Understand your market, set your price, and stick to it. Confidence in pricing builds trust. Indra Nooyi
The problem with the concept of finding “your price” is that the conditions of pricing keep changing.
And I’m not just talking about the “referral lottery” giving you all kinds of oddball projects.
It’s also that one month, you could be drowning in quote requests, but 3 months later you find yourself looking at your phone, daring it to ring and save you from having to start searching for jobs in this economy.
How can the result of such turbulence ever be something consistent enough to be called “your price”?
Not having a standard way of pricing is not the end of the world by itself, of course. However, being inconsistent greatly slows down any kind of learning on your pricing and hides sales mistakes, keeping your prices too low in the long run.
But this can be fixed.
There is a sequence you can use that lets you build the answer to “What’s your price”.
1. Who do you sell to
2. What expensive problem of theirs are you solving
3. Who do you have those clients to compare you with?
4. Where can they stumble into you
5. How do you approach them
6. How much is your (base) asking price
7. How low do you go, and under what conditions
Yes, that’s a lot of work. But once all 7 steps are established, you will know enough to finally start comparing, learning, and growing.