Selling the Price Increase

12Defending Price Increases: Between a Rock and a Hard Place

Here's how defending price increases typically goes down: The senior executives in your organization decide to launch a broad, across-the-board price increase initiative that will impact most of your customers.

• Perhaps it's an increase in the delivery charge from $5.00 to $10.00.
• Or an environmental fee or fuel surcharge tacked on to all invoices.
• Could be they've decided to raise the per-seat fee for your SaaS platform by 7 percent.
• Maybe an increase of 20 percent on a certain item or feature.
• It might be an increase on processing fees, specific parts, or shipping.

No matter – they've weighed the risk of losing customers against the reward of the price increase and determined that the risk of losing customers is low. Because of this, the price increase will be non-negotiable with exceptions for a handful of your largest accounts.

Next, the marketing team, along with the senior leaders of the sales, customer success, finance, and operations organizations, get together to develop a rollout plan. They decide when the price increase will be announced, when it will go into effect, how it will be communicated, the message customers will receive, along with when, how, and where it will be communicated and cascaded to the front-line leaders, sellers, and service personnel.

Marketing develops messaging. Customers may get the announcement via email, as a notice of changing terms and conditions when they log in, as messages ...