PRICING SERVICES

PRICING SERVICES: THE PRICING PENTAGON

Five elements that influence service pricing:

1. Costs

It is impossible to pursue any pricing strategy without understanding the cost line. What are the costs you will incur to deliver the solution or service at the customer site? Regardless of your pricing strategy, the objective is to make the cost component as accurate and tangible as possible. The better you understand costs, the greater chance you have of pricing services profitably.

2. Financial Objectives

What revenues and profits does the company expect to receive from the service offering? With no target profit model in mind, financial objectives for a service offering must be debated on a case by case basis and can end up all over the place.

3. Competitor’s Price

If the service you are offering is available from other companies (and more than likely it is), it is helpful to understand what those companies are charging. As always, it is risky to determine appropriate pricing in a market vacuum.

4. Customer’s Price Point

What is the customer willing to pay for the service? Such a simple and obvious question. Yet, not an easy one to answer. The salient point is that the more you understand about the customer’s price sensitivity, the better your target pricing will be.

5. Value

Where a customer finds value in your service should clearly influence how you position that service. Value influences final pricing. Do you have a clear sense of what value the customer receives by purchasing the service? One of key tactics to profitable service pricing is to accurately assess the benefits the customer receives from the service and the total costs incurred to deliver that service. The more tangible you can make both the benefits and the costs, the clearer the value of the service becomes.

These five elements are summarized in the image for today’s blog entry:  The Pricing Pentagon. Each point in the pentagon influences the pricing of a service offering. The logic is simple: The better your understanding of each variable, the more effective and profitable your service pricing will be.

The Pricing Pentagon

With these five variables in mind, there are three distinct approaches you can take to create pricing for a service offering:

1.            Cost Based Pricing

2.            Value Based Pricing

3.            Market Based Pricing

Each pricing approach requires different levels of mastery regarding the five variables. Each approach has strengths and weaknesses.  Cost based pricing is the low effort approach but it results in the minimal required profits—pricing does not exploit the true value of a service. Also, cost based pricing creates the highest amount of market risk. Your service may simply be over priced and deliver little value. Value based pricing takes more effort but increases profit potential because you are now exploiting the value line by matching price to value. Value based pricing also has less market risk than cost based pricing. Market based pricing requires the most effort but rewards you with the greatest potential of owning the market.

At this point in time, our data tells us a vast majority of service organizations pursue a brute force, cost based pricing strategy.  Even when projects are bid with a fixed price, they are often structured in a time and materials fahshion with a not to exceed cap. In other words, the service provider still approaches the project from a cost basis and does not base the fixed price on the value of the project to the customer. As Peter Drucker pointed out years ago, there is incredible market risk with a cost based pricing approach.

If there is strong viewing for this post, I will dedicate a future post to introducing a new service pricing framework I am working on titled “Pricing Time Zones”.  It is another framework service organization can use, like the Pricing Pentagon, to formulate a strategy for pricing those pesky, intangible services.