More Clients Less Hustle

14 Day Challenge: Double Your Revenue Overnight with Per the Price Whisper (Day 2)

• Caroline Balinska + Per the Price Whisper • Season 1 • Episode 9

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Are You Leaving Money on the Table? The Shocking Truth About Pricing Your Business Might Just Make You Rich!

Get this: You're working hard, but your bank account doesn't show it. What if I told you there's a secret weapon that could change everything? A way to make more money without working longer hours?

Meet Per, the Price Whisperer. He's about to blow the lid off the biggest mistake most business owners make - and it's costing you big time!

In this eye-opening episode, Per reveals:

• The pricing trap that's keeping you broke (and how to escape it)
• Why your customers will actually thank you for charging more
• The magic words that'll make price objections disappear
• How to turn your team into pricing ninjas

This isn't just another boring business lecture. It's a goldmine of actionable advice that could transform your business overnight. And the best part? You can start using these tricks today!

So, are you ready to stop undervaluing yourself and start making the money you deserve? Click play now and get ready for your "aha!" moment. Your family (and your bank account) will thank you!



Per's Bio

Per Sjofors, a Swedish and US national, is a seasoned international business executive with a track record of success.

He has led companies in three countries and spearheaded the establishment of joint venture companies in Japan, Korea, and Taiwan.

His thought leadership has been recognized by the Forbes Business Council, and he has been ranked 24th among the Top 50 Global Thought Leaders and Influencers by Thinkers360. Inc Magazine has also acknowledged his impact, listing him among the Top 10 Leaders That Make A Difference in 2023.

His company, Sjofors & Partners Inc., has been identified by the CEO View as one of the Top 50 Innovative Companies to Watch in 2024.

Get In Touch With Per
https://sjofors.com
https://www.linkedin.com/in/persjofors/
https://www.youtube.com/@thepricewhisperer



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Speaker 1:

Welcome to More Clients, less Hustle, the podcast where we break barriers, defy labels and empower busy entrepreneurs like you to soar to new heights. Get ready to shatter the glass ceiling as we dive deep with experts and transformative coaching calls, unveiling secrets to success and unlocking your true potential. Join us on this journey of growth, empowerment and limitless possibilities. Let's pave the way for more clients, less hustle. I'm your host, Caroline Balinska. Hi everyone, welcome back to the 14 day challenge. I'm very excited. We are on day two and I have a guest that I've been desperately wanting to speak to, so this is going to be a fantastic episode. We have Per, the price whisperer, with us today, and as soon as I found out his name, I said this guy must know exactly what he's talking about and, after doing some research, I'm so excited. So, per welcome. So much. Thank you for joining us today.

Speaker 2:

Thank you so much, Carolyn. I'm excited about this and I'm looking forward to being on the show and hopefully share a little bit of my insights to the audience.

Speaker 1:

Fantastic. So you have been doing this for just a couple of years. I believe that I think I can throw some questions at you and you're going to be able to give us some really fantastic answers.

Speaker 2:

More than a couple of years actually. So yes, I think so.

Speaker 1:

Fantastic, so I just want to get into. Today's episode is really about pricing, and the reason why I needed to do this as part of the challenge was because I see it too often, two things that I see all the time either people are pricing themselves ridiculously high or ridiculously low. So let's just sort of touch on that and talk about what the just the overall concept is of pricing and the idea of where we sort of sit with pricing.

Speaker 2:

Prices are optimized when they match the value perception of the customer right, and that value perception is created by everything you do in your company, right. So, depending on how you market yourself, depending on how you target your customers, depending on how the product feature, functions and benefits matches what the customers actually want, your sales strategy, your messaging strategy, your packaging strategy if that's something that you sell all of these affect the value perception of the customer and consequently, they all affect how you can set prices. Now to your statement. It's more common to price too low because companies are often timid in pricing. They say things like I'm unsure about the value that I'm bringing, so let's just price low and hope that will lead to a very high sales volume. And sometimes it does. Many times it doesn't right Because it doesn't match the value perception of the customer.

Speaker 1:

Yeah. So when it comes to pricing, I do see a lot of people pricing really low. I also see people pricing really high without having much substance in what they're selling. Do you see a problem with changing the prices as you go, so increasing your price over time?

Speaker 2:

There's no problem in increasing. Well, there's a process to increase price right and unfortunately, many companies do not adhere to the best practice. They just increase price. But there's a couple of things to think about when you increase price Again. First of all, the price should be increased if that's the right word to again match the value perception of the customer. Secondly, if you increase that price right, when you message that to the customer, it is always, always, always an opportunity for you as a seller to remind the buyer of the particular value that you bring Right. Not like, let's say, one of the more popular streaming platforms, vodio, that I get an email saying that, as of this date, we're going to increase our prices to barabara. That doesn't say anything about the value they bring. They could have said something that we now have a million more songs, we've changed our user interface and now we can actually find what you're looking for. They could have said all different things, but they didn't. They just said we are increasing our price. So they missed the opportunity to deliver a value message right.

