“Can I use a value calculator to set my price for my customer?”
I hear this question a little bit less frequently than I used to. But at times people still come to me and say, “I want a value calculator so I can figure out how much to charge the customer.” I then ask, “Why?” and they say, “Well, because we are implementing a value pricing strategy and we want to know how much value the customer receives so that we can charge as close to that value as we can.” Because I know this isn’t going to end well for them, and despite the fact that I am in the business of selling value calculators and ROI tools, we never do these deals.
Here’s what’s wrong with that mindset. Customers will see through the ruse and resent you for not being forthcoming. And even if it worked one time with one customer, it’s not going to work a second time with that same customer. So now you have customers that don’t trust you and won’t spend another penny with you. (By the way, this ugliness then gets reflected back on us and is why we don’t do these deals.)
How to Set Your Price
We all want to maximize our pricing. However, pricing has to be done within the constraints of marketplace competition and competing alternatives, which include the customer doing nothing. Ideally, before you go to market you would perform a strategic analysis of your offering’s value and take into account the constraints just mentioned. However, you can conduct this exercise at any point during the product’s lifecycle. What you are trying to uncover is 1) where your offering’s value is unique, and 2) at what point your offering’s net value exceeds the net value delivered by your competition and competing alternatives. For more detail, read my earlier post, The Value Lifecycle: Establishing Your Value in the Market.
When a Value Calculator Can Help You Set Price
If the customer answered my “Why?” question above with, “Well, we want to implement gain-sharing contracts and share the risk and reward with our customers,” that’s a different story. In this case, a value calculator or ROI tool can be very helpful in establishing the value of the shared risk and pricing. A gain-sharing contract can’t even get off the ground if the value dimensions and measurements can’t even be agreed upon. This is where a value calculator can come in handy – to define what’s being measured and how it’s being measured. An ROI tool can be used to model various pricing scenarios. In general, the greater the price agreed to by both parties, the less the vendor’s upside is.
How do you set your price? What challenges do you face? Are you using gain-sharing agreements?
[Image via Flickr / JD Hancock]
