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Jas P

How to Handle Price Objections - 0 views

  • Create case studies If you really want to show the value in what you offer, you have to create case studies. The simple ones won’t cut it, you have to give detailed ones… ideally with the exact things you provided and the results. To legitimize the case studies, make sure you put in testimonials from customers. This can be done in the form of video or text and if you happen to go the text route, make sure you include: Their full name Company name Their picture Title at the company If you want to see an example of a good case study, check this one out from Conversion Rate Experts.
  • Offer a free trial One of the easiest ways to handle price objections is to offer a free trial. Remember, just because you are offering a free trial doesn’t mean you can’t take a credit card up front. With Crazy Egg, one of our biggest objections from people is that our prices are too high. We created a “free trial” offering in which people had to put in their credit card up front. That offer converted at 59% higher than our 30 day money back guarantee offer. Keep in mind that you will get a lot of people who will cancel your service before their free trial is up, so when you a/b test this you have to also include cancelations into your calculations.
  • Explain the value The easiest way to demand a high price point is to explain how much money you are going to either make a company, or how much money you will save them. If you can explain this in an easy to understand fashion and provide case studies to back it up, it shouldn’t be hard to demand a premium price. A great way to do this is through sales copy. And don’t worry, your copy doesn’t have to be sleazy. I do this with Crazy Egg, NeilPatel.com and I also used to do it for my Quick Sprout Traffic System. You could even spice up your sales copy by including a video incase people don’t want to read your copy.
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  • Offer payment plans When I used to sell the Quick Sprout Traffic System, some people felt it was a bit too expensive. They didn’t like the fact that I was charging $197 for an eBook, and video/audio training. Instead of reducing the price I tested out a few payment plan options: 3 payments of $97. 4 payments of $67. Although both pricing plans in total were more expensive than the original price of $197, the 3 payments plan option converted at 34% more than the original offering and the 4 payment plan option converted at 52% better than the original. With the 3 payment plan option I still got complaints about my prices being too high, but with the 4 payment plan option, I got almost no complaints. Plus I was able to charge more than the original price of $197.
  • Explain what you don’t charge for Just like any good business, you want to go above and beyond for your customers. Which is why you probably provide a few little extra things for your customers at no charge. When people start to complain about your price points, you should explain how you go the extra mile for your customers and all of the little things you do for free. You can even express this on your website by bundling all of that extra stuff you provide into a “free bonus” for anyone that purchases your product or service.
  • Explain why your price points are high If people understand why your prices are what they are, they’ll be more likely to pay them. Tell them your fix costs, explain what their money is being spent on, and even tell them your profit margins. People know you are in business to make money, but no one wants to feel like they are being screwed over. If your margins are reasonable and you explain your costs to potential customers, they shouldn’t have an issue. For example, Single Grain had an issue in which potential customers felt their prices were too expensive. Instead of reducing their prices they explained to the companies why they charge so much, then they broke down their costs and even shared their margins. By doing this they were able to sign on 33% more new customers.
  • Offer lower price points for less and then upsell Now this won’t work for all businesses, but you could lower your price by offering a limited version of your product or service. Plus if people are happy and looking for more, it creates upsell opportunities. I actually had this happen to me when I tried hiring a copywriter by the name of Michael Williams. I didn’t want to pay his fee of $12,000 so he sold me on a smaller package that only cost me $3000. Funny enough, after 2 months, I went back to him and paid an additional $9000 to receive the rest of his services as I had a huge ROI on my initial investment. At KISSmetrics, upsells make up almost 10% of our new monthly revenue. We’ve found that a lot of companies at first don’t want to pay for our higher plans, but within 3 months of using our product, they’ll upgrade to a higher end plan after seeing a positive ROI.
  • Focus on how you are better than the competition If people didn’t see the value in cars like BMW or Mercedes Benz, they would just buy something affordable like a KIA. The fact is a car like a BMW or Mercedes Benz not only has more features than a KIA, but also is better built. Consider creating a comparison chart that shows how you differ from the competition. This is done on the homepage of Crazy Egg. It provided a single digit increase in conversions, so not a huge boost but better than nothing at all. It also reduced support questions by almost half in regards to our prices versus our competitors’ prices.
  • Stress the drawbacks of a lower price point In many cases, lower prices will come with a drawback. If you can explain the drawbacks of the lower price you can persuade people to pay your premium prices. A good example of this is RackSpace. They are one of the largest hosting companies and possibly one of the most expensive. They charge a lot, but their uptime rate is phenomenal. If you ever speak with one of their sales representatives they’ll quickly explain they are expensive, but they rarely if ever go down. They’ll also explain that their competitors may be cheaper but tend to go down more often. Then finally they’ll close hard at the end by asking what it would cost you every minute your website is down. For this reason they have done extremely well with their high price points. The company is worth almost 9 billion dollars as of today.
  • Leverage perceptual price points There are a lot of little tricks you can do to make your price points seem like they are lower than they actually are. Walmart has actually mastered this. Instead of charging you $50 for something, they’ll charge you $49.97. That way you emotionally feel like you are getting a good deal. If you want to learn more about physiological pricing, you should check out this blog post on KISSmetrics. It has some great tactics with examples you can use and learn from. Even the smallest thing can have a huge impact on your sales. Such as removing the “$” sign from your price points, which can cause a boost in sales and reduce price objections.
Jas P

