Happy New Year! I wish you great joy, happiness, good times, and business success in 2023. To help you get started on the right foot for this year I want to share with you some tips – 3 things you can do in January to make sure you’re starting in the best way possible.

Like anything else in life or business what we pay attention to is what will carry us through the year to come. If you ignore pricing, it will not be there supporting your business efforts. In fact, for many business it will do the opposite – it will work against them. One thing I always say is “Pricing can hurt or help your business.” Let me ask you this on a scale of 1-10 (1 being I have no idea or it’s totally hurting my business – 10 being my pricing is rock solid) where would you rank pricing in your business for 2023?

Be honest – you don’t have to share your score with anyone if you don’t want to.

Not everyone will feel a 10 but if you’re 6 or below then there’s work to be done for sure. Remember pricing should be viewed on a maturity scale. Meaning that each and every business is on their own journey. Where you are is where you are, only you can decide that it’s time to make a change. I can only be here to support you when you’re ready.

In This Episode

In this solocast episode I share with you 3 Pricing Tips to Start 2023 Off Right. Listen to the tips and reflect on what you need most when it comes to pricing right now in your business.

Enjoy the episode. And share with me which of these pricing tips do you think will help you start off the year right.

Favorite Quotes

“Just because nothing has changed on their (the customer) side doesn’t mean that your prices are still appropriate for the market.” Janene

Episode Link

Customer Interview Prep Course: https://thepricinglady.com/betheexpert/
Raise Your Prices with Confidence: https://thepricinglady.com/raise-prices-confidently/

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Episode Transcript

Today we’re going to be taking a look at getting the best out of 2023. I’m going to share with you three pricing tips to help you start off the year. Right now. One of the things that people often ask me this time of year is, what should I be doing? This is a really good question. I love it when people ask this because of course, it helps me understand that they’re actually thinking about their pricing.

One of the Biggest Mistakes You Can Make

One of the biggest mistakes you can make is doing nothing. Now, if you’re not taking action because you’ve already done a pricing review and you’re confident that there’s no need for anything to change, then no further action now makes sense. But if you’re doing nothing because you are afraid to do something or because you don’t know what to do, or you’re uncertain or scared of doing it, or because you’d rather just put your head in the sand and not think about it, then that is a BIG MISTAKE and I want to help you avoid that.

If that’s where you are acknowledge it. Figure out what you want to do, and then go and do it. The sooner that you can take action, the sooner you can start seeing results. Remember you don’t always have to take big action. Oftentimes in pricing, small little baby steps can lead to big results because when you have success from those little steps, it spurs you on to do even more.

Towards the end of last year, I had a client I’ll share with you briefly, who was having some problems with some of her customers who you weren’t really treating her in a very fair and professional way. But part of the problem was a result of her not standing up for herself and saying, “Hey people, this is not okay.”

You can do that in a kind and gentle way, but still stand up for yourself and kind of command that other people treat you well.

Small Little Steps can Make a Big Difference

We had a conversation and we’re working together on these things and I could see every time that I said something that maybe pushed her a lot too far outside her comfort zone, her whole body would tense up and she’d get really nervous and I could tell the next word out of her mouth was gonna be butt.

It was quite interesting to see the dynamic between the two of us. But in the end we came up with a plan for her on one small thing that she could change. I know it was really hard for her, but she took that step and she was amazed by the result. She wrote me back a couple weeks later and she’s like, you wouldn’t believe what’s happened.

I got the results that I was looking for. Some people were a little upset, but I was able to handle it. But in the end, I got the results that I was working for, and it was better for them and better for the new clients I have coming in and better for me. You can see small little steps can make a big difference, and now she has the energy and the motivation to try something else later on.

Pricing Tip #1 – Things Change Over Time Prepare Yourself

Let’s talk about what are three things (the pricing tips) that you can do in January to get you ready for the year when it comes to your pricing? The first thing that I recommend that you do is touch base with your clients. These can be previous clients or current clients, as long as if it’s a current client, you don’t want it to disrupt the work that you’re doing currently.

This goes for both product-based businesses, service-based businesses. Software-based businesses, or not both, but all three. Right.

For any kind of business, you want to reach out and touch base, base with your clients. The reality is that things change over time. Now, sometimes we forget that in the day today, but they really do change every time.

