When a Pricing Decision Is Too Thin to Trust

Welcome to The Pricing Lady podcast. I'm Janene your hostess. This is where smart business owners price with purpose and profit with clarity. Today, I wanna talk to you about something I hear constantly in my work. People will come and say to me, Janene, I don't know if my pricing is right. Ultimately, they don't trust their prices. What I've learned over time is that when Pricing feels hard to trust, it's often because the decision doesn't allow them to trust it. Let me explain. A price you can't trust is almost always the result of a decision or decisions that weren't robust enough. Never in all my years has someone come to me and said, "Janene, I made a bad decision about what price to have." No, that's not how you, or they would describe it. They say, "help me. I don't know if my Pricing is right." And this is a very important distinction. Now, what does this look like in their business. First of all, they may feel it as second guessing themselves, as hesitating to take action when it's needed, to change a price or to create that offer or to set the price before the offer goes out the door. Or they unnecessarily discount when they get pressure or pushback from a client. Yes, they have prices, but they don't feel great about them, and they don't know what to do about it. Pricing day to day ends up feeling like a struggle, and it's consuming more energy than it should. I see it as a decision issue. But they see it as, I don't, or I haven't found the right number. The competitors have lower prices. Maybe my price just needs to be tweaked a little bit, or no one is really willing to pay that. These are the things that I hear from people that they describe as the problem. And none of this is necessarily wrong. That is. You know, a problem, let's say, but it's not the root of the problem. Those are more symptoms of the problem. And if you're focused on, I haven't found the right number, I haven't found the right number, then you're gonna be looking for the solution in the wrong place. Rather than going deeper to the root of the issues, you end up focusing on the wrong things. When I talk with clients and listen to what's going on in their businesses and try to assess how I can best help them, I don't start with the number. The reality is that even if the number needs to change, the number is not the problem. Here's what I look for. Who is the customer that you're targeting? What do you offer? What's the value behind it? How do you work with them? How did you arrive at that number or those prices? And where do things feel most painful right now? These are the things that help me understand if the decision behind the price was strong and what might need working on. The truth is that if the decision were strong enough, then pressure wouldn't automatically turn into doubt, and that's why it feels so difficult in your business. Now let's talk about the one-legged table. This is an analogy that I came up with recently. I find it helps people to see this in a different way. A table with one leg is still a table. It might not even stand up, or it might stand up until you put some weight on it. The problem isn't that there's no table. It's that it can't hold much, right? Now Pricing based mostly or only on the competition, for example, is like a one-legged table. And whether it's the competition that you only focus on or the costs that you only focus on, focusing on just one element and having your prices based on that will rarely lead you to having a very stable or robust Pricing decision. It's like that one legged table. So when Pricing continues to feel wobbly, it's usually because you're placing too much weight on too little thinking. It's not your fault necessarily. Probably no one taught you how to do it. The the important thing here is that you understand that it's not looking out in the market to try and find the answer. It's actually looking at how your Pricing decisions are being made and to shift that so that they are stronger. Then you can trust in those decisions more. So your table. Needs more legs. And in this context, I'm talking about legs like the customer and the offer and the value and the marketplace, and the cost and profit. Those are the kinds of legs that you're, your Pricing decisions need so that they can feel more robust. I'd like to wrap this up with the following. If you feel that your Pricing collapses under pressure, you stumble when you have to say the price you, the pushback makes you anxious when you get it from clients, you delay sending the offer even when you know you should. Yeah. They're not signs that you chose the wrong price or that you chose badly. They are a sign that the decision or decisions you made were not robust enough for you to trust in. So if your Pricing feels hard for you right now, don't rush to try and change that number right away. Instead, start by looking at the decision behind it first. Thank you so much for joining me today. If you wanna support the show, the number one thing you can do is share the episode on social media and tag me. That really helps get the word out. I wish you a wonderful day, and as always, enjoy Pricing.