7 Tips That Will Actually Improve Your Customer Acquisition Efforts | Grow Everything. - 0 views

  • 1. 80/20 rule from Noah Kagan Appsumo’s founder, Noah Kagan, notes that one rule of thumb that they follow is to use 80% of their marketing budget for things that are working and 20% on newer marketing initiatives. One more thing: they go all in when they find marketing channels that work. You can watch one of his presentations where he shares his experiences of growing Mint, Facebook, and AppSumo here.
  • 2. Communicate, communicate, communicate At Treehouse, we work remotely and as you might imagine. There are some that think there is no replacement to working in person while others support it. For us, we’re half and half – we have an office in Orlando and we also have a team up in Portland. The rest of us are distributed. But hey, it works because we communicate a lot. If you don’t feel like you are running enough A/B tests, speak up about it. If you feel like the team needs more developers, speak up. If you feel like an executive decision is going to cost the company money in the long run, talk. People might not always agree with you but it’s your job to communicate. You’re doing the company a disservice if you aren’t being honest. To get you started, here are some tools we use to communicate: Campfire Skype Google Chat Google Hangout GoToMeeting – we use GoToMeeting for our leadership meetings. It’s very simple to use and the video quality is pretty good.
  • 3. Be a voracious reader Although there’s a lot of crappy content circulating the internet, there’s always going to be someone you can learn from. The key is being able to discern signal from noise. For example, if I’m looking to learn more on conversion rate optimization, there are great blogs such as Unbounce, ConversionXL, KISSmetrics, SEOmoz, and more. Just look at the detailed blog posts that they write: 10 Useful Findings About How People Use Websites – ConversionXL 5 Landing Page Conversion Killers – Unbounce The Ultimate Guide to Conversion Rate Optimization – SEOmoz If your goal is to squeeze every penny out of your website, you should be reading conversion rate optimization articles like the ones above. They cost no money to read and stand to help create original ideas that will eventually create more profit for you. This applies to any topic you’re interested in. Using the right tools can go a long way in helping you save time. If you’re on the go and don’t have time to read, you can use Pocket. To help you find relevant topics/articles via Twitter, you can grab curated lists using Listorious. Finally, I like picking off interesting topics from Inbound.org or Hacker News. Key takeaway: don’t read every single blog out there. Find the ones that actually add value and follow them.
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  • 4. Never assume you know everything They say two years in the tech world is like ten regular years. Things move very quickly so it’s important to stay grounded, even if you’re doing well. What worked two years ago might not be effective today. For example, if you wanted to rank well in Google for certain keywords in 2008, all you had to do was spam forum links with exact match anchor text. Doing that today would get you torched by Google. Be willing to adapt and be humble. It’ll take you a long way.
  • 5. Be willing to listen to other people People will often have opinions or ideas on how to help drive growth for the company. Listen to them. Sure, they might not have the hands on experience that you have it comes to marketing but it doesn’t mean they don’t have good ideas. Marketing/growth is a company wide initiative and everyone should be participating. I’m not saying that you have to take action on everything others tell you, but listen closely and try to discern the signal from the noise.
  • 6. Test everything We live in a world today where you no longer have to be afraid of challenging executives when you think something is wrong. If you feel strongly that something should be a certain way, all you need to do is fire up an A/B test and have the two variations duke it out. The data decides the winner. And if you are the executive and someone comes up to you with a seemingly stupid idea that you think will never work? Test it. And if their test goes to shit, then they’ll know to come back to you next time better prepared. That’s what makes data great. Don’t know what to test? Look for case studies such as this one to get ideas. Then gather feedback/data from your customers and decide on which elements you should be testing and do it. Don’t waste your time trying to outsmart your peers on why your idea is superior. Just shut up and test.
  • 7. Talk to others Talk to others. A lot. I make it a habit to talk with other Chief Marketing Officers/VP of Marketing/Growth Hackers because they share valuable experiences that might help my company grow. In return, I do the same so the relationship is mutually beneficial. If you’re starting from scratch and need a way to talk to these people, Clarity is a great way to do so. You can connect with some of the world’s brightest minds not only in just marketing, but in other areas such as angel investing. Another method is to read a lot and reach out to authors who have written articles that are truly remarkable. These are the articles that make you go ‘wow, this guy really knows what he’s talking about and I could probably learn a lot from him’. If you get that reaction, then it’s worth it to shoot them a tweet or even e-mail them. I used this method to find my present day mentor, who has helped accelerate my growth considerably. The key is to keep reaching out to people – you never know which relationship might sprout into something very powerful so you just need to keep at it.
Jas P