Speaker 1:

And that's interesting You're talking about a huge company. Yes, it's not a one-man band that's done that in time.

Speaker 2:

Since I happen to know the guy who runs that particular company, I've reached out and said you guys are doing it wrong and they keep on doing it wrong, right, and the other thing if you're not one of these giant streaming companies but you have salespeople, if you actually have customer support people or customer service people, when you increase prices, right, they are the people who's going to take the brunt. They you know their angry clients are going to call up and say why did you do this? I'm going to go to a competitor and they're going to be saying all different things. So these sales people, these customer support people, must be trained on how to defend the price increase, and a lot of it is again being trained to deliver that value proposition right, and this is what a lot of companies don't.

Speaker 1:

So that's really interesting. What would be sort of some key features that you would talk about as a value proposition when it comes to pricing?

Speaker 2:

Each company has a different value proposition, unless what you're selling is a complete commodity, right? Because if what you're selling is a complete commodity, the value proposition is low price, right. And then the challenge is if you want to increase your price in a commodity, you have to add something around it, right? Maybe you can have better warranties than your competitor, maybe you can have quicker delivery, maybe you can, I don't know. I mean, it all depends, right, but the price of the actual commodity still needs to be the lowest. If you're not selling a commodity, it is to understand what differentiates your particular product, your particular service, in such a way that that value perception is being increased. And that's another thing that a lot of companies struggle with, because what you think internally is the value, may or may not match what the customers say. Is the value right? There is another twist on this, right, and stop me if I'm talking too much Not in that place.

Speaker 1:

I love it. Tell me.

Speaker 2:

There's another twist on this, and that is that companies typically talk to their customers, which is good, right. But two things. First of all, if you talk to your customers and if price comes up in that conversation, the customer is likely to lie, right, and they're likely to lie or at least withhold information that they think is going to be valuable the next time they for the seller, the next time they buy from the same company. They simply want a better deal, right, and this is human behavior, right. And I mean, if you're on, let's just take a made up example here, right? The illustration let's say you're on the car lot, you're going to buy this new car and you have a particular model in mind, you have a particular color in mind, right. And as you walk through the lot, you discover that they have the model and they also have the particular color that you want. Do you say to the salesman oh, you got the color I want, so I'll give you another two grand. No, you don't. You say, oh, you got the color I want, so if you knock another thousand bucks off the price, I'll buy it, and this leads to timidness in pricing.

Speaker 2:

The other issue with talking to customers is that any company goes to market with a certain value proposition. That value proposition is accepted by a portion of the market. The rest of the market just ignores it. A portion of those who accept the value proposition becomes customers. So then, if you talk to customers that already are your customers, why are you buying from us? What is the value proposition that made you buy? They are just going to bounce back what you just told them, right. So then you're suddenly in an echo chamber, right them? So then you're suddenly in an echo chamber and you miss out on this much bigger market that may become customers if you have a slightly different value proposition. And oh, you have to talk to the market, not customers. I mean, you should obviously talk to customers, but those are not the only and I'm saying talking here in the greater sense of the word. Right, communication may be a better word to prospects, to strangers which never heard of the company, but may become prospects and customers should you be able to message them in an effective way.

Speaker 1:

So you do mention. I know that you've got a book and we'll talk about that in a minute, but the one thing that you talk about is better pricing. Can you explain that in more detail to us?

Speaker 2:

Well, again, I sort of alluded to it that you talk about is better pricing. Can you explain that in more detail to us? Well, again, I sort of alluded to it that a better pricing is when it matches the value perception of the customer. If you price to match that value perception, a lot of things is going to happen your sales volume is going to go up, your revenue is going to go up, your profits are going to go up. Right, and let me give you an example of how this could be done.

Speaker 2:

There is a particular way going out in a market and do something called pricing research. And from pricing research you can accurately predict sales volume and revenue at precise price points. If it is done right, right size price points. If it is done right. And just to give you an example of this company, it's a SaaS company. We did this pricing research and we found that they were so underpriced that our recommendation was to quadruple prices. And when I checked in with the CEO eventually he said that well, they increased prices, not overnight, but over a nine-month period roughly. And what he said was that we got an increase in sales volume with 25% right, that is, at four times prices right. And then he continued and he said and then we found, with the higher prices we found a different customer category, a more professional category, we got rid of the bottom feeders and our support costs have gone down with 80%.

