You’re all set to increase your price and then you get cold-feet.
It happens all the time and not just with small companies, but with corporate giants.
I can tell you it happens because I’ve personally experienced this with both small companies and global giants.
The big reason a price increase doesn’t stick is due to a failure to have a plan everyone believes in.
In the end, it comes down to having confidence in what you’re doing. Again, this issue of confidence strikes both large and small companies, whether they have high market share or low market share.
There are a number of things you can do to ensure success with a price increase, and I’ll unselfishly tout my book, High-Profit Selling: Win the Sale Without Compromising on Price. If you haven’t read it, you need to.
Okay, enough about that… let’s get back to your confidence.
To help you deal with confidence and ultimately ensure the price increase works, you need to back up the timing of the price increase with a marketing push to go after new customers. The reason I like this is because it’s amazing how confident we are when we have a full pipeline.
The key is to start your prospecting push before you start announcing the price increase. This way as you’re announcing it and having to deal with customer feedback, you can do it confidently.
The more full your pipeline, the more confident you’re going to be to not simply ask your customers for a price increase, but to tell them you are taking a price increase.
The beauty of setting up a real strong push on prospecting just prior to announcing a price increase is the new customers you gain during this push are all going to be at the new higher price. These customers are all going to be basing their price/value relationship on the new higher price.
This will give you still more confidence about why moving all of your customers to the new higher price makes sense.
Copyright 2012, Mark Hunter “The Sales Hunter.” Sales Motivation Blog.
