When Lea and I were taking marketing classes many years ago, our professors diligently pointed out that people don’t buy based on price, they buy based on value. Perceived value, which is different for each person if we leave them totally to their own devices to determine. Which we all do all too often.
Have you ever bought something that wasn’t the lowest price? I thought so. Us, too. Don’t ask about our wine collection!
Why did you do that? Why was a higher price, perhaps the highest price, more attractive to you?
In simple terms, you wanted it more than you wanted the money.
Something has value when it is more important to you than the money you pay for it. In order to gauge value, you need to understand what you’re getting for the money you’re spending.
So here’s our big question for you.
Do you tell your clients about the value of working with you? Do you help them understand how you uniquely can solve their problem? Make their life better? You should.
Clients need us to lead them. We know more about our subjects than they do. That’s why they call us “experts”. How many times in their lives do they need to buy a website or create a business entity or evaluate an investment property? Not very often. So why would they know how to determine its value? It’s our job to lead them, to explain in clear terms what the value in working with us is.
Let me give you an example.
A group of MIT students were asked to do some menial work for a not-for-profit in their area, and they were offered minimum wage to do the job. Almost all the students said “no” flat out. They evaluated the work, determined its value by themselves and came up with a big fat “I don’t think so”.
They went to a similar group of students and asked them to do some menial work for a not-for-profit, but this time they explained the work the charity was doing, its benefit to the Cambridge community. And they offered the students NO MONEY at all for their work. This time…almost all the students said “Yes”. The students perceived working for free for a worthy cause to be more valuable than working for pay for a not-for-profit.
We’ve got another example for you closer to home—us. We firmly believe that we offer more value for your money than any other IT consulting company out there. As a matter of fact, our competition has a break fix approach to IT service. If a customer has a problem we will come out and fix it. No discussion on how can we avoid problems, be proactive so our systems are optimized and they make our business more productive. We know we’re really good (said with modesty) yet we were getting shopped all too often.
Why, oh, why was this happening? Then we realized…we weren’t explaining our value to you. After all, how often do you think about avoiding computer problems? Not very often. So why should we expect you to fully understand what you should be asking for from the IT service company?
