Have you ever wondered how a former eBay pricing expert transformed the way businesses approach pricing? Discover the secrets of strategic pricing that can enhance profitability and boost business valuation. Jenny Millar, a renowned pricing consultant, shares her insights into how strategic pricing can elevate a business to new heights. Her expertise reveals game-changing strategies that will leave you thinking, “Why didn’t I know this sooner?” You won’t want to miss this.
Pricing Strategy’s Role in Business Success
Strategic pricing impacts more than just profitability; it influences market position and attractiveness to potential buyers. By integrating pricing into an exit strategy, a business can present itself as an appealing investment, command a higher sale price, and ensure a smooth transition to new ownership.
Jenny Millar is the founder of Untapped Pricing and an expert in pricing strategies. With her experience from setting fees on European eBay platforms, Jenny understands how pricing psychology influences buying decisions. As the head of an award-winning consultancy, she provides clarity to business leaders, helping them optimise pricing for performance, growth, and successful exit planning. Jenny’s practical approach helps businesses enhance profitability and market position through smart pricing strategies.
Key Takeaways from Jenny Millar:
- Pricing strategies can maximise business value for a successful exit plan.
- A structured pricing system streamlines operations and boosts profitability.
- Pricing is crucial for business valuation and strategic growth planning.
- Moving from time-based to value-based pricing can transform revenue models.
- Incorporating customer feedback in pricing strategies leads to sustainable growth.
Transitioning to Value-Based Pricing
Jenny advocates for shifting from time-based to value-based pricing, especially for service-based businesses. Pricing based on deliverables and outcomes fosters a stronger, trust-driven relationship with clients. This allows businesses to optimise margins while delivering meaningful outcomes, enhancing both customer satisfaction and business success.
The Role of Pricing in Exit Strategies
When preparing for an exit, pricing is key to instilling confidence in potential buyers and investors. Jenny emphasises the importance of clear accountability and a systematic approach to pricing decisions. Consistent pricing strategies help eliminate guesswork, build trust, and lay the groundwork for a successful exit and future growth.
Watch the episode here:
How does your pricing strategy affect your exit plan? I’m talking to Jenny Millar, a pricing guru, to figure out how we can use pricing to influence our profitability, which will increase our valuation. And if we can have a pricing strategy that will work regardless of the owner’s involvement in the business, that is systemised and structured and therefore doesn’t rely on any owner’s involvement, which means it will be sustainable under new ownership. Now, that’s the headlines that we take out of this. But Jenny, it gives us a whole lot of top tips of what we can do and how we can implement and how we can get started on a pricing strategy that will be beneficial to our business and make it more profitable and more valuable. Pricing strategies one of the strategic solutions with Jenny Millar. Let’s go.
Welcome to the podcast that’s dedicated to helping business owners to prepare for exit so you can maximise value and then exit on your terms. This is the Exit Insights podcast, and it’s presented by succession plus. I’m Darryl Bates-Brownsword, and today we’re tackling one of our strategic solutions for business owners. What’s your pricing strategy? How do you change your pricing?
How do you make sure that you get pricing works? And so I’ve asked Jenny Millar to join us today. Welcome, Jenny, and thanks for joining me.
Thank you for having me.
Jenny. Now, you focus on pricing all day long. That’s what you do. And that’s. So I thought, who better to ask and get in and just help us with getting our pricing right in SME businesses, because often when it’s an SME, the owner is very close to the pricing and they can be attached. And I hear stories all the time where pricing hasn’t changed for years and years and years. So it’s one of our strategic solutions.
So how did you get involved in pricing? Let’s start with a little bit of background to set up, just so we know who we’re talking to today.
Of course. And I hear those stories all the time as well. So I think pricing is often that overlooked or neglected growth lever, but it’s such a powerful one in driving customer behaviours and resulting financial performance. I first got into pricing during my ten years with eBay, actually.
So I was responsible for setting the fees for selling on the European eBay platforms. It was a $26 billion business back then, so we priced very strategically to optimise for financial performance, but also to nudge customer behaviors. And so that’s where my interest in the psychology of price and its role in buying decision making was born. And skip forward. I’m now founder of Untapped Pricing. So we are an award winning consultancy, giving business leaders the clarity and the confidence to optimize their pricing to drive performance.