[Companies with 8 figures of revenue] are worth many multiples of 8 figures to a... | H... - 0 views

  • Let's say that you've built up, from essentially nothing, enough of a presence in your industry that you're selling $10 million a year of SaaS. That's only 10k accounts at a blended average of $100 a month -- far less if, like many SaaS companies, you make a significant whack of your money on custom enterprise deals that are not on the pricing page.
  • Now consider this company from the perspective of a Fortune 500 like, say, Intuit:1) They have software which exists.2) Their software creates clear value for customers. They have 10,000 people signing their praises and case studies up the wazoo. We know people will pay $100 a month for it -- we have copious, audited financial statements that prove that.
  • 3) Oh yeah, we're a Fortune 500 company. Launching a new product costs us $250 million and we could fail to produce something that both achieves technical success and produces any value for anyone anywhere. Assuming we do, selling to our built-in base of hundreds of thousands of customers is what we do best.Intuit can totally justify spending, say, $300 million to buy $20 million a year of revenue and the opportunity to 20x that by selling it to everyone who has ever heard of Quickbooks. Or mid 8 figures for something which has, say, a million a year in revenue.
Jas P

5 Common Mistakes Made when Getting Customer Feedback - And How to Avoid Them - 0 views

  • 1) You are talking too much.. 99% of the process of getting feedback is listening. If you want some great feedback on your website, shut up and listen.
  • 2) You are getting mad at your customers for feeling one way or another. Customers are allowed to feel the way they feel. My above anecdote is a classic – she got angry for me not liking the font option, instead of making a note to herself “client can’t find the font change option – are other having a hard time finding it?” I also see companies get hung up on this mistake a lot with pricing. Business: “How much would you pay for this?” Client: “I wouldn’t pay for it but would use it if it was free.” It isn’t their fault that they did not understand the value of paying for it.
  • 3) You are not understanding or caring about the customer’s WHY. You must understand a customer’s WHY. Why do they feel the way they do? A good example with a recent client: the feedback from not one but three testers: “I hate that color purple.” Ok, so you could take that and change it to orange, but you don’t even know why you are making that change. Instead, I asked why, and got back “because the font is hard to read at the top.” Ok. now we have a readability problem, not a color problem. Much clearer issue to fix.
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  • I asked “tell me about your tablet usage, if you have one. What apps are you using?”
  • Now I have their actual buying behaviour. I looked up those apps to see how much they were, and that’s data I can make good decisions on. You can learn much more from a customer’s ACTUAL behaviour than what they say they would do.
  • 5) You’re (over?)reacting to all customer feedback. Yes, you should acknowledge and thank all feedback, unsolicited or otherwise. But sometimes you have to sometimes agree to disagree. For example, maybe a feature your customer wants is too expensive and your revenue model just can’t justify it. Heck maybe your customer is wrong – it’s happened before. Or maybe that customer is heading in a different direction than you are. Again, that’s ok.
Jas P