Speaker 2:

So pricing also selects the customer that you have. If you're priced very low, you get price-sensitive customers, and price-sensitive customers are often the kind of customers that requires the highest support and you, as a seller, you're investing a lot of money supporting those price-sensitive customers and as soon as there is a cheaper alternative, they're gone Because for them the value is the low price right, whereas if you price higher, you always get a set of customers that are loyal to you, that invest in your company, that promote your company. I mean, how many people switch from Apple to PC? Not many, right? I'm sure there are a few, but there are not many right. So it's worthwhile thinking that, again, the pricing selects the customers you get.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I find that really interesting. I used to have a hairdressing salon. Back when I was 20 years old, I started working in a salon in Australia and it was really low. The prices were for the area it was a very rich area of Melbourne and the prices were quite low one of the lowest salons and so when I came in I became a business partner. The first thing I said was we are increasing our prices like this is ridiculous. And my business partner, he'd been there. So I became 50% partner and he'd been there already for 10 years or something and he thought I was crazy.

Speaker 1:

He's like we can't do this and I forced him to. I said I'm not becoming partner unless we do this. I don't want to work in a salon where the prices are so low and I know we can charge more because I know we have the skill set. So I agreed. What I did agree to him was your clients that you've had for all of these years. You keep them on a secret pricing. I'm not gonna, you know. You just charge them what you want and we'll just increase the prices as our sort of let's see how it works yeah and he was blown away.

Speaker 1:

He's like oh my god, we nearly doubled our um the uh income yeah in like literally two weeks yeah just from increasing our prices and the caliber of clients change. Yeah, I wish all of that and I've been a believer. That was, you know, 25 years ago. I did that and I'm a complete believer and I say to people you price too low and then it's just a race to the bottom and you can't make any money that way.

Speaker 2:

We need to look at this also in a wider perspective. Right, because every company is driven by its profit. This is not so evident to a lot of people, right, but every company is driven by profits. So if you can increase your prices and thus increase your profits, you get more money to market development. You get more money for product development. If you sell products, you get more money for inventory. If that's what you need, you get more money for inventory. If that's what you need. You get more money to define more services. You get more money to hire better, more expensive people, right, and so that's one thing when it comes to profits.

Speaker 2:

The other, of course, is that we are all delivering something of value to our clients. If there's no value, we're eventually going to be gone. Right, with more profits, we are able to deliver that value to more customers. So profits are for good, right, and again, that's something that a lot of business owners don't think about. Right, it's not only money coming in, it's that you also have money to deliver value. You may have more money to spend on charitable causes, right, whatever you know. So pricing for profit is always what you want to do.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, and I'm a believer in it 100%. So I've got a question, though, about that, because is there a difference between selling to other businesses or selling to consumers? Do we look at it in different ways?

Speaker 2:

Well, the difference is that in business-to-business sales it's often a more complex sale. You have multiple influencers in a business-to-business sale and you have typically only one decision-maker right. Despite that, there may be some kind of committee that makes a decision, but then in the end there's one person that makes the decision right. Then there's one person that makes decision right. The people who can influence often have a different agenda than those who actually want to buy or have the purchase decision. So these influencers are people that can say no but they can't say yes, right. So a company then needs to think about having different value proposition, different messages to the influencers than to the buyer. And let me again a short example here.

Speaker 2:

We did this project for some software sold to IT departments. The CIO was most concerned about security of this piece of software. The actual IT staff, that was, the influencers. They said the most important thing is that it doesn't add workload, so we can go home early, right. Two completely different messages, right. And obviously that IT staff. They would look at the choices they had and they would say yes to whatever software that they felt would be the easiest to install, the easiest to maintain. Right, which may be very, very different to the software that actually is the most secure.

Speaker 1:

And so how would you find that out? How did you find that out? In that sense, did you find that in time? I guess that's the question.

Speaker 2:

Well and this goes to the history of what we do in my company, right, and the reason we're doing what we're doing is that I had a chance to run a couple of companies in Europe and I came here to the US to establish and run a division of a fairly large public company, and then I had another four CEO jobs, and in all these instances we did experiments with pricing. Some of those experiments were very successful, meaning that next quarter revenues are up 25% or so. Others were complete duds Actually, most of them were complete duds, and so when it was time for me to set out on my own, I decided that there must be a better way, there must be a process that would make every pricing experiment a success. And the problem that we had done when we did these pricing experiments was that we looked at pricing as would it live in a vacuum. But, like I've always said, everything you do in the company affects how you can set prices.

Speaker 2:

Said, everything you do in the company affects how you can set prices. If you just do pricing experiments, that may or may not work, because it depends how you target your customer, it depends on your marketing, it depends on the product features and all different things right. So the process I eventually developed is what we call pricing research. It's online research. People fill in the questionnaire and we have developed AI in the backend that supports that. But the most important thing is that it allows you to understand how all that everything affects the prices you can set.