So I’m imagining an auction platform is really jumping into the deep end of understanding buyer behaviour, whether it be business buyers or consumers, private buyers. Understanding and seeing. Given eBay’s got so many different listings, you can compare two very similar, two identical listings, and why people are paying different prices and what are their scenarios? What’s the context to set up for one selling more than another?
Because on eBay, you’ve got everything there to play with, whether it be auction or fixed price and everything. I imagine you learned a whole lot about pricing really quickly.
Yeah, absolutely. So the breadth in selection was phenomenal. Some fascinating behaviors that I think that auction mechanism would trigger.
So we’d often notice that for exactly the same item, perhaps even from the same seller, if it was available for fixed price and auction, often the auction price would go above it, would exceed the fixed price. And we used to call it windorphins, so that that need to win. Yeah. So some fascinating behaviours and also like an array of different types of fees for listing, for successful selling, some subscriptions for kind of higher volume users, whether they were businesses or consumers. So it was an incredible place to cut my teeth in pricing.
Yes. So you’ve got all sorts of pricing structures. You’ve got all, you know, and they’re all available on the network, and as you say, from subscription through to buy it now through to auction, and sort of the thrill of the hunt type of purchasing, and a bit of scarcity and everything thrown in there. Let’s see if we can extract that, which I know you do on a daily basis anyway. But let’s, let’s figure out how we can apply that knowledge, because what we’re really interested in is the business owners that are listening to this podcast, typically medium sized to mid market sized businesses, really, in that two to 30 mil revenue bracket is most of it, and a little bit either side of there.
And that’s the size of business, where owner managers are still really in the thick of it. They’re often quite at their home and they started their business when it’s just them set their pricing. And what’s your experience? Is there psychology around pricing? How do you overcome the hurdles?
How do you educate people around the different options? I don’t know where to start. There’s just so much is the first bit around the psychology, a bit of understanding psychology and shifting business owners?
Yeah. So I think perhaps the first thing to talk about is the potential triggers for thinking about your pricing. So you certainly mentioned one of them when a small or medium sized business owner is looking to sell. But there are also others. Like ideally, the best time to think about price is actually the moment you start designing your product or service. So think about Ikea. The company first decides on a price and then sort of retro or reverse engineers the construction.
But for more established businesses with existing products and services, the triggers we commonly see are around, firstly the need to respond. So either to competitor activity, perhaps to inflationary forces. So maybe your costs have risen and your margins getting squeezed. But also remember that every year you don’t raise your fees, you’re devaluing your service because every dollar or pound of revenue is worth less due to inflation. Sometimes owners simply suspect they might be leaving money on the table or they want to make the business more attractive for sale.
And so I think in that scenario. So pricing strategy directly impacts your profitability, your market position and your attractiveness. But by using pricing as part of that exit strategy, a business can position itself as an attractive investment, can command a higher sale price, and also facilitate a smoother transition to the new ownership.
Yeah, and I guess you touched on, the more they keep their price the same, the more they devaluing their product. And the reality is their business is becoming less profitable.
And if I sum up, and I guess you’re saying the same here, if I sum up all the businesses and make some generalizations about the businesses we see, a lot of them are service based. So probably 70% of the businesses we work with are service based businesses. And the extent of the science or planning behind their pricing is pretty much what is everyone else who delivers what we do, what do they price now, my sense is that pretty much is turning your product into a me too product and really commoditizing what you offer, even if it is a service, you’re commoditizing your service by just going, look, we’re just the same as everyone else, and the more we just say we’re the same as everyone else. Well, the only difference that the client sees in that scenario is price. So why wouldn’t they go for the cheapest if everything else looks the same?
How do we get around that? I think you started touching on it before when you said, hey, look, we need to reverse engineer it and we need to start thinking about our price as soon as we start designing our products. So are you suggesting that there’s some sort of synergy for wanting to use a, you know, let me find a better word around that. But some sort of matching between how the product is structured and how the pricing is structured and that they fit together somehow?
