Christopher Murphy · 21 June, 2020
Your price signals your brand, just as context does.
Andrew Foster, Autonomous Ideas, sent me the following as a WhatsApp message after we'd discussed the pricing for my Accountability Coaching:
Component costs of an iMac are about 1/3rd of the total selling cost. The 2/3 uplift is brand, beauty and certainty of after sales support.
You don’t want to be a cheap or a commodity, there's too much competition (and you're not a commodity, you have far too much value to offer, you are changing lives).
I had originally priced the Accountability Coaching for early adopters at £500. Foster rightly pointed out that I have 30 years of experience and I share that experience with the individuals I'm coaching.
Foster continued: “I know you are a naturally modest man but your client should be feeling: ‘Fuck me, I’m being coached by Chris Murphy – Chris Fucking Murphy! – £200 a session is a bargain!’”
In light of this, we discussed revised pricing, which we felt should be in the region of £750. (This might still be too low. I'm wrestling with it.) ¹
Opening up access to as many people as possible is important to me, so I'm actively exploring pricing that includes monthly payment plans.
You don't have to be Apple – or a $1,500,000,000,000 company – to offer your customers to spread the cost of their purchase price. One thing you might want to consider, however, is the spread of risk.
Apple offers financing – technically Barclays (in the UK) offers the financing – for 0% (below). A company the size of Apple or Barclays can absorb a number of credit defaults in a way that your company likely cannot.
If you adopt a payment plan approach, you might want to consider an additional fee for financing: