The LeveragePoint website
Over the weekend, LeveragePoint’s Twitter feed picked up my posting Pricing, value and marketing — is there a common denominator? LeveragePoint offers a “software solution for value-based pricing,” advocating the not-unreasonable concept that if you can find the right pricing value point for your product or service, your margins will naturally be much better than if you simply sell based on your cost.
Of course, LeveragePoint prices its software at a level in line with its philosophy. You can certainly obtain access to the software for free (for four months), if are a student and you have purchased as a textbook The Strategy and Tactics of Pricing by Thomas Nagle, John Hogan, and Joseph Zale. Of course even the book isn’t inexpensive as far as books go, $40.86 at Amazon.com’s current discounted price. Then again, if you are a corporation with under 100 users, expect to pay $6,000 a month for the software.
Okay, this is obviously expensive stuff, unless you are Betchel or SNC Lavalin. I can’t see many of my blog’s readers forking over this type of dough when many of us are rushing to review plans and submit bids for “lowest price” wins tender opportunities (and worse, in some cases, engaging in “bid peddling” to see if they can find a way to revise their bids to come in lower than the lowest-posted bid).
However, if you read around the edges of the LeveragePoint site, you’ll still discover some incredibly useful free resources and learn more about the intriguing interface between sales, marketing and pricing in the business-to-business landscape. Figuring out the hot spots, presenting offers where the real value to your market is undeniable, and creating the atmosphere where your clients are quite comfortable with the pricing they pay is undoubtedly a challenge worthy of solving.