E101: Get creative on your pricing for more profit with Blair Enns
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Blair Enns is founder and CEO of Win Without Pitching, the sales training organization for creative professionals, and the author of two books: The Win Without Pitching Manifesto (published in 2010) and Pricing Creativity: A guide to Profit Beyond the Billable Hour.
Episode highlights:
- The reason for Blair taking on his second project that’s all about pricing.
- The art and science into pricing (value-based pricing).
- The first three rules to the pursuit of scale and the downfall of customizations.
- Common objections from clients being charged different prices.
- How high to go with pricing.
- Best advice ever received: If you’ve got a body in the trunk of the car, you should stop and fix the burned out headlight or don’t speak.
- Habit that contributes to success: Recharge; the idea that time off is not a reward for effort or good behavior time off is a requirement for success.
- Recommended book: Zero to One by Peter Thiel
- Recommended tool: EconTalk podcast
Links
- winwithoutpitching.com
- Pricing on Purpose by Ronald Baker
- Million Dollar Consulting by Alan Weiss
- @blairenns Twitter
- Blair Enns LinkedIn
- Zero to One by Peter Thiel
- EconTalk podcast
Quotes:
- “I realized I knew nothing about the subjects of pricing and value.”
- “He said I really wanna thank you for what you do. We made a lot of money from your advice over the year. And I said oh that’s great thank you, and they said no no no, we made A LOT of money.”
- “I had no qualms about pricing it in units of hundreds of dollars.”
- “There are ninety thousand pieces of information data points that go into the pricing of an airline seat…ninety thousand points. So it’s like heavy on science and the computation.”
- “You cannot decouple the subject of pricing from the subject of selling.”
- “I proved this in the book is wired to answer the question which of these is the best value so you change the question from is this worth X to which of these is the best value.”
- “I said, “I appreciate that you’ve reached out to me.” and I said this, “So, I want to make two points. Number one, I reserve the right to charge you whatever the hell I want. Your decision is whether you pay it or not. And number two, I pulled the invoices and one of the three of you bought a different product I packaged things up and the other three of you who think you paid three different prices, you all paid the same price, you just misremembered.”
- “You will create animosity if you proposed to be paid more than the value you propose to create or more than what they see as a fair share.”
Takeaways:
- You can create packages for the client without tying your agency to three specific packages for every client all the time.
- (1) Press the client, not the job or the service. (2) Always offer options. (3) Anchor High.
- Charge prices based on the value offering.