Episode 52: Mastering the Art of Pricing: Discover Your Value and Attract Your Ideal Clients

Unlock the secrets to pricing your products and services with confidence and clarity. Promising fresh insights into the psychology of pricing, we join forces with a luxury photographer client who shares her journey of realizing that setting prices too low can inadvertently devalue her premium offerings. Through our conversation, you'll discover how the worth of your services isn't just about the numbers—it's about the transformative results and time-saving benefits you deliver to your clients. As we unravel these crucial aspects, you'll gain the tools to experiment with pricing strategies that truly reflect the broader impact of your work.

In our quest to define value and attract your tribe, we delve into the art of identifying and communicating your unique strengths. By listing your services and articulating why you excel at each, you'll not only boost your confidence but also begin to cultivate a devoted client base. Drawing inspiration from icons like Tom Brady and LeBron James, we emphasize that greatness is subjective. It’s about finding and focusing on those who truly resonate with your unique offerings. Together, we'll empower you to understand your value, leading to more compelling selling conversations and a stronger presence in your market.

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Chapters

• 0:05 The Psychology of Pricing and Value
• 8:59 Defining Value and Finding Your Tribe

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:05

Hello and welcome to the Vicki Kotris podcast. I am your host, none other than Vicki Kotris. I'm a retired corporate girly, two-time six-figure founder who's obsessed with brand building, sales generating and digital marketing. My mission with this podcast is to share the lessons I've learned, to help you make more magic and money with your own marketing efforts, and to feel inspired to continue on your own journey as a creator and entrepreneur. Here I'll share real life strategies, marketing tips and mindset shifts that have helped me go from cubicle to creator. This podcast is for business owners, creatives or those just looking for a little more sparkle in their day, so let's kick off this week's episode. Hey guys, welcome back.

Speaker 1: 0:51

Today I want to talk about something so juicy, something so scary, something so crazy that so many business owners cannot wrap their head around and begin to maul it over and let them let it just simmer to where you cannot make a decision and you start to feel bad. Can you guess what it is? It's pricing. It is the idea of putting a monetary value on a product or service that you provide and is so intertwined in marketing and worth and worthiness and all of these different mental breaks that we do not even see it as a problem, because if we are so used to putting a value on something of our own, which we do in our society, obviously everything has a cost. Like I paid for this microphone I'm talking on, I paid for the food that I had this morning. There is a cost to purchase something and there was a value placed by that company of how much that should be worth and how much I should pay. Where I think we get so hung up, especially as entrepreneurs, especially as solopreneurs maybe you are even just somewhere in the middle grappling with the idea of value or worth is that we attach it to the actual product and say this is what it is worth. What we forget is that worth and value is all subjective to whoever is the one on the receiving end of the product. So what I might pay $25 for, my friend might pay $150 for, or someone else might only pay $5 for. It's all how we perceive value in our lives and the things that we might need at the time. So that's why marketing is so important of your product, because you are essentially saying I believe in this product or service so much that I am building a full campaign and shouting from the rooftops why you should buy this so that you feel a connection to what you will be paying or what the value will be to you.

Speaker 1: 3:32

There is such an opportunity in that, and the reason why it's so top of my mind right now is because I had a conversation with a client recently who was telling me all about her business. She is a luxury photographer. She takes gorgeous, gorgeous, ethereal photos. They're so beautiful and she is an artist at what she does. And she's telling me what her goals are for next year. Her goals are that she wants to do less weddings at a higher price point, and I laughed because I said this is literally everyone's goal.

Speaker 1: 4:06

Everyone that I talked to, myself included. Everybody wants to work less and make more. We want to enjoy our lives. We want more time so that we can actually do the things that we love. That's what makes entrepreneurs so special is because many of us have cracked that code and realized that the true currency in life is time. It is not money. The more money that you make buys you the more time to do the things that you may actually want to do or the things that you value more.

Speaker 1: 4:36

So we're having this conversation. She's telling me what she really wants to do. She's saying, you know, I want to take a little bit of a step back and I said, okay, well, you know, ask me what their prices are and how she sees herself getting there, how she wants to do that. And she tells me a really ironic idea. She tells me that she knows that she missed out on business this past year because she was priced too low. Business this past year because she was priced too low because her target audience that she markets to that she and has also created strategic partnerships to target this market. Meaning she works with wedding planners and other high-end vendors that service this group, that they. She has gotten feedback from these vendors who have brought her into these discussions or relationships with a family who would book her bride and groom, who would book her and said they didn't get, they didn't understand that because she was priced so low that she was actually a very talented and wonderful photographer. They assumed because her price was so much lower that her services were cheap, that they were discounted and this particular group they didn't want that. So it doesn't matter if we are good, because good or great is subjective to the person who is on the receiving end of that product or service.

Speaker 1: 6:13

And I found that so interesting because it truly ties back to the psychology of sales, where, when we are making an investment in something, we are not always looking for the cheapest price Because we assume that what we are getting is not valuable, is not going to solve our problem, is not what we need. So I say that because I am working with another client who's working on different pricing strategies for services and digital products that she's creating, and there's a little bit of experimentation going on and I caught myself in an instance thinking like that's a high price for what it is. And then I thought, well, let's reverse engineer this. Let's think about what is someone actually getting from purchasing this product? By building this relationship with my client, will they see results that could change the trajectory of their life? Could they make more money, could they change their career? These are all things that are related with my certain client and I thought, yeah, so what's the price of that? So what would you pay for that? Is it too high? Is it too low?

Speaker 1: 7:34

And that's where those really interesting, thought-provoking conversations come in, because you are now starting to think of it from the perspective of what you are giving someone what they will receive by working with you or buying your product or enhancing their life in some kind of way, and even if you have products or services that are at a low price point, you are preaching to the choir now. Hi, it's me. I'm the choir. I sell $5 ice creams for a living, so I know what it's like to have a lower price point. What I know now, to be true, is something that you should know as well, is your time is extremely, extremely valuable, and if your goal is to find more of it, then you have to respect it by pricing your time appropriately. So while I might sell a $5 ice cream, I know that I don't show up anywhere unless I am guaranteed to make at least $500 or $600 in that two-hour span, and that's how we have valued our time and our services. So it becomes a lot more complex of a conversation of how you price that and how you think about the value that you're providing.

Speaker 1: 8:59

If you are struggling with this, a excellent exercise that I have been doing for myself is writing down all of the different services that I provide my clients, and then I create three subtopics under there of why I am the best woman for the job, why I am so great at doing that and I don't get caught up with. Am I the greatest? Because that is subjective. We are all the greatest. We can all be the goat there with Tom Brady and LeBron James. We can all step into that role and that's marketing.

Speaker 1: 9:37

Folks, we could say what we are, but we don't have to be the greatest in our minds. We have to know what our value is, what our unique fingerprint is that we bring to the marketplace and know that we can successfully offer that to a client. And something I heard recently is we don't have to be the something for everyone. We just have to provide something to someone and expand that value to multiple someones. And that's how we find our people. And that's how we find our people, that's how we find our tribe, that's how we find our VIPs. Those are the people that continuously come back and purchase our products. So looping back to the idea of value is finding areas in your life that you can better serve people in your business and knowing why you do that will make those selling conversations so much more powerful. It will put more oomph behind your convictions when you explain to a stranger at a networking event, what it is that you do, because you can feel and know that what you do is valuable and important.