Sometimes like with the pandemic, things change almost overnight, what people wanted and needed, what they valued in a solution. Was different from almost one day to the next. When you think about food, you know, we couldn’t go out to restaurants anymore. All of a sudden being able to take out or have food delivered to you became extremely important.

Sometimes it’s not even what you’re offering, it’s the way that you’re delivering that offer that changes.  Other times it’s more of an evolution rather than a revolution. Maybe it’s slowly changing over time, but if you’re not reaching out and connecting with your clients regularly to understand them better, then you would completely miss that evolution, and that’s why it’s so important to reach out and reconnect with your customers on a regular basis.

That may even be reassessing who you’re targeting because maybe your offer is better suited to someone else now, or you need to update your offer to suit the clients that you have. But we’ll come back to that in a minute so it can come, like the changes and shifts can come in many forms.

Listening To Your Customers

Maybe the problem that your customers have has changed. Maybe the desired outcome that they’re seeking has shifted, maybe the way people want to work with you or the type of product that you offer needs to change based on what they want or maybe even the way they want to pay.

The way they want to consume something or the way it’s delivered to them needs to be altered and you’ll only ever be able to understand those things if you’re staying in contact with and listening to your customers.

Tip number one is you need to ask, listen, and then learn from what your customers have to say. Let’s take a look at tip number two. Tip number two is kind of an outcome of tip number one,

Once you’ve listened to them and reflected on what they’ve said in the context of your offer, then you’re going to want to revisit your offers. Not just the offers themselves, but again, how you deliver them, how you have people pay for them, can be in many different capacities, as we said. Listen to them and then take a step back, review your offer in the context of this new information.

Do I need to Create An Offer?

Let’s say you identify that there’s a new target group that you want to reach out to. Then checks to see, do I have an offer that really suits that group already, or do I need to create an offer for them? If the problem has changed, then maybe what you offer needs to be adjusted. In some cases, your offer will just need to be fine tuned or the way that you would describe what that offer is.

Whether it be a product, a service, or a software it needs to change to align to what’s most important to them now. Let’s say you are a fast food restaurant of some type and before the pandemic. You were advertising about dining in the restaurant itself? Well, during the pandemic that message would’ve fallen totally flat, and been completely impossible for anybody to actually do.

The message would need to change to “we deliver” or you can take it out, you can order online and come pick it up. You can see how different needs and shifts in what customers want can really affect not just the offer itself, but how you might communicate that offer. Sometimes the offer doesn’t need changing, but what you have around it, either on your webpage or in your verbal communication needs to change as well.

If what they value in an offer has changed, like the functions and features of the offer, or the ways of working in a service or that up outcome that they’re seeking. If those things have changed, then of course you’re going to need to either adapt those offers or swap out new ones for old ones, right? You may need to do some swapping and moving around.

Tip #2 – Having the Right Offers

If you’re swapping and moving around offers like that, then you’re going to have to check your prices, right? We’re gonna come back to that. I think you’re following my logic here. Now, if you don’t have the right offers, then it won’t matter what price you set, people just won’t be interested by.

Tip number two is all about revisiting what you’re offering and ensuring it’s what’s needed now. Tip number three. After you’ve reconnected with your customers, interviewed, had conversations with them, once you’ve reviewed your offers and figured out what you’re offering to which target groups and any adjustments that need to be made, then you’ve got to take a look at whether or not you’re going to be making price changes.

Whether or not what your customers want has changed, you must still review your prices. Even if you’ve learned through your talking with customers that your offers are suitable because their needs haven’t changed that much, you should still review your prices. Just because nothing has changed on their (the customer) side doesn’t mean that your prices are still appropriate for the market.

Whether or not you learn something new in steps one and two. Either way, if you do learn something, if you don’t, then you’re definitely going to want to review your prices. Some of you may have done this before the year ended and kudos to you if you are ahead of things and have already put out an announcement about your price changes.

If you have done that, but you’ve decided to do some customer interviews now and you learn something new, it’s up to you whether or not you adjust prices again. Sometimes that can be appropriate and sometimes not.

Pricing Tip #3 – Review & Adjust Based on What you Learned

But what’s most important is for those of you who have done nothing, those of you who are afraid of making changes or would rather ignore the topic altogether.

Now is the time. If you want to make a significant impact on 2023, now is the time to do the work because the sooner you start doing it, the sooner you can one, move on to bigger and better things, and two, start bending, fitting from any adjustments you do make. If you don’t make adjustments, then you certainly won’t benefit from them.