Yeah, I think so. And I think that there is a tendency to for competitor led pricing strategies in the absence of a better plan. But of course, what that’s doing is giving your competitors the reins when it comes to setting your pricing. And if they change their prices, are you going to follow suit? Do you pitch your prices above them, below them, alongside them? But often that’s quite an irrelevant benchmark because what if your customers just see the value of your services totally differently?
So in our line of work, we are often trying to remove the guesswork and we do that by building the evidence that’s going to directly inform your pricing decisions. So we talk to our clients, customers and prospects, we do depth interviews and I survey work and often find that the competitors in the minds of the business owner that they’re tracking against aren’t the alternatives that their clients would go and research or compare you against. So that’s even worse. Right? Because then those benchmarks are even more irrelevant. So, yeah, go ahead.
I was just going to say, it sounds you’re really getting strategic here, which is what I’m liking. So you’re saying what’s happening with business owners a lot is that they’re comparing with who they think are the competitors. But you do research with the client or the potential customers and they’re basically going, yeah. Never even thought of that. No, they weren’t my alternative options. So then what happens?
Yeah, that’s it. And it might be that they are considering different competitors and they are shopping around, or there might be other alternatives. Do they do it in house? Do they not do it at all? Do they have other clunky workarounds? And I think this is all part of understanding, this is all part of understanding the value or perceived value that you’re delivering. So getting a grasp of the tangible outcomes that your service or product enables. So does it save time? Does it drive more revenue? Does it say, does it drive more profitability, generate more customers? Like what are those measurable outcomes, but also the intangible benefits? So does it have your product or service have an impact on brand, on wellbeing, on risk reduction? And what are those alternatives?
And so if you’re armed with those three things, so the tangible outcomes through the eyes of your customer, the intangible benefits and their alternatives, that’s a very powerful set of evidence to directly inform how you price and establish where the headroom might be, but also pays dividends in your positioning and your marketing and strategic decision making. And of course, you might find it’s very different for different pockets of customers.
Yeah, okay. Okay. So you’ve mentioned positioning there. So that’s another one of the strategic solutions that we address in this series where we’re going. Let’s get clear about what’s different about you in the marketplace, and then you can link that to your pricing and your proposition or your offering. But let’s imagine we’ve captured the attention of a number of the audience members who are going to. Yes, that sounds like me. I provide a service, essentially a service to my clients, and I want to move away from charging for time, and I don’t want to charge an hourly rate anymore.
How do I charge for the value I bring for my service? How do I tap into that as a traditional service, professional service, if you like, offering to my client, how do I charge the value? Where would you start that conversation?
Yeah, so I love time-based pricing. i think it is very easy to do. Perhaps it can be the default if an alternative isn’t clear, but you’re trading your time for money and that’s just not scalable. I think there’s a conflict of interest because the longer you take to do something, the more you get paid. So it penalises you for the expertise that you’ve built yourself and in the business for potentially years and years. So I find. But I do come across a lot of service based businesses that are still providing their estimates based on time, being very visible about that to the client.
And often that is done in the spirit of trust building and transparency, but actually the opposite happens and it invites scrutiny of. Well, why is it saying it’s going to take one and a half days to do that? I think that’s half a day’s work and I’m not paying for this element or this project manager. And it actually erodes the trust and takes it down to like a much more transactional relationship. Whereas if you can refocus on that sort of more strategic partnership and focus on the outcomes or the value.
Now, I appreciate that is hard to say, and it’s a hard transition in some industries that are really wedded to time based pricing. So there are some expectations and anchors to people are going to come up against there. I think you can certainly take some critical first steps. So let’s say that you still derive your minimum price by making time based estimations. I would do two things.
So first, when you share that with the customer, no longer provide those breakdowns of hours or days or kind of the rate per level of seniority, and instead break down the deliverables. So don’t price each deliverable and don’t sort of share how time is priced. We could talk about pricing the cake, not the ingredients. So people want to buy those.
It’s not a VAT conversation, is it?
So, yeah. So you’re taking away that granularity based on time, still sharing the stage gates or the deliverables they can expect. So what is in the cake is important, but you’re not pricing each ingredient, so you’re starting to decouple from the line level item. But then also the second thing is getting closer to what it means to the customer. So let’s say the same project, roughly the same scope, might mean two very different outcomes for two client A versus client B.
