Tag: Manipulation

The price of dropping your trousers

Posted on by philipdodson

Price is one of these old school manipulative tools that is used heavily in business.

The phrase ‘they dropped their trousers on that’ is a well used one, especially when the purchaser is eagerly telling their peers about a great ‘deal’ that they negotiated.

The fact is that most businesses have built manipulation space into their pricing model and therefore ‘deals’, if that’s what you’re after, are rarely a deal.

How about running a business honestly and straight-forwardly. Whereby you price fairly to start with, demonstrate the more important value of being part of your business journey and then not needing to sell.

Demonstrate your ‘why’, your reason for being in business, put your values into it, price fairly and then there is no need to sell or manipulate your customers with the ‘price’ tool. They will gladly buy and stay loyal, even when others attempt to lure them away with price.

Stop discounting, stop over-inflating your prices and stop manipulating. Simply be honest, value-driven, fair and inspiring. Otherwise the price of always ‘dropping your trousers’ will be, that it becomes the only tool you have to attract customers and sooner or later it stops working as there is no value in the transaction or loyalty.

Don’t bother selling…..there is no point

Posted on by philipdodson

IMG_2797

If you have to sell your product or service, then you have failed.

Successful businesses create things that people want and they attract the right customers by telling the world why their particular business exists.

If you have got to the need to sell, then your product/service has failed to inspire, it has simply become a commodity and there will be little or no loyalty from the customers that you manipulate to purchase it.

Sales should be renamed manipulation. If you are at the stage of having to engage in strategies (tactics) to get someone to buy, then they haven’t seen the value.

All that will happen is that you will use discounts, add-ons, promo’s etc. Essentially you will be bribing your customer to purchase. Bribery works for a while, but it isn’t sustainable, as sooner or later your competitor will come along with a bigger bribe.

What we should all be doing is marketing our values, our reason for ‘being’ to our potential audience to inspire them to do business with us.

Inspiration effectively communicated, will last a lifetime in some cases, a manipulation, a sales tactic, will motivate for as long as the bribe is better than someone else’s.

Inspiration, combined with marketing, is the route to success in business in a connected world, where people have grown tired of being sold too and are growing ever more tired of manipulations.