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Pricing is how a business sets a price for an offer. It can be based on costs, marked up on a market assumption, based on the capital invested, on the market standard price, on how much it's worth to the customer compared to their gains. There's no right or wrong way to establish prices. However, there are ones that are less controllable (on external factors), and ones that leverage the profitability of your margins (I tend to go for this last one).
A price is a signal to the market. It's the representation of your promise. If it's high, it means it's a premium / expensive / worth the money. If it's low, it might work... or not; and that's ok. A price is fixed and known BEFORE making the buying decision. It informs the decision. Do you give prices?
The more you run will not necessarily get you farther. The more effort you put, the more complex you make things (either for yourself or for your customers), the more it costs you to build something, the more time to learn something. Your customers don't care. It might be a nice-to-know, but they don't care. You could very well be in a hamster wheel. What is it that you might need to do less of?
"The best marketing is a product people want to talk about." Nope. The best marketing is helping your customers. Helping them in such a way that they will LOVE to pay you what you ask for and they'll say "Thank you" at the end of it.
That something seems like a big potential win can be mistaken with an opportunity. Without assessing properly the trade-offs, the implications of pursuing it, the motivations behind, all you'll get is a fun way to get off your actual goals. Then what seemed like an opportunity was, indeed, a distraction*. * Opportunity v Distraction - The Business of Authority
In your field, what's the thing that makes you different? If you could say only ONE thing to make your case, what would it be? When you are different, yet all of the arguments are similar to the ones of your competition, your odds of getting the deal are not as high —you're not the obvious choice. I'm quite sure you have something that makes you and your business stand out. However, it won't be how passionate you are, how much effort you put into it, how much time it took you to learn your...
The first trap: good, better, best. You've seen them pretty much everywhere: SaaS, productized services, services, products, subscriptions... While it would make sense to offer tiers named "Good, Better, Best" there's a thing that gets overlooked: judgement. It judges the buyer's decision: You can only afford "Good", not the premium. You can only do "Bronze", not the Platinum You can't afford more expensive things... It makes them feel pressure, that what they decide is of less value than the...
Everything now is an agent. And here's people trying to create a digital twin that "acts" and "thinks" like them. Here's the thing, it goes against what agency means: the capacity to choose and act independently. To create and be creative. You've always had agency.
There's the assumption that Help is something to be done asking for nothing in exchange. If that were true —bear with me on this one— any of the following would be help? A doctor's diagnostic and treatment A nurse / caretaker A school teacher A university professor A researcher You Having the best interest of the people/organization you are trying to transform at the core of what you do is Help. It has not to be free —it can, if you choose to. And if that help has a big money quantity...
"You're always trying to sell." "You're always selling." One is the neediness and the push to make a deal happen. It's looking for an angle on how to make the sale. The other is about figuring it out early if/when there's even a deal to happen —while connecting to what's in it for them. It's discerning if there's a fit, and inviting the prospect to decide for a No from the start. One is looking for the angle, the other is about helping.