That’s a fairly obvious. Tip number three is that you need to review and adjust, most likely adjust your prices in lieu of what you learn and make sure that you do it in the best way possible. What do I mean by that? I mean, it’s a pretty vague statement. Apologies for that. So let me clarify what I mean there.

So that includes doing the right analysis, so knowing what things to look at and what things to consider when you’re looking at your prices. Knowing what to do and how in short. Second of all, knowing how to use that analysis to know if there are changes to be made and what changes to make. Because you have to decide.

You may know that you need to make some changes, but maybe what you don’t know is which changes to make. And then last, knowing how to make the changes without upsetting customers and losing the business that you want to keep. Now these seem fairly straightforward, but we all know what happens when we get a little bit nervous about making changes.

Taking No Action is an Action

We get afraid and then we do nothing at all. We all know that taking no action is action in and of itself, but it rarely, if ever, will get you where you want to be. , but if you know what analysis to do and how to do it, which changes to make and how to communicate it, then you can prepare your pricing for the year and you will be set up for the rest of 2023.

What’s really helpful here also is then you can kind of stop worrying about your pricing. I know some of you out there really spend a lot of time worrying about your prices and creating all these special offers so that you can give discounts, which by the way, I’m not a huge fan of for all businesses, so be careful about that.

But what if you felt confident enough about your prices now that you didn’t necessarily need to do those things? That, in my opinion, should sound kind of exciting. Those are the three steps or tips that I wanted to share with you. Things that you can do immediately in your business right here in January to get the year started off right.

Now you don’t need to interview 20 or 30 customers. Just talk to five, maybe 10 at the most. Even talk to two. Just make sure you talk to customers who are valued individuals. Preferably not friends and family. But talk to people who are who can give you good solid feedback.

Couple of Things that are Available to You

I’d like to share with you a couple of things that are available to you right now to help you be able to do these three things that I talked about.

The first one is I have a self-paced course for customer interviews. I call it the customer interview prep course. It’s online. You can do the work either over a couple of weeks or you can do it all at once. It’s up to you how you choose to do it. And it’s 127 Franks, so it’s not gonna break the bank, but it’ll help you to be able to conduct those interviews in the best way possible. It’ll help you prepare which questions to ask, who to ask for interviews, and then how to start using that information in your pricing as well.

When you know what I know about, Pricing or about doing customer interviews. Then you get to skip to the head of the line. In other words, you don’t have to take 20 years to learn what I learned.

I condensed it all into these programs and courses for you so that you can benefit from it much more quickly than it took me. I’ll put these links in the show notes for you head on over to thepricinglady.com/betheexpert to check out the self-paced course and learn more about it.

Anybody who buys this course and then sends me an email with the subject, Be the expert, I’ll share with you a bonus module tailored specifically to doing these sort of follow up interviews. The actual course itself is not necessarily geared specifically towards these follow up interviews, so I prepared you an extra bonus module on how to adjust things a bit based on doing these sort of follow up interviews.

Decide Which Changes to Make

Now, the second thing that I have available to you starting on January 17th, 2023, is I’ve got a four-week group program on raising your prices with confidence. Well, that’s a perfect fit, right? If you’re, say a solo entrepreneur, a coach, or a consultant with a smaller size business, then this could be a really good course for you if you are looking to make incremental increases to your prices, but you’re really not quite sure how to go about doing it.

This is a four-week program, there’s an online course plus group Q and A / Coaching Sessions, that we do together over this four-week time period that will help you decide, do the analysis. Decide which changes to make. Prepare yourself to make those changes and then prepare the communication.

It really gives you all those four steps and it is such a great course. I love doing this with people and it would be a great pleasure to have you along with us. You can get full details at thepricinglady.com/raise-prices-confidently. Again, I’ll put that in the show notes for you.

Wrapping It Up

Now, last, if for you this isn’t the right, neither of these is quite the right thing that you’re looking for, then you can always reach out to me at thepricinglady.com, book a call with me there, and we can talk about what’s going on in your business and find a way that maybe I can help you with that.

Whatever you choose to do. I do look forward to getting to know you and learning more about you. Most of all, I look forward to seeing you flourish in 2023. Have a fantastic start to the year and as always my dear, enjoy pricing.