Avoid Flinch Pricing
People ask us about pricing a lot. It’s on our site and our goal is to keep it straightforward. Everyone gets the same deal.
This is counter to a lot of companies which use “flinch pricing“. Flinch pricing is about finding the highest possible price a customer will pay for every transaction. You throw out a number and, if the prospect flinches, you negotiate.
There’s value in negotiating but that doesn’t mean every transaction needs to be negotiated. For example, with website maintenance, adding on the overhead of quoting and negotiating every change increases the cost of doing business and makes website maintenance more expensive.
As an aside: a side effect of using flinch pricing is that one group of customers, usually those who aren’t as informed about the market they’re purchasing in, ends up subsidising work done for other customers. The service provider ends up with a blended rate that they’re satisified with overall. Some people pay a little more, some people pay a little less.
I prefer up front pricing that’s easy to understand and consistent for all comers. That’s not always easy to find (when I’m dealing with plumbers, for example) but the comfort of knowing that I’m getting the same deal as everyone else is worth the effort.
BTW, the Karass books are leftover from a Karass Negotiation Seminar I went to back in 1995. Yeah. 1995.