So now in the sales process and your qualification and understanding of what they’re looking to do, how do you quickly detect the client A’s from the client B’s and look to build in some additional margin and some additional headroom on your price, where it means more to the customer. And so you can start to experiment and start to build in that additional margin where you see those opportunities.
And I like the cake analogy because at the end of the day, they want the cake and they want what the cake looks like and they want what the cake tastes like. They don’t want the ingredients list unless you’re selling the ingredients list to build the cake yourself, which is a different proposition. And so if we, if I’m understanding, you’re basically saying, get the brief from the client as to what sort of cake they want and how much fancy bells and whistles they want on their cake.
And that will give you, you know, how much of the cake do you want us to build and how much of the cake do you want to build to? I guess keep extending the metaphor and the more, and that way you can get a feel of the value to them because they can go, look, you’ve done it a million times. We know that you’re going to build the cake or make the cake quicker than we could anyway. And because you’ve done it so many times, we know that your cake is going to be much better than ours and prettier and tastier. We could do it ourselves potentially, but it may or may not work.
And we just don’t want that risk. We need it right first time, and we don’t want to mess around because slowing us down means we totally missed the opportunity to eat the cake when we wanted to eat the cake.
And therefore, if I don’t need the cake for a month, well, it may be less value to all me today, but the benefit to you is you can schedule the cake making when you need to. I might be taking that, the metaphor a bit far, but. Yeah, but no, it’s a really good metaphor to understand how if we think about our pricing and it is a service to make a cake, and at the end of the day that the people get the cake, and I guess we could apply that, well, you get a contract, you get a will, you get a tax return, you get legal compliance, you get financial due diligence or financial compliance. And all these things we’ve got to start thinking, how do I, how do I describe what I do as a cake?
Yeah.
In terms of an end use outcome or an end use valuable piece is the biggest thing I’m taking out of this.
Yes. And I think another reason why often business owners are wanting to share the ingredient in such depth is because they want to be flexible and they want to convey choice and kind of empower the customer to cherry pick what they want. But actually, again, that can work in a very different way. And we often are able to prove that that sparks kind of decision fatigue because your clients come to you to be the experts, to curate the right set of ingredients for them and package it up into something that is going to get them from to where they want to go.
So again, you might inadvertently be putting more friction into the decision by trying to be overly flexible and by bundling, or maybe it’s bundling features or kind of putting together, let’s say three. Three is a magic number. Your good, better, best or bronze, silver, gold. You’re able to, to benefit from offering choices and empowering the customer to make decisions based on what they kind of really need, but without sort of overwhelming them. And then you see that approach everywhere because it’s so effective.
So the small, medium, large in a coffee shop got bronze, silver, gold, sass tiers, and it’s that sort of goldilocks effect. But from a pricing standpoint, it also means you can really anchor perceptions of your prices by pricing up that gold option. So some will go for it because they want the very best you can offer. But even those who don’t want that, you are anchoring their perception of your pricing for the, for the other two options. And you know, you are curating those, those packages based on your your expertise, you are getting on the front foot for any negotiation because you’ve already laid out how scope and price are going to change.
And so let’s just labor the analogy a little bit more. But you are putting forward the cupcake, the regular cake, and the three tiered cake. And it can be such a powerful kind of conversion and sales like technique.
So what I’m hearing, Jenny, is we want to give them some choices, but the choices around the value that they choose, we’ve got to, I guess, move away from the old, you know, let’s be totally transparent, because at the end of the day, the cake, the client doesn’t want you to buy the ingredients, assemble the ingredients, bake the cake, and ice the cake. They want the cake, and they don’t need to know the steps.
So the choices you’re giving them is, do you want a big cake, do you want a dozen cupcakes, or do you want a party size cake? That’s what we’re saying. Or a wedding cake, or what have you. And so we need to get clear around what it is that the client is buying so that we can get our story right to match that. And you touched on something else there that I think I’ve forgotten or missed.
