Selling the Price Increase

10Make Breaking Up Hard to Do

I started this section with an important premise: When selling price increases, your mission is to maximize revenue AND retain your orders and customers.

Selling price increases requires a dual focus. It's like playing offense and defense in sports. The offense is tasked with scoring as many points as possible while the defense focuses on keeping their competitor out of the end zone.

In Part Three, “Approaching Price Increase Conversations,” you are going to learn frameworks for targeting, messaging, and conducting effective price increase conversations. Think of these tactics as your offense.

Still, no matter how you approach it, customers are not going to be thrilled about getting a price increase. Some of them will threaten to start buying from your competitor if you raise their prices. Therefore, your best defense for making your price increase stick without losing your customer is to make breaking up with you hard to do.

Leveraging the Status Quo Bias

The good news is that you have both physics and psychology on your side.

First, physics. Change is difficult because it takes lots of energy and effort to get a stationary object moving. In order to change, your customer must start from a standstill, expending time, resources, emotions, and energy to begin a search, unwind their relationship with you, and potentially disrupt their business.

So, even though their emotions may compel them to seek out an alternative when presented with your price ...