Speaker 1:

I think it's extremely useful.

Speaker 1:

I think it's extremely interesting because I do find that a lot of people are doing their pricing incorrectly and I sometimes struggle, from my point of view in marketing, doing my job, when people charge what they charge and then trying to.

Speaker 1:

First of all, people can't afford to work with me half the time because they come to me and say I really want to work with you, but I can't afford it, and it's like, yeah, you're not charging enough, so you need to charge more to make more money, to be able to get more help.

Speaker 1:

It's like exactly what you said, and I think sometimes you made a really good point that there's so much more to it than just the price, and I think that that's what people really need to understand that, when it comes to marketing, it is it's a, it's a full package. Each part needs to work together, because you could go crazy and do your Instagram fantastically and have this, like you know, put all your eggs in one basket and do your Instagram, but if you're not doing your emails properly, then you've got people coming through and they're not coming through to your email funnel and then if your pricing is wrong, then you've wasted your time and I think that that's a really good takeaway is that everything has to work together, and works together in a very important way.

Speaker 2:

Well, absolutely yeah. Let me give you another example of that, a company we worked with. They came to us and they said they sell consumer goods. They had tried to increase their prices seven years ago and they said it backfired badly right, so they had to go back right, and now they had to increase prices and they didn't want to make the same mistake again. What the pricing research found was that if they change their marketing message and how they position themselves, they can certainly increase prices. In one week, this particular company went from a $200 to a $240 million company Right. Actually, there was an increase in sales volume at higher prices, based on a different marketing message, a different positioning segment, and we just completed the second project for the same company. So they're now $300 million.

Speaker 1:

Lovely, I hope you got a percentage in that company.

Speaker 2:

I hope you got shares in that. No, that's not how it works. Lovely, I hope you got a percentage in that company. I hope you got shares in that. No, that's not how it works.

Speaker 1:

Per, before we finish up, I want to ask you two things. First of all, I want to know from you what would be one or two steps one, two, three steps that people could take immediately today to make a difference in their business when it comes to their pricing.

Speaker 2:

Well, first of all, just increase prices. But do it the way I said increase prices. Make sure that at the same time as you message this, you take it as an opportunity to remind your customers about the value proposition and train the people that may take the brunt. People that may take the brunt and, worst case, is not going to work.

Speaker 1:

So you go back right and it's almost always going to work and you have a percentage that you can raise them by, or it doesn't matter no, no, I don't um the, the um I mean, if you double your prices, that may be a little.

Speaker 2:

That may work in some cases. In many cases it't. But best practice is to every six months, or every year at least, increase prices with 3% or 4%. Small changes like that people don't notice and, like I said, the worst case scenario you can always go back right.

Speaker 1:

We'll find a new audience.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, and best case. You're going to find different customers. You're going to have more resources to drive your company forward.

Speaker 1:

I love it. Per, you do have a book out at the moment and you've got a masterclass. Can you share that? Because anyone listening that really wants to get serious about pricing definitely needs to catch up with you and find out more.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, the book has my moniker on it, the Price Whisperer, and I got that moniker and I'm using it because I got such a wacky Swedish name right that nobody can either say or spell. But the subtitle is actually more important. The subtitle says A Holistic Approach to Pricing Power and what this book is about is how all this, everything in your company, affects how you can price right. And if you go to our website first of all, if you want to reach me, just do a Google search for the Price Whisperer. You should get about 10 million hits. It's all my writing. It's my YouTube channel.

Speaker 2:

There's also a not very active TikTok channel and you're also going to find the website. And on the website there is a masterclass and for those who listen, the masterclass is paid for, right and just like the book. People say can I have a copy? And I say no, because then there's no value. They're going to get the book, they're going to put it on a shelf and forget about it. So the masterclass is paid for, but I'll give the audience a 20% discount that you use when you check out, and that code is POD20, p-o-d 20, and you'll get a 20% discount.

Speaker 1:

Fantastic. I'm going to put all of that in the show notes. People can find your link and the code in there, and I have to say that while I'm doing free master classes, and your theory on why you don't do that, I love it. So you're definitely the person to learn from when it comes to pricing. So thank you. Uh, it's been really great having you here, pair. It's. You's great to speak to you, and I know that people get a lot of value add from everything else that you do as well, because you've given us a lot of information today already. So thank you.

Speaker 2:

All right. Thank you so much, carolyn, and thank you so much for listening to me.

Speaker 1:

Thank you and thanks everyone, and keep watching. We've got many more days to go with the 14 day challenge. Bye, thank you for joining me on this episode. For more tips and resources, visit moreclientslesshustlecom and leave a review or comment so I can continue to help you on your journey to more clients with less hustle. Till next time.

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Caroline Balinska

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