When your clients (and prospects) ask for the price
Don’t. You. Ever. Try. To. Anchor. Them. Giving. Bullshit. First. Stop trying to convince. Set up your differentiated value and stop the bs. “Our goal withX is to make starting and running your own X business accessible. MBA programs cost upwards of $50,000 [→ FIRST ANCHOR] and exclusive masterminds charge $15,000+ [→ SECOND ANCHOR] to help you learn X fundamentals. We think both miss the mark. You don’t need to spend decades working to become a whatever-aspiration-they-try-to-sell-you [Bro…
The job to be done
Jobs To Be Done Theory focuses on taking the customers’ perspective on what they’re really after, so your offerings focus on their needs, rather than the product or technology itself. There are two (let’s call them) schools of thought on Jobs To Be Done Theory. One taking the comms, messaging perspective, and the other one taking an innovation-focus perspective. Is one better than the other? Is one flawed and not the other? Is one truer over the other? Who cares! It’d be nonsense to focus and…
Loyalty to the job
“We have learned that people aren’t loyal to companies or brands. They are loyal to getting a job done better (faster, more predictably, and with higher output/throughput) and/or more cheaply.”[Tenet 08] Tony Ulwick With this, you gotta know that loyalty is not real —when talking on brands. Louis Grenier makes a strong case —and his POV on this brought me ot think that Yeah, there’s no loyalty to the brand. Under Ulwick’s POV, it’s loyalty to the JTBD in an efficient or effective way; despite…
Aggressive. Interrupting. Annoying.
You get bombed by the same kind of ads from this one company. So much so that you see them here, there and everywhere. Aggressive. Interrupting. Annoying. Have you ever bumped into this kind of campaigns? When talking with a friend about workshops and was asked about a well-known guy, here was my reaction: “I fucking hate this guy” This guttural, from the deep-core-in-my-body reaction came out so quickly I didn’t even had time to react and think of the next things. The reason behind it? The…
You truly over-delivered
“After purchasing your product, I can say you truly over-delivered.” Client If you hear “you over-delivered “… You might want to revise your price, your promise or your product. Maybe all of them. Truth is, you might be over servicing. Attending an overserved market. Or underpriced.
Over-delivering 1/3
Overservicing hurts you. Because the extra things you do are out of scope creating marginal value (doesn’t really have an impact) taking resources off of you Here’s the thing It might look like you’re delighting your customers. Truth is, you might be bringing nice-to-haves, without a real impact on your profit side, or on their impact side. You can delight, by keeping your promise. Always.
Overdelivering 2/3
Overdelivering in the shape of attending an overserved market hurts you. You provide nice-to-haves. Moving one extra pixel that only you notice. Writing one more line of beautiful code, that only you care for. Here’s the thing If they’re nice-to-haves odds are, they’ll be mostly ornaments without a relevant job. It’ll increase your workload while adding either more complexity to your customer or adding nice features they don’t actually care about. You don’t need to prove anything. All you…
Overdelivering 3/3
Makes your price go down —and your work’s value. Doing more of what you promise trains your clients to expect more of what you promise… every time. For. The. Same. Price. And since they’ll know you’ll do more for less, they’ll go for it. You’re giving a hidden discount, even when you don’t want to accept it. In the long term, it makes your work go for a lower price, and when trying to raise prices or go for the actual job, your customers’ expectations will be higher. You not keeping with…
The best product wins
You’ve heard this before: if we have a great product, we don’t need marketing. Here’s the thing Product is part of marketing. And marketing is not comms and messaging —or ads.
The math behind overdelivering
Here’s why overdelivering hurts your business. In a math edition. Paul is about to work on a project for Marie. In Paul’s head, underpromising and overdelivering will make a sweet deal in Marie’s eyes to: Close the sale Build a good reputation The opportunity to raise prices next time. [Because great work, right?] It’s the perfect formula… to unprofitability. → The promise in Paul’s head: X BUT → The promise in Paul’s mouth: Y → Paul tells Marie he’ll deliver Y, which is “10” less of what…
