Flying Blind

What does aviation have to do…

…with your pricing strategy?

Break the bonds of industry pricing!

Get compensated well for the value you provide.

Imagine that you’re a seasoned pilot. You’ve filed your flight plan when a massive snow storm hits. Visibility is zero and the winds are gusting up to 30 knots. Are you going to take off? Not unless you have a death wish, right? You know the dangers of flying blind.

Yet business owners fly blind time and time again. How? Let’s say that your competitor comes out with an improvement to its offering. Your sense that the enhancement is going to give them competitive advantage so you scramble to provide a similar enhancement. You just took off in a blinding snow storm.

First, you don’t know whether their customers, or yours, will value this enhancement. Unless your competitor raised its prices to reflect the additional value the enhancement provides and their customers are paying that price, you don’t know whether the enhancement has any value to the customer.

Second, many business owners give away these enhancements without ever asking for higher prices. Their rationale is that they’ll gain “competitive advantage” and garner a “larger share of the market.” How often has that really happened in your industry? Isn’t it more likely that there was little, if any, shift in market share?

If that’s true, your competitor drove up its cost structure without gaining any additional revenue. That means its margins just dropped. Worse yet, you followed them blindly. Your costs are going up as well, without the benefit of additional revenues. If that weren’t bad enough you just made additional investments to do so. Ouch!

It’s counter-intuitive, but following a competitor’s lead in enhancing their offerings without evaluating their approach and the impact it will have on their bottom line is the equivalent of abandoning your flight plan and taking off into a blizzard. The results can be devastating.

For more information on how you can command higher prices for your products and services, please post your questions or comments below, send Dale an email at dale@furtwengler.com or call him at 314-707-3771.

To see how counter-intuitive thinking can be applied to other business issues, visit Dale’s blog, The Invaluable Leader at www.furtwengler.com/theinvaluableleader/.

What does aviation have to do…

…with your pricing strategy?

Yet business owners fly blind time and time again. How? Let’s say that your competitor comes out with an improvement to its offering. Your sense that their enhancement will give them competitive advantage so you scramble to provide a similar enhancement. You just took off in a blinding snow storm.

Second, many business owners give away these enhancements without ever asking for higher prices. Why? Their rationale is that they’ll gain “competitive advantage” and garner a “larger share of the market.” How often has that really happened in your industry? Isn’t it more likely that there was little, if any, shift in market share?

If that’s true, your competitor drove up its cost structure without gaining any additional revenue. That means its margins just dropped. Worse yet, you followed them blindly. Your costs are going up as well, without the benefit of additional revenues. If that weren’t bad enough you just made additional investments to do so. Ouch!

Discover how easy it is to command higher prices for your products and services, call me at 314-707-3771.

You can get my book, Pricing for Profit, by clicking on the book cover or by ordering online from Borders.com, BarnesandNoble.com and Amazon.com.

Enjoy!

Tags: counter-intuitive pricing, gaining market share, market share, price management, Pricing, pricing management, pricing strategies, pricing strategy

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 30th, 2010 at 6:00 am and is filed under Marketing, Pricing, Sales. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.