Okay, so you’ve convinced business owners to start thinking about things differently and go, okay, look, I need to get my pricing more systemised. I need to get it structured so that there’s no decision around when we do our pricing. It’s very set, the way we do our pricing. We want to do our. So that there’s no guesswork.
So it’s very systematic in the way we apply our pricing. The benefit to the business owner is then that their pricing is consistent, which will really help with their revenues. So you’ve got business owners to think about that. Where do you start, and what are some of the traps that people who are trying to do it on their own, what mistakes do they make?
Yeah, so I think when it comes to pricing, there are a couple of kind of key pitfalls. Firstly, that sort of, I guess, ego of the decision makers or business owners. So either they’re sort of resistant to change. I think with pricing, there can be a really sort of don’t. If it’s not broken, don’t change it. I got the saying right there.
But a mentality about sort of we don’t want to break anything, but that can inadvertently stifle growth and reduce a company’s appeal to potential buyers. But it also, I think, leads to gut led decision making. So making decisions that are based on sort of emotional attachments, which then lead to that missed opportunity for maximising a business’s value. So then the second, I think, common pitfall is around not knowing what customers are willing to pay. So that can easily lead to either underpricing, where you’re leaving money on the table, which can lower that valuation and profit margins, or you’re actually overpricing, so you’re setting prices too high, which deters some customers and erodes your market share, perhaps.
That’s an interesting one. So what we’re saying is the problems are when owners are attached to the pricing themselves and applying their gut feel, which is often wrong, and not getting really clear on what it is that the customers that are buying from you actually value. So the pricing may be a mismatch to what they’re actually buying potentially, but they couldn’t buy anything else, so therefore they had to get this from you. And it’s not the value they want, but it’s close enough that they can budget and make it work to meet their needs. And if you actually had something that was more aligned to what they actually wanted, you could probably charge a bit more for it.
That’s it. So it’s all about removing that guesswork. So just a handful of interviews with customers can reveal a lot about needs, perceptions, motivations, what drives value, what unlocks decisions and willingness to pay. Maybe for business is thinking, oh, okay, I can design a cupcake, a regular cake, and a three-tiered cake. Like put pen to paper, create a prototype or a mock up of how that might look, and go and ask customers, go and get a handful of reactions to those options.
How do they respond to the language you’re using? Who do they think those packages are designed for? What is their willingness to pay? And you can frame it in a very sort of safe way. Everybody likes being asked for their opinion.
You’re a valuable customer. We’re thinking about kind of how we optimise our products and services to serve you better. Here’s something we’re considering, and sort of start to build some of that evidence. And then, of course, if businesses are serving kinda big communities, then quant survey work is also a way to get statistically robust data around things like, you know, willingness to pay for certain services or certain elements of your, of your service, and starting to spot the differences between perhaps different industries, different stakeholders, different product products or service ranges.
And I guess extending from that, from what you’ve just said, it’s quite possible that a business is already offering a service or a product or got something they do bundled up and the client doesn’t value that, and it’s valuable to the business, or the business thinks it’s valuable, but when you go and do the research, the client kind of says, well, yeah, we could do without that type of thing.
Yeah, absolutely. And let’s say, I don’t know, a one feature or part of a bundle is actually rarely used, but to some it’s super valuable. That’s the perfect candidate for an add on instead of part of that bundle, for example. I do appreciate, I’ve mentioned a couple of times testing for willingness to pay, but pricing is one of those topics where you can’t just say, hey, how much would you pay for this? And expect a reliable answer.
So perhaps it’s worth just talking about that for a moment. So a good starting point is a set of four questions. Now, these are called the Van Westendorp price sensitivity meter. So probably needs a bit of a rebrand, but they’re an incredibly powerful set of four questions. So at what price would you consider this to be a bargain?
So great value for money. At what price would you consider this to be getting expensive, but you’d still consider it? At what price is it too expensive to consider? And at what price is it so cheap you would question the quality? So in a one to one interview setting, asking those questions about a package or a feature or a service, whatever you know we’re talking about at the time will give you an indicative sense of what they’re willing to pay for.
