In a PricingBrew Journal subscriber training seminar, Pricing Services to Customer Value, we talked about the importance of doing the leg-work to really understand your customer’s priorities. We also illustrated how speaking to those primary value-drivers through various packaging strategies can reduce pricing pressure by making your services much more relevant and a lot easier to buy.
And then we got a lesson we weren’t expecting…our webinar service crashed.
Fortunately, our subscribers are a gracious bunch. They know that “stuff” like this is bound to happen at some point. And, they also know that edited and glitch-free versions of our training sessions are always made available to them afterwards.
But when it comes to things that affect our subscribers, we aren’t nearly so gracious. And within just a couple of hours, our team had decoupled the current solution and integrated with a replacement. A more expensive replacement, I might add.
This frustrating experience serves to reinforce the importance of understanding your customers’ value hierarchy. If you don’t understand, for example, that “reliability” will trump “ease of use” and “feature set” every time with your customers, it can hurt you in at least three big ways:
- You invest internal resources toward the wrong things
- You miss big opportunities to differentiate your offerings
- You lose customers that could generate profit for years
There’s another important lesson here are well…
Speaking to the priority value-drivers can indeed help you win the business you want to win, at the prices and margins you want to command.
But winning the business and keeping the business are two very different things. And to keep the business, you can’t just speak to the priority value-drivers—you have to actually deliver on them.
