Missing the nuances.
Getting too close to what the rules/views/templates/best-practices are can make you miss important details. Paper can hold anything. Reality doesn’t.
Zeroing
In a negotiation, the first thing you need to be comfortable with is zero. As in No Money, can’t pay, won’t pay, don’t see the point on it. Having that figure clear in your head is the thing that will let you move forward. Right now, you have zero. If the deal doesn’t happen, you’ll still have zero. You didn’t lose something that you didn’t have in the first place. Zero means you’re also free. You can say no when it’s not a fit, when it doesn’t make sense to you, or when you feel like it….
Anyone
Anyone with money. Anyone who is willing to pay. Anyone that needs our thing. How do you reach to this specific anyone? If you can’t come up with a very clear specific description of who this “anyone” is, it’ll be hard for them to know you’re talking about them. For them to know of you. For them to recommend you to more like them. At the end of the day, anyone is no-one.
Pause it all
In diving, when you’re overwhelmed, you stop everything. Then, you breath. Assess. Decide. Same is in business. While everything seems urgent, you can only do so much. So stop, breath, assess, decide. And to get to that decision, you’ve already thought of a few ways to go about it.
Practice: small to big
Just as a band starts playing in a house, to small gigs, to more small gigs… all the way to stadiums with thousands of people. It’s the same with decisions. The more controlled, low-impact, and low-risk decisions you make, the easier it is to see the patterns to move upwards. It’s simpler to stir the wheel and correct direction with small decisions, than to shift everything from one decision. Quantity over quality first, quality over quantity then.
Practice
The way to choose better is by choosing more often. The way you decide better is by deciding more often. Practice. Quantity beats quality. It lets you make decisions that train your judgment. You won’t ever have all good decisions. Yet making a decision (even a shit one) can let you stir the boat and correct direction. Waiting for it to disappear won’t fix it.
Re-packaging
Not only products. Also ideas. It’s working around your ideas and offerings to present them in a different way. What’s the impact it can have? It can lead to buy-in from decision-makers. It can shift how your brand is perceived. It can bring in marginal revenue. It can also bring new revenue in orders of magnitude (selling the same thing for a way higher new price). However, it’s not about charging more only for the sake of charging more. It’s about bringing (and articulating) more of what…
Spraying and praying
Reach is not what will deliver you change. Just because you’re in contact with more people, it doesn’t mean your results will shift and/or improve. Hope is not a tactic. You have to be selective and make the hard choices, so that you can focus. Once focused, getting in front of the right people gets simpler (and easier). Instead of the big fish in the big pond, you get to be the big fish in the small pond.
One way is backwards
Set your costs, then your price. Build a brand, then your customers. Set the metric, then the result. We have it backwards. Pricing: find the value, then set a price, then figure out what makes sense for you to charge for that price. Brand: design your customers, they’ll build your brand. And you’ll find the red thread on all of those brands, to make a cohesive one. Metrics: figure out what you want as the outcome. Then think of the result, then the measurement. The metric is the measurement…
Not the only ways
Markup and cost-plus are not the only ways Pricing doesn’t get to be built up from the ground up. (And it’s not math either). It’s not about how much something costs you and how much more you want to make. It doesn’t have to do anything with how much you know, how much time you spent learning your craft, how much effort you put into, or how much you think you deserve. It has to do with how much of the value (what’s important to your customers) they find reasonable for them to pay —and be…
