Podcast: Play in new window | Download
How to Set Your Prices with Melina Palmer
In business and marketing, few concepts evoke as much confusion and misunderstanding as pricing. From determining the optimal price point to crafting effective pricing strategies, navigating the intricacies of pricing feels like deciphering a complex puzzle. Behavioral economist Melina Palmer helps us delve into the heart of pricing and sheds light on its significance as well as some strategies to consider.
Key Takeaways
- Pricing Is More Than Just a Number: Melina emphasizes that the elements leading up to the price point—like priming, framing, and building value—are more influential in the purchasing decision than the price itself. The way a product or service is presented and the customer’s experience before seeing the price can significantly impact their perception of value.
- Confidence in Pricing: It’s crucial for businesses to present their prices confidently. If a business owner shows hesitation or uncertainty about their pricing, it can lead to customer doubt. Stating the price clearly and confidently can make a significant difference in how it’s received by potential customers.
- Quality vs. Value Decision: Businesses need to decide whether they are positioning themselves as a provider of quality or value, as the strategies for each are distinctly different. Quality-focused businesses should use rounded pricing and avoid discounting, while value-focused businesses can leverage discount pricing and promote bargains.
- Use of Scarcity and Social Proof: Implementing tactics like scarcity (e.g., limited time offers) and social proof (e.g., showcasing popular choices or testimonials) can create a sense of urgency and validate the customer’s decision to purchase, based on others’ actions and opinions.
- Strategic Pricing Structures: Melina suggests that businesses should carefully structure their pricing tiers, ensuring there’s a “wingman” option— a higher-priced option whose primary role is to make the other options seem more reasonable. This approach helps in anchoring the perceived value and can lead to higher conversions for the desired pricing tier.
How to Set Your Prices Episode Transcript
Rich: My guest today is returning for her second tour of duty on the Agents of Change podcast. She is the CEO of The Brainy Business, which helps companies around the world apply behavioral economics, so customers buy, and employees buy in.
She’s written three best-selling books and hosts the Brainy Business Podcast, which has more than 1 million downloads in over 170 countries. A consultant and keynote speaker, she also teaches applied behavioral economics via the Texas A&M Human Behavior Lab. She and her work have been featured in many outlets including Inc. and Psychology Today. Which growing up having a psychologist for a dad was always somewhere in the house, so I love that magazine.
Today we’re going to be talking about pricing, one of the most misunderstood and confusing aspects of both marketing and running a business, with returning guest Melina Palmer. Melina, welcome back to the podcast.
Melina: Oh, thank you so much for having me.
Rich: I love your stuff. I love your podcast. Tell me, what was the inspiration behind writing your newest book, The Truth About Pricing?
Melina: I’ve been talking about pricing and helping people with it for a very long time. And The Truth About Pricing was almost my first book. And in working with my publisher at that time, it was, which way do we want to go? And they ultimately decided to go with the general behavioral economics, which became What Your Customer Wants and Can’t Tell You. So I’ve known that this had to be a book for some time. And it took a couple of years longer than expected to come out.
But really the reason that I wanted to have the book is because I know so many people struggle with pricing, and our brains are really wired to make it so that it’s hard for us. Especially if you’re in smaller business and you’re having to price your own stuff. That can be really hard for people and can make it difficult to speak with confidence when you’re selling. And that is such a huge disadvantage you would be putting yourself to if you’re not able to speak confident confidently about your prices.
So being able to feel good about them, know that they’re properly aligned, and how to incorporate psychology into that selling, buying, pricing process. And knowing there’s a science to it is like, how can I not write that book?
Rich: Absolutely. It’s funny because earlier today I actually did a guest lecture for an entrepreneur class at a local college. And the very first question somebody asked me is how do you price your services? And I’m like, I have an idea, but I will have even more of an idea later on today after I talk to my guest, Melina Palmer. So, talk about timing. I’ll have to send this over to her.
Early on in the book, you say that the truth about pricing is that it’s not about the price. What do you mean by that?
Melina: Yeah. And I think that’s page three. So when we say it’s early, I give away the answer to the title. So the thing is that everything that comes before the price matters more than the price itself. And the example that I always come to here is one that leads into my framework for pricing, which is called, “It’s not about the cookie”. So if you imagine we’re walking down the street, having a great conversation, and then all of a sudden there’s this delicious scent that comes toward us, and it’s sweet and a little salty and chocolate. We realize it’s chocolate chip cookies. They’re close. We can smell them and we’re so excited. And so we’re still having a good conversation, but we’re drawn toward that delectable scent. And then we get in front of the store, and we see there’s a line, and we find ourselves in the line. And they have free samples and they say today only buy three, get one free. Before we know it, we walk out of there each eating a cookie with a bag that has an