Ramit Sethi and Patrick McKenzie on Getting Your First Consulting Client | Kalzumeus So... - 0 views

  • Ramit:  I want to emphasize a couple of things you mentioned. One, if you’re charging 5, 10, 20 bucks an hour, it’s very, very difficult to go from that to charging 200, 300 an hour or 10,000 a week.  It’s very difficult to make that transition. If you do it when you come in, that can happen. But going from one level to another is extremely difficult.
  • Thumbnail sketch: You can get from $20 to $100 by getting serious as a professional, and you get from $100 to $200 by getting really good as a professional (or working in a high-demand speciality), and then somewhere between say $150 and a weekly rate in the tens of thousands you probably repositioned your offering such that it is no longer directly comparable to what you were doing before.
  • Can you sell Rails at $50k a week?  I'm going to go with "almost certainly yes."  I think there are probably people who do that, and if you listened to them pitch clients, they would speak a language that holds very little in common with what you hear from a $100 an hour Rails developer.  Want to speak that language?  Keep reading for some thoughts.  (It will also help to get pretty darn good at Rails... though I think most people in my audience probably overestimate how skilled you have to be to move up that ladder.)]
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  • Ramit: The other thing you mentioned is how many people go in saying, “I’ll just do this first, and I need to make my bones.” And you know what? There is a time and a place to do free work. I do believe in free work occasionally. But I always tell people if you’re going to do free work, make sure you are clear about your messaging.
  • Now, I’m generally not a fan of free work, but I can be strategically. This is what I would say to the client. I would say look, my normal consulting rate is $85 an hour, or whatever format of pricing you’re using.
  • However, I really like what you’re doing, and frankly, I want to build up my portfolio. I would be willing to do this for three weeks for free if, in exchange, you agree that if I do an extraordinary job, then we can discuss working at my normal rate. Well, who’s going to say no to that? If you do an extraordinary job, everyone’s going to want to pay you.
  • But in this case, yes, you are working for free. But you are explaining why. That is so important. It separates you from, frankly, the people who are new. They’re new, and you can tell that they’re asking to be taken advantage, because they’re like OK, I’ll work for free. It’ll be fine. Somehow, I’ll go from free to $500 an hour. Doesn’t work. Explain your messaging. Explain your positioning, and people will respect you way more for it.
  • You will then aggressively leverage this portfolio when attempting to get work at your current billing rates.  I have projects which I did at $X per week which I will use to justify new $5X per week projects at new clients.  If clients ever picked up on the discrepancy – which would require me being stupid like mentioning that somewhere publicly… wait… d’oh – I would say something like “My previous client took a chance on me earlier in my career, when I didn’t have a track record of delivering results to people just like them. 
  • Ramit:  That’s right. I want to talk about one of the secret sauces of my business, and it’s something that actually nobody really cares about. People think they care about it, but they don’t care about it. It is the research that I do going into building a product or getting a client. And I know you’ve done this as well. It’s funny. The other day, I was asking people, “Hey, if I speak at South by Southwest, what would be a good talk?” Somebody wrote back on Twitter saying, “You should talk about your research methodology.” I said that would be great… for the three people who would attend.
  • Research is what allows me to charge 100 times what my competition charges… but nobody cares. Nobody wants to see [the hard work which goes into] how the sausage is made.  They just want to see the shiny tactic – the A/B test where you tested the color of this button.
  • I have a course called Earn 1K, and it’s about how to take your skills and turn them into freelancing income by getting multiple clients and earning 1K. Many of my successful students earn 5K or 10K in a month on the side. So, very relevant to the people listening here. When I started off doing this research, I actually didn’t even think of doing an “earn money” product
  • You can negotiate your salary. You can get passive income, which for most people, never works. You can get freelance income. You can blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.  [Patrick notes: Ramit would probably round out this list with 1) buy real estate and rent it to people, 2) invest in the public capital markets, and 3) start an honest-to-goodness business.]
  • Now, you can get good survey data with as few as 20 responses.  For all the engineers listening, listen closely: Statistical significance is irrelevant when you’re doing customer research. I don’t give a damn about P values and anything like that. It’s almost all qualitative.
  • Now, you don’t have to do 50,000.  Honestly, 100 gets you farther than most people do. [Patrick notes: I think talking to ten individual people who could actually buy your product prior to writing a line of code puts you ahead of the curve, judging from my inbox.  You’ll learn a million times more from 10 people than you’ll learn from your IDE when coding a product built for nobody.]
  • No SEO wakes up in the morning and thinks, “Damn, I have a WordPress problem.” They wake up in the morning and say, “Damn, I have a business problem.”
  • I pay them pretty well. I have passed on hiring engineers who may be more technically proficient, but they didn’t understand what I wanted. Honestly, guys, as a business owner, do you think I care if you’re using this technology or that? I just don’t give a damn [about technology]. I really don’t.
  • What I care about is, is my business going to generate revenue? Am I serving my customers? Is my website going to go down, and I have to be the one who tells you? Or can I go out on a Friday night and not worry about my business?
  • The guy was doing very well. I believe he was making either 40k or 400k a month. He was doing very well. This guy got pretty interested, and he said, “Hey, I’ve got to take a look at this market.” He spent about four or five months really doing deep research. Lots of stuff, including ad words, including customer research, including buying all the other products.
  • Once we got those right, sales skyrocketed.  [Patrick notes: cough read writeup in Fortune Magazine cough] I’ll just say that it’s very, very important to understand the words that your client or your customer is using and be able to explain how and why you can help them.
  • I think we don’t pay nearly enough attention to the exact words people use. Maybe we would if we came from a communications background. Nothing motivates people like having their own words repeated right back to them, which is something that you should try to do more often. It’s just an easy conversational hack to sound more persuasive.
  • But you have to make your prospective clients feel like you understand where they’re coming from. And that starts with both understanding where they’re coming from, and then communicating like you understand where they’re coming from. Even if you’re building a website for someone, it’s not just a website, right?
Jas P

