Price Management

Productivity Basics, Cost, Entrepreneurship, Margin, Price Management, Pricing, Sales, Todd Sattersten

Fixed To Flexible – Great ebook on the basics of pricing

7. February 2010 Manuel Koelman

Todd Sattersten has published an eBook called Fixed to Flexible and it is about cost, price, margin, and the options we have for how to sell. It is a quick and good read. I especially recommend it for entreprepreneurs, product/marketing guys and sales people. It might change the way you look at pricing.

There are four basic messages:

The story of cost is that it always trends down. You can count on it.
The story of price is that it is more flexible than you think.
The story of margin is that is is a stark choice between opposing strategies.
The story of options is that you have many more than you realize.

The way they are stated here they seem simple and obvious. However, I recommend you read the book. Every topic has a concise an entertaining explanation.

Productivity Entrepreneurship, Price Management, Sales

Advice for Entrepreneurs: Charging For Your Product Helps You Focus On Customers Instead of Users

4. December 2009 Manuel Koelman

Charging for your product helps you find out who your customers are. Discovering who your customers are is crucial and it isn’t as easy as it would seem. When a product first launches it can be picked up by a wide variety of groups. But a product can’t effectively target all types of users so decisions have to be made pretty early on about what type of customer you are targeting. Not charging for your product can push you towards making the wrong decision.

Charging for the product helped us quickly figure out who our customers were going to be, what they wanted to accomplish and how we could help them. When you launch your next product ask yourself, “Am I looking for users or customers?” The answer should have a big impact on your decisions going forward.

via bluemangolearning.com

Very true!