Don’t give away the store!

     As bureaucratic nooses tighten  around small business necks, it’s natural for feelings of desperation to begin setting in, and to respond by reducing prices in order to make sales. It doesn’t take long to be traveling on this road before you’re giving away the store!

     Resist the temptation to undercut your value  by offering “more competitive pricing.” Easy to say, you may say, but when the guy down the street is selling comparable products and services for lower prices, and is getting more people in his door, reality dictates lower prices!”

     Bull! You’ll only be worsening the economic stress on your business.

     Reality dictates  that you will be more successful than the price-slasher down the street by sticking to the prices you have and offering instead more value. Are you being innovative enough to offer product and service line extensions that help customers economize?

[This is not the same as lowering prices. This means offering a high-end mattress cover that zips on and extends old mattress life for a fraction of the price of a new mattress. This means adding the availability of inexpensive payroll services to the lineup of accounting practice offerings. It means adding energy-efficiency, fuel-economy, etc.]

     Do you and 100% of your staff  have a “kill ’em with kindness” attitude 100%  of the time with 100%  of your prospects and customers? Not 99%.  100%.  Truth? What needs to happen to get to 100% of the time with 100% of your prospects and customers? 

Is getting to that point going to cost you more or less in real

dollars and real stress than increased sales at lower prices?

     Like giving a salary raise  to someone instead of a one-time bonus or other reward, and ending up with a permanent long-term financial drain, when you lower prices, you run the big-time risk of never being able to raise them back up again.

     Your customers  will expect your low prices to stay low and when you try to raise them, they’ll head for competitors who offer more value.

     In the end, the smart response  to economic stress is to build and boost and promote value, and not give away the store.    

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