Q4 Pricing Check-In: What to Revisit Before the Year Ends

In this episode of The Pricing Lady Podcast, we take a look at doing a Q4 pricing check-in, what to revisit before the year ends. Sit back, relax, and enjoy the episode. Hello and welcome to The Pricing Lady podcast. I'm Janene your hostess. This is where smart business owners price with purpose and profit with clarity. I'm so happy to have you here with me today, and we are going to be looking at taking a Q4 pricing check-in. What you should revisit as we approach the end of the year. Now here we are heading into the last few months of the year, and it's the perfect time to hit the pause button and reflect on what's working and what's not working. When it comes to your pricing. The smartest thing you can do is to stop at periodic times during the year and take a fresh look at your pricing. I call it a little bit of strategic hygiene, if you will. So why does this matter? Q4 is often a time of year. That's quite intense. There's a lot of work sometimes offers and work gets pushed around and shuffled about and it can be quite stressful, this time of year. Often business owners are focused on, am I hitting my year end goals or my revenue goals? They forget to take a look at their pricing as well, which in my opinion is a big mistake. Because pricing can be a really interesting lever, not just for your revenue, but also for your profitability. Often it gets overlooked or forgotten in the process. The reality is that your pricing touches everything in your business, and so it's important for you to have those checkpoints throughout the year. Definitely towards the end of the year. You want to look at it as well, not just to help you achieve your goals, but then also to start planning for the next year. We're not talking about fixing everything, but we're really talking about for this check-in, in the first step is alignment. Is it aligned with and still supporting the goals that you want to meet for this year? So let's take a look at five questions that I think you can use to do a quick check-in. This are smart questions, I guess you could say, high level questions that you can use to start doing this quick check-in. Number one, has the market or your customer shifted in some way? Now, this is a great place to start because as I always say, pricing is rooted in a deep understanding of your customer. And as your customers shift and evolve and change, and they do and will, you may need to adjust your prices. It could create urgency. It could be that you have new types of clients that you're seeing popping up, or you're shifting your market a little bit and you're seeing the results of that happening. Your pricing should evolve as your audience evolves. It's not just if you make a change to your offer that your pricing might change, but if something happens with your customer base or what they're looking for or the problems they're having, then you may need to adjust your pricing as well. That's the first place you want to look. Question number two, has your offer changed? This is the more obvious one. If you've changed or adapted your offers or shifted how you're delivering things, then you may want to consider adjusting or making adjustments to those prices. Maybe you've shifted the scope, made it include more, or you've taken something out. Maybe the format of your offer is different. You changed it from a group program to a mastermind group. You know, there are lots of different ways that you could have shifted your offer, whether it be a software service or a product, right? Maybe you removed features. Whatever you've done in your offer, you should check to make sure that your price is still aligned with that. Third question, how satisfied are we you with how pricing functions in your business? This is a biggie and it's often overlooked. Do you feel more or less friction in your sales conversations? Are your propo, are there proposals that you hesitate to send out or where you find yourself kind of internally haggling over the price before you even sent it to the customer? Your satisfaction with how your pricing is working is actually a data point that you should be paying attention to. It's not just a feeling. It's a very important part of your pricing because you are the chief executive officer of your pricing. If you feel uncomfortable with it, then that is going to be reflected in the conversations and the results that you have as you're working with your clients. Question number four, have you adjusted prices informally recently? Since the last time you adjusted your prices, have you been informally making adjustments? What do I mean by informal adjustments? I mean discounting, throwing in extras. Are you making reactive decisions when customers say no or object. or are you even making preemptive. Strikes, taking preemptive strikes by lowering the price preemptively. You know, these are informal adjustments. If I asked you what your price was, you would say it's this. But in reality, you're doing these other things, which is bringing your price down here. There's a couple reasons this question ispor important, and one is that consistency in how you handle pricing builds trust with your clients and yourself. If you are doing things that's eroding those prices, then you're probably first and foremost hurting that trust with