July 22, 2010

Add more value to your offer, don't get beaten up on price

If you are up against it on price, try to think of ways of making your product or service different.

Differentiation is relatively easy with services, but with products its more expensive. You can of course improve the services that surround a product to differentiate it. Examples could be; a longer warranty, faster service back up, a replacement product and so on.

This week one of my clients added two processes to their service offering that were not anymore expensive to deliver and they closed an order, 30% higher than their competitors, who were not offering the same level of service, provided by my client. 

People will pay more if they can see the value. 


When your offering is difficult to compare to your competition, your product/service will be less of a commodity, making price pressure easier to deal with.


Let me give you a practical example; years ago I owned a concrete company, now that's a commodity business! We were one of the the first companies to offer  2 metre capacity trucks. We did not charge surcharges for small loads like the bigger operators and our trucks could access areas where the big trucks could not go.


It was a nice little business that we sold to Tarmac in the late 1990's.


Within our Results Driven Marketing coaching system we have 31 different strategies to defend price.


The question to consider is; where can you be different?


Take Care


Regards


Mark 

Integrated Marketing  Copyright Mark Wheatley 2010 All Rights Reserved

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