And, you know, how broad is the range that they’re talking about here? And of course, then you can probe further and ask, well, what was in your mind when you answered those questions and start to get some of those benchmarks? Oh, well, we spoke to this competitor of yours last year, and this is what we expected, or you might surface some really bizarre price anchors in their minds. So we did a piece of work for a sustainability business recently, selling into enterprise level organisations. We were pricing a new data platform of theirs and we were asking these willingness to pay questions.
And people were thinking about their Netflix subscription when they were answering these questions about this enterprise level software, right. Which just showed us that, I mean, it’s a very nascent space. So our client needs to work harder in education around value and outcomes and really needs to sort of show their clients, help them anchor them on a much higher value.
I was just going to say you’ve raised something really important there because you’ve touched on subscription pricing, which is everybody wants to get their product unsubscription because it’s reliable cash flow. But do you think perhaps we’ve got subscription fatigue as perhaps as maybe was coming out in that survey, whereas everyone wants to go on subscription. It seems there’s a whole stack of products now that are being put on subscription, which you go, I only want that for the next month, or, I don’t want a subscription for that. That’s not an appropriate thing to be buying on subscription. It should be just an outright purchase. Is that happening?
Yeah, that’s a great shout. And actually a number of clients have come to us saying, hey, we think we’re ready, we want to move to subscription pricing. And we have proven that that would be a very bad move. Not the right time.
So I think to consider that a couple of things. Firstly, you need to build the evidence that there is that perceived ongoing value in your service. So it’s not only going to be meaningful to your clients in the first few weeks of using your service, but there is that sort of perceived ongoing value. And they won’t just churn after three months when they’ve sort of got what they got what they wanted.
I’ve perhaps lost my second thought, but I think it’s definitely something to be. Ah, yes. So also think about how the impact that’s going to have on your revenue curve. Right. It’s expensive to move to subscriptions because even if it’s successful, you are shifting from kind of worn off fees into lower ongoing fees.
So just make sure your, your forecasting and your projections is like, is accurate and that you are looking to refine the assumptions in that model as quickly as you can validate them.
Okay, so we’ve, we’ve covered a lot of ground. Jenny, what about some quick wins? Have you got some hot tips that business owners can do perhaps before they’re ready to reach out to you or they want to start dabbling or do some of their own research where they can extend their pricing. What are some top tips to get some quick wins?
Great. Okay, so I’ve got one, sort of. Yeah, I’ve got three tips. So, one, two are almost some of, a couple of our favorite, like, psychological pricing tricks when presenting your information. So. But the first, the structural one is. So we’ve been talking about generating the evidence that’s going to make you and your potential purchases more confident in evaluation, got the right pricing strategy. And so just looking at your internal data in a new way can be very revealing. So if you can plot either your services or your clients or your projects into kind of high and low growth and high and low margin quadrants.
Yeah.
So just imagine sort of a bubble chart with four quadrants, and we’ve got kind of high growth, high margin parts of your business, top right. And we’ve got low margin, low growth parts of your business on the bottom left. Yeah. Some teams might be kind of plotting, yeah. Product lines or maybe markets or even sales leads within the organisation.
And so that gives you this powerful view of where growth and profitability is concentrated in your business. So then what can you learn about that top right quadrant? So the high growth, high margin areas of your business, they’re the stars. So what we can, what can we learn from those projects or services or packages or clients that we can cascade elsewhere? Maybe the low growth, low margin is actually areas to sort of divest or just sort of deprioritise high growth, low margin.
Like, are you losing margin unnecessarily in those areas, or are you actually comfortable to forego margin there? So, of where things fall on that quadrant, I think sparks really useful strategic questions that guide you to firming up areas or your pricing strategy and finding those opportunities to enhance your pricing.
Okay, so doing so, the first tip is do some analysis on where your products fit in terms of their growth and margin and just understand how they spread. And just by doing that analysis, some obvious strategies will come out and be identified by plotting everything that way. Great tip.
Second tip. Second tip. So this one is about sweating the small stuff when it comes to actually presenting your pricing information. So whether you’ve got a pricing page online or it’s the pricing page in your proposal, like this is where the decision gets made. Lots of research showing that actually customers just flip to this page, don’t decouple value from pricing here, it needs to be inextricably linked.