yourself because you know the price is really down here, but when, when you, you talk about it or asked about it, you're saying it's up here, and that disconnect can erode the trust you have with yourself. And that also then has an impact on clients. It will come up in the conversations that you have with them. On a subconscious level, they will feel that, or they might sense that, last time it was this price and this time it's this price, and they might sense or notice that variability in your pricing. Actually, I had one client earlier this year who said that, I asked her, why do your clients have so many different prices? And she goes, well, it depends on how good they are at negotiating with me. And that's another type of emotional reaction or informal adjustments that are being made that aren't really serving her. Or really in the end, the client, because she starts to resent that they have these better prices for no other reason except for that they were able to negotiate well. Okay. Reason number five, or question number five is to let's see, to ask yourself are your current prices or is your current pricing strategy aligned with where your business is currently heading? If you're focused on your short-term goals, hitting your goals just for 2025, then you need to make sure that your pricing is still aligned with getting you there. Yeah. Are, and then if you look beyond 2025 into 2026, is there growth that you need? Are there, maybe you're bringing new people into the team. Maybe you're, you've decided to shift your business and do less hands-on work with your clients. For example, these types of shifts in. Where you're taking your business may also and usually will require some adjustment to your prices. Oftentimes, people forget to make those adjustments and then later on have to catch up. But if you take the time to take a look at that now and understand that, then you're going to be in a better position, not just for this year, but going into next year. So I look at it this way, that the model that got you where you are today might not be the one that takes you where you want to get to in the future. Yeah. So you want to make sure that you're checking in with yourself and taking a look at that. I want to remind you that my suggestion here isn't that you redo everything, but where you need to and then would like to make small adjustments to your pricing in order to bring some of these areas back into alignment if they are out of alignment. We're talking about a review, not a complete overhaul. That's really important because you want to keep it sharp and focused right now, you can always come back and do something heavier later on if that's needed. And certainly going into 2026, you're going to want to give it a, a. A more thorough looking at, let's say small refinements in your pricing strategy, both internal and external, can remove friction and support you in achieving those bigger goals. Pricing isn't always about making great big changes. Sometimes it's about making little adjustments and fine tuning things along the way. Tune up, not a tear down, I think is the message on that one. Okay, so here's what I suggest you do. Set aside 30 to 45 minutes, maybe an hour, depending on your business this week, to run through these five questions that I just gave you. Let me just repeat the questions. Has the market or the customer shifted? Has my offer offer changed? Am I satisfied with how pricing is functioning? Have you been adjusting prices informally? And last is your current price strategy aligned with where your business is headed. So those are the five questions I suggest you sit down and run through those questions. Look at your offers, revisit the packages, maybe even look back at some of your notes if you've have them from client discussions. And just ask yourself, is this still how I want to work? Is this still how I want to price things for the rest of this year? If something feels off, then you're going to look at it a little more deeply to decide how you want to proceed. Now if you're listening to this episode and you're nodding along, oh yeah, this is me, I need to do this, then you may actually want to check out my Price Check Workbook. It could be a really smart next step for you. The questions in this episode are the big picture questions the workbook gives you 12 strategic questions to ask yourself. It gives you more clarity. It goes deeper. And then it gives you that self-pace and reusability of the workbook. You can use it say, once or twice a year to continue to review your prices in a very structured way. I'll put a link in the show notes for my Price Check Workbook so that you can buy yourself a copy, if you think that that's something that would help you. I can certainly recommend it. My clients use it quite often to kick off their pricing review process. If you want to go deeper, that is the workbook for you. That is what I wanted to share with you today. Hope that this episode has given you some food for thought and that you've already booked that review session for yourself in your calendar. I appreciate you being here. We are very proud to be part of the SwissCast podcast Network here in Switzerland and be one of their legacy podcasts. Be sure to check out the other shows in this network. Until next time, my friend, I wish you all the best and enjoy pricing.