Exclusive sounds good, right? We usually understand it as “reserved”, but exclusion also literally means not admitting, or sidelining anything that is not our focus.
When you target your pricing toward communicating a clear message to a particular audience, you are at the same time choosing to skip considering other people’s opinions of that same pricing.
This has some downsides on the raw numbers of potential clients, but it also has many positives:
- Positioning: you will be more easily recognized as a specialist
- Self-selection: many types of time-wasting clients will not even bother to try approaching you
- Negotiation: you start from the position of “I can obviously afford to lose badly fitting clients.”, which is beneficial, to say the least.
You know how no one really trusts “big tent” politicians, the ones that try to play up too many ideologies, depending on whom they are currently talking to? They are try to say too much at once, when exclusion is basically the core principle of messaging hygiene.
Exclusive pricing, meaning pricing built to fit the message, is a solid practice that needs to be used more often. If you are unclear on what messages can one express with a price, I’ll write about that next time.