But two quick fire tips. Firstly, make sure that the font size that your price points are written in isn’t too large. Our brains have a universal conceptualisation of size, so we tend to equate sort of font size with the magnitude of the price. So just writing your prices in a smaller font, not an unreadable font, but a smaller font, will sort of help influence how that number is perceived, help it be perceived as a smaller number. And then the second is anchoring with any high number.
So people tend to rely heavily on that first number they see when making decisions, which causes an anchoring effect. So if you can display any high number near your prices, it can influence how customers perceive that price. So it might be that your price is, I don’t know, 5000 pounds, but you’ve got 200. You put 200,000 happy customers, or, you know, it doesn’t have to be pricing information. Any high number.
That’s interesting.
Very near. Your pricing information can be very powerful, too. It’s one of those predictably irrational things about how we interpret information.
That’s brilliant. So three top tips there. And because you just did the last two together, so get a big number. And what was the second tip? So get a big number next to your price. And the other one is don’t necessarily use a big font for your price. You don’t want it too big. Yeah. So let’s give. And you don’t want it too small so that it looks like you’re trying to hide your price too much, but you’ve got a link at next to value and a big number can do that. Jenny, that’s amazing.
Okay, so there’s some great tips to get things going. I’m just wondering, while I’ve got you, is there anything that you’re expecting me to ask today that you don’t feel that we have covered but you feel is really important and you want listeners to make sure they get this message.
I guess, just to reemphasise how to think about pricing and its role in exit strategy. So put yourselves in the shoes of the buyer, and it’s all about confidence in the business. So can you confidently demonstrate kind of consistent and reliable revenue streams? Can you confidently demonstrate kind of a strong and sustained profit margin? Can you show that you’ve changed prices and as the business has evolved, and that you can communicate price changes and manage customer sentiment? And do you have a well documented pricing strategy? Because prices, like, even at, you know, in a range of company sizes, pricing can not have an owner. I’ve seen it sit under many different job titles or just be floating around a leadership team as like a hot potato that no one wants to catch.
So do the team know how prices are set, measured and changed? Is accountability clear? And you always can see that.
And the last thing we want is for the pricing to be reliant on the owner, to set the price or quotes for anything, so that as long as the. As you said, there is a structure, there is a framework for how pricing is done.
If you’ve got that, then anyone in the business can apply that. That’s a fourth bonus tip. Jenny, thank you. I really appreciate you sharing your exit insights. We will link for anyone who wants to explore this further. We’ll put some links to how to contact you, your LinkedIn and your website. Is there anything specific that you want them to tap into in terms of exploring and getting started on their pricing strategy journey?
Yeah. So if you want a quick health check on your current approach to pricing and some ideas for where to get started, go to thepricingscorecard.com. Thepricingscorecard.com so yeah, it takes about four minutes to answer some yes or no questions. You’ll get a personalised report packed with some tips and tricks for where to improve.
Alrighty. We’ll put that link in the show notes so the pricing scorecard and that’ll get them started to start to, I guess expand their thinking on and build confidence by the sounds of it is a big part of it. Build the confidence around. If you change your pricing, it’s going to be okay, me and then you’ll be on your way.
Jenny Miller thank you. I really appreciate you sharing your exit insights with us today.
Thank you.
About Jenny Millar
Jenny Millar is a specialist, advocate, and thought leader in the field of pricing. She demystifies pricing strategy, giving business leaders the clarity and confidence to price their products and services more effectively.
Jenny founded Untapped Pricing to shine light on the untapped potential of pricing to boost profitability, drive engagement with customers and unlock growth bottlenecks. Her lively team of pricing experts, Design Thinkers, research specialists and behavioural psychologists bring colour to the topic of pricing and help you remove the guesswork.
Her background includes 10 years with eBay where she built the world-class analytics teams to transform their 20 petabytes of data into commercial intelligence and delivered major price changes across eBay’s major European markets.
Jenny teaches Entrepreneurship at Warwich Business School and Pricing Strategy at London School of Economics.
For a quick pricing health check, visit thepricingscorecard.com. It only takes four minutes to answer a few yes/no questions and get a personalised report with tips for improvement.
Get started by knowing how sellable your business is right now. Check out our Business Sellability Scorecard to find out.