TL;DR: You can ask customers about pricing - your interests are more aligned than you think.

Monday Price Point:

The best pricing models are the ones that both you and your customers love.

Think of it as a Venn diagram with two overlapping circles.

1) All the potential pricing models that will work well for you

2) All the pricing models that your customers will like and accept

If your product creates value the circles will overlap. Trust me.

Most people miss this as they think pricing is a zero sum game and customers will lie if you ask them about pricing.

They kind of miss that the customer-circle even exists.

So they just try and pick a model that falls within their own circle and try to sell it to customers. If they get lucky it happens to fall within the customers' circle, and sales will be easy. If they don't, sales will be hard.

But if your product delivers value your customers would want to buy it in a way that makes sense for them, is fair, predictable, scales well with how they use and adopt the product and so on. At least they don't want the opposite of all of those things.

The good news is you can ask customers how they want to pay, and they will tell you.

You just have to ask them how they want to pay - not how much!

Here are questions that your customer will 100% answer honestly:

1) Does it make sense to split our pricing into retail and wholesale, creating two totally different models?

2) Does this packaging structure make sense to you - and does it address a real problem you are trying to solve?

3) Does a 'price per location' paid annually upfront represent a fair and reasonable way to pay for the value of the product, assuming the price is fair?

Your customer will answer honestly because it is in the customers best interest that you get this right. That your price falls within their circle.

So you can ask the customer about packaging, the pricing model and the structure of the pricing, as long as you don't ask them about the $-number.

Try it.

As promised: a point about pricing every Monday.

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