There is Nothing New in Marketing Except Catch Phrases | Iterative Path - 0 views

  • Marketing is about segmentation and targeting there is nothing more to it. Segmentation is recognizing that different people buy different products for different reasons and  finding those reasons, occasions, usage scenarios and hence what the customer is willing to pay for.
  • Targeting is delivering versions that meets those reasons and customer’s willingness to pay. I started a new series of articles on what I called “Fidelity Trap“.
Jas P

Must-read for founders: A VC explains how to build a killer value proposition | Venture... - 0 views

  • In its simplest terms, a value proposition is a positioning statement that describes for whom you do what uniquely well. It describes your target buyer, the problem you solve, and why you’re distinctly better than the alternatives. One of the classic mistakes of building a value proposition is diving headlong into the solution definition phase before really understanding the problem you’re looking to solve. To understand whether it’s a problem worth solving, I recommend exercising four U’s: Is the problem unworkable? Does your solution fix a broken business process where there are real, measureable consequences to inaction? Is fixing the problem unavoidable? Is it driven by a mandate with implications associated with governance or regulatory control? For example, is it driven by a fundamental requirement for accounting or compliance? Is the problem urgent? Is it one of the top three priorities? In selling to enterprises, you’ll find it hard to command the attention and resources to get a deal done if you fall below this line. Is the problem underserved? Is there a conspicuous absence of valid solutions to the problem you’re looking to solve? Focus where there’s whitespace, not scorched earth.
Jas P

Hetzner Online AG - 0 views

  •  
    Hetzner provides lots of power, ram and CPU for a good price. Worth looking at if you're looking to get your own VPS or Dedicated Server.
Rafal Dyrda

Numbers for Startups - 2 views

  • Produce quality financial projections for your business, without your own in-house finance team.
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