The Pros and Cons of Implementing a Value-Based Pricing Strategy Wouldn’t it be great if you could price your services by shaping how your clients perceive the value you provide? Welcome to value-based pricing, a pricing strategy that has the potential to explode your profits. What is value-based pricing? When you employ value-based pricing, you set your prices on your service’s value to your clients. This should let you maximize revenues and profits: Your competitor’s prices are not a restriction, as they are when using a competition-based pricing strategy You free yourself from the mindset of a set profit margin, which is the foundation of pricing models like … [Read more...]
Small Business Articles on Processes
Read small business articles from the Anchor Advisors team for best practices on building and improving your organization's processes. Go back to all Articles »
Tiered Pricing – Pros and Cons and How to Implement It
Putting ‘Good, Better, Best’ Pricing into Action How much more profitable could your business be if you could sell your services at higher prices? The answer is way more profitable, right? Tiered pricing could be the answer to this conundrum. The strategy is successful for many reasons. It’s a great way to raise prices without losing customers. You may have even been ‘tiered priced’ without even knowing it. In this article, you’ll learn how tiered pricing could help you sell your services at higher prices to your customers – and a few tactics to help you achieve this. What is tiered pricing? There are several definitions of tiered pricing, and it’s often confused with volume … [Read more...]
The secret to filling your new business pipeline: Outreach
The sales funnel is a useful concept for helping us visualize the journey that a prospect makes toward becoming a customer. But the idea of the “funnel” makes the process seem more predictable than most of us find in practice! Just because someone is in your funnel doesn’t mean that they will buy, or even that some percentage of them are going to buy this month! What can we control about our funnel, and what can’t we control? YOU CAN’T CONTROL WHO’S GOING TO BUY Obviously, not everyone buys. In fact, some folks you think are a slam dunk will never buy, and some long-shots will come through easily. YOU CAN’T CONTROL THEIR TIMING When a prospect tells you, “I want to get … [Read more...]
How To Raise Prices Without Losing Clients in your Small Business
Adjusting to a Profit Margin Mindset There’s a strange phenomenon that many entrepreneurs and small businesses suffer from. Fear of raising prices. You’re scared that your customers will pull their business from you if you do. Yet your business is growing. You’ve got loads of work coming in. So much so that you’ve taken on staff. You’ve increased your tools and your tech. The results speak for themselves. You’re inundated with requests for prices from referral business. Take it from me, you deserve to charge more. And if you don’t you probably won’t make it. While many many entrepreneurs choose to work long hours, do you really want to work more for less? I’ve got news for you. … [Read more...]
More Ideas Than Time
I have more ideas than time! My team is so frustrated. We are loaded with good ideas—ideas that will make us money! But we can't even get the work done to execute on the services we already have going! When my team sees me roll in with another "great idea" their eyes shoot daggers at me. How do I decide what we should execute on, and what we should delay? Should we just work harder? What do I do with these ideas we can't get to? When a business is just starting out, the most important question that a business owner is asking (and they ask it a lot) is "Will this thing GO? Can we survive?". When you're facing survival, trying everything is a rational strategy. You don't really know … [Read more...]
How Great CEOs Spend Their Time
Freedom makes a huge requirement of every human being. With freedom comes responsibility. ~Eleanor Roosevelt One of the best things about being a business owner is FREEDOM. In any given moment, I’m the only one that I have to answer to. My time is my own and I use it as I like. One of the worst things about being a business owner is FREEDOM. There is no one to tell me what to do! I am 100% responsible for how I use my time! (And I’m frequently disappointed in myself…) This paradox is like a tiger stalking around the back of my brain. It keeps me up at night. Am I doing a good job? How would I know…? So when I saw that Michael Porter published an extensive study called The Leader’s … [Read more...]
Why You Will Hire The Wrong Person
One article consistently stood at the top of the list of “Most Read Articles” on the New York Times website in 2017: Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person by Alain de Botton. In it, de Botton argues that we are looking for an ideal partner (without flaw or conflict), while ignoring the fact that, as human beings, we all are deeply flawed and often a little bit crazy. In summary he says, “Marriage ends up as a hopeful, generous, infinitely kind gamble taken by two people who don’t know yet who they are or who the other might be, binding themselves to a future they cannot conceive of and have carefully avoided investigating.” To me this sounds like the way most of us make hiring … [Read more...]
Too Many Ideas, Not Enough Time
Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen. ~ John Steinbeck Entrepreneurs are starters; we love to begin something new! We also see opportunities that others don’t see. So as we live our lives we are always coming up with new ways of doing things, new ideas that need to be pursued, new opportunities. How many times have you come back to your office, all excited by a new idea; you share it with your team and they grimace. They aren’t excited, to them it looks like work – and besides – what happened to the last 40 great ideas you came running in the office with? Ouch! That stings. Opportunity is missed by most people because … [Read more...]
PROPOSALS…HUNH! YEAH! What are they good for?
(ACTUALLY? Not a whole lot.) I work with a lot of service firm owners and there’s one thing they all hate, and that’s writing proposals. They love meeting with prospects, identifying the problems the prospects are having, and talking about how they can help. But then they get back to their office and the work of actually writing the proposal is a grind. And it’s easy to see why when you look at the proposals themselves; they are (truly) works of ART! My clients will craft unique descriptions of the problem, then outline (step-by-painful-step) how their unique process™ will produce the solution their prospect is looking for. Then they add to that team bios, case studies, and all kinds of … [Read more...]
So you think your agency needs a salesperson…
As the business owner, the job of business development for your creative agency has been yours—from the beginning. But the thing is, you don’t like it. Maybe you don’t feel good at it, or successful as a salesperson, or maybe it just feels icky. But none of that matters now, because there’s a solution. You’re going to hire a salesperson, and that’s going to fix everything. It makes perfect sense. A skilled and experienced salesperson would (likely) know exactly what to do in order to increase sales. A skilled and experienced salesperson would handle the clients better, write better proposals, and close more of them…You’re asking yourself “Why didn’t I do this sooner?” before you even have … [Read more...]
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