that what they’re getting from your teleseminar will greatly outweigh their investments of time and money, you have managed to increase the perceived value of your event.

Here are some ways to accomplish that high-value factor:

• Promise to disclose secrets. True secrets would be those things that aren’t common knowledge.  Or, even better, they are those things which you have discovered; things which you invented or uncovered that can make your teleseminar participants’ lives better.

• Promise to divulge your mistakes. Some failures, especially small ones, are inevitable, and can be instrumental in learning for success.  But if you can share the mistakes that you’ve made, to save your audience the time and grief that can come when they make those same mistakes, you will increase the perceived value of your teleseminar.

• Save your audience some time. When the information that you have compiled for disclosure on your teleseminar will save your participants hours, days, or weeks of research, you move them toward their goals more quickly, which is for most, invaluable.  For instance, if you can offer succinct, successful methods for doing something on a 30 minute call, for which people would normally spend 2 or more hours researching, you have created value.

• Quantify the cost. Ask yourself how much it would cost participants to unearth the information, on their own, that you’re planning to convey.  Consider resources they would have to buy, the traveling they might have to do, the phone calls they may have to make, and the time away from revenue-building that they would have to spend.

• Limit participation. If you limit the number of spaces on your teleseminar to 10, for instance, you will increase value.  Registrants will know that they won’t have to compete with 100 other people during question-and-answer time, and they’ll attach a noted value to that opportunity to have a voice.  You may have only expected to get 10 people on your call anyway, but by making a statement of limits, you increase perceived value.  This not only ensures that you get 10 people who are very interested in your topic, but will allow you to convert a stumbling block into a selling point.

• Offer extras. Gifts like transcripts, reports, templates, memberships, e-mail support, participation in a follow-up question-and-answer session, critiques of participants’ work, etc. will add perceived value and increase your revenue, as long as the gift you’re giving doesn’t out-cost your price tag differential.

Remember, if you create a high perception of value before your teleseminar, you must deliver on your promises.  Some of your best teleseminar customers will be repeat ones, so you’ll want to make sure that you do everything that you say you will, or your offerings will be viewed as fraudulent.

Success with higher price tags is all about perceived value.  Offer your audience what they’re looking for in a teleseminar, and incorporate the tactics outlined above.  Doing so will raise their perceptions of value…in a direct, upward relationship to your bottom line.

Bernadette Doyle specializes in helping entrepreneurs attract a steady stream of ideal clients. If you want to get clients calling you instead of you calling them, sign up for her free weekly e-zine at http://www.clientmagnets.com

No matter what you’re selling, whether it’s a training course or a marketing seminar or a physical product, you’ve probably spent a long time agonizing over price. Sellers almost always spend more time than they need to thinking about and setting a price. In reality, sellers think price is a lot more important than it actually is. The next time you’re pricing a product, keep these things in mind.

Price Isn’t as Important as You Think
Sellers almost always spend far too much time thinking about the price of a product. They agonize over whether they’ve priced their product appropriately for their market. In most cases, sellers actually under-price their products. When I work with people one-on-one, I almost always find that sellers are charging too little for what they’re offering. I spent a lot of time telling people to raise their prices.

While sellers may think that price is the most important aspect of marketing an event, that’s simply not the case. Research has shown that less than 10% of buyers are actually influenced by price as a primary factor when they make a decision. Realistically, it isn’t the price that matters, but how well you market the event.

Present Your Price Effectively
Many sellers think that if they price a product low enough, it will virtually sell itself. Sellers think that low prices are easy to justify in consumer minds, so consumers will want to take advantage of the low product and make the decision to buy or register. In reality, it isn’t the price that influences peoples’ decisions to buy; but rather, how well you present that price. If you don’t present your price effectively, the sale is over before it’s begun.

Beware of Sticker Shock
Sticker shock is a phenomenon that occurs when people present their prices too early. You don’t start off a presentation by telling people how much something costs, because then they’re fixated on that price. If they feel that the price is high, they’ll stop listening to whatever you have to say, and you’ve lost the sale. Instead, present the price toward the end of the sales presentation.

Build Your Product Value
To effectively sell your product, you must establish your product’s value. You must spend time showing your potential buyers why your product is a must-have product. Explain what they get from buying your product. Show them how your product solves a problem they just can’t seem to resolve, or how it does so better than anyone else’s product. Once you’ve established that your product has value, you can present the price of your product; after your buyer is convinced enough of your product’s value to listen to your value proposition.

In Summary …  Charge More, and Present Your Price at the Right Time
Don’t undercharge for your product. A low price won’t sell your product – good sales copy will sell your product. Price your product appropriately, and spend time establishing the value of your product before you reveal the price to your sale prospects. With the right value proposition techniques, you can increase your conversion rate and let your product sell itself!

Bernadette Doyle specializes in helping entrepreneurs attract a steady stream of ideal clients. If you want to get clients calling you instead of you calling them, sign up for her free weekly e-zine at http://www.clientmagnets.com

The registration process is a key aspect of planning an event. The more registrations you get, and the earlier you can get them, the better you can plan for your event. With enough registrations or pre-registrations, you can pay deposits and completely fund your event without a penny of your own money. If you don’t get enough registrations up front, you may worry about filling the event or managing the costs of the event.

“Early Bird” Pros and Cons
Many people utilize an “early bird” strategy to get people to pre-register for events early. With the “early bird” marketing technique, you give people a discount for pre-registering far in advance of the event. Having the cash early offsets the discount, somewhat, and you can also price events slightly high so that the discount is the price you really hope to achieve, and so it looks even more attractive to prospects.

Unfortunately, the “early bird” marketing strategy has one major downside: once the deadline passes, people have no particular incentive to register. The deadline creates a false sense of urgency, and once that deadline is gone, the urgency is passed. You can use the early bird strategy effectively with other marketing techniques, but don’t count on it to carry your pre-registration efforts.

Plan a SERIES of Deadlines Leading up to the Event
One useful strategy for successfully marketing an event is to plan a series of deadlines leading up to an event. You might have price increases, or you might provide ‘bonuses’ or ‘extras’ for people who register before a certain date. For example, participants who register before a certain date might also get bonus materials, such as a handout, manual or guide.

Alternately, you could give people who register before a certain date an opportunity to participate in a one-on-one session with a lecturer or industry professional at the event, or other value-added session. By having a series of deadlines, you can continue to create urgency to register without simply extending your pre-registration deadline.

Provide Payment Plan Options
Another effective strategy for boosting pre-registration is to provide payment plan options. Break it down to payments that sound simple and relatively low, instead of demanding the entire registration amount up front. For example, if you’re planning a training course for four months away, you can offer pre-registration for $400, or four easy payments of $100 each.

Set deadlines for each payment to ensure your registrants don’t simply wait until the last minute to pay. The downside with this option is that it may require more administration from you, in that you’ll have to track each payment and may have to track multiple payments for each registrant. However, if this boosts your overall registration, you may decide that the extra administration is worthwhile.

Be Creative and Flexible with Pre-Registration
Above all, be creative and flexible with the pre-registration process. Utilize multiple techniques to boost your pre-registration numbers as much as possible, both to get an accurate idea of the number of attendees at your event, and to help finance your event deposits. With the right pre-registration techniques, you can plan a fantastic and successful event!