Pricing for Profit

In today’s uncertain economic times, landscape and lawn care professionals are looking for a quick return on investment, no matter if this investment is in time or dollars.

As has been noted by leading analyst firms, such as McKinsey and Co. and A.T. Kearney, pricing is the quickest and the most efficient way to improve your bottom line. It has more leverage than cost cutting, traditional business process improvement and any effort to increase your sales volume. It is also an area that relatively few companies focus on. Thus, excellence in pricing gives you a strong competitive advantage.

Now, in knowing this, how can you use pricing to drive higher revenue for your business? What tactics in the pricing realm can you implement today?

Today, pricing is on everyone’s mind. If your company is bringing out a new service, choosing the right price is a topic of discussion. Maybe your company is facing downward pricing pressure, and you are looking for ways to fight back. Maybe you are just looking for ways to improve your bottom line. No matter the reason, these proven pricing tactics are guaranteed to go straight to your bottom line.

Do this today
Document the profitability (not revenue) for each of your service offerings – or at least the top 20 percent to start. We recommend you put programs and policies in place to guide your customers to the most profitable of these. Try these:

1. Compensation Optimization. Compensation drives behavior, and as you want to sell more of your most profitable product, it becomes important that your sales people are compensated on profits, not revenue, or at least some combination of the two. You can even offer special bonuses for these particular services to further drive your salesperson’s efforts to get them into the hands of your customers. 
2. Price Imaging. This is the method of using a service that is more expensive than the one you are actually trying to sell in order to create the illusion that the target service is more affordable.
3. Strategic Discounts. Discounts are best used if executed strategically. This means discounts should be focused on driving customers to your most profitable services and should not be used indiscriminately. The levels of discounts also need to be carefully calibrated so your highly profitable services stay highly profitable.

Do this next month
Services that are unique in a marketplace have pricing power. This means that prices can increase and sales volume will not suffer. In fact, if any offering is unique, and you are selling it at commodity prices, you are most likely on the upward slope of the market’s demand curve and a price increase will result in higher sales volume and revenue yields. 

A good method is to take your top 20 percent best-selling services and look at how much they stand out in your market. Categorize unique services as “A” and totally commodity services as “D.” “B” and “C” services are in between. Then focus all efforts to take out cost from “D” services and increase prices on “A” services. Also assess how “B” services can become “A” services and how “C” services can become “D” services.

Do this in the next six months
The final step in pricing excellence is to know the price elasticity for your services and therefore know where you are on the demand curve. The demand curve almost always has an upward slope, a crest and a downward slope. Generally, if you are on the upward slope, an increase in price will increase revenue. Likewise, if you are on the downward slope, a decrease in price will decrease revenue. If you are at the crest you need to use other methods, as just changing your price will not help.

Similar to price elasticity are price walls. Many services have very clear price walls; these are inflection points in the demand curve that consumers have built into their psyches. At these price walls, a 1 to 2 percent price change may generate a 10 to 20 percent drop or increase in revenue, depending on which side of the crest your price happens to be.

Conclusion
Finally, understand your customers. Anecdotal information about the needs of your marketplace captured by sales people is not the same as hard data from your marketplace.

Data capture the value perceptions and willingness to pay that your customers have with statistical significance. Having this at your fingertips will allow you to generate behavioral segmentation and to create bundles of services (or options) and prices that better target your marketplace.

Through this greater understanding, it may also be possible to open up new market segments – segments you have not yet served.
 

The author is the founder and managing partner at Atenga, Inc. He may be reached at per.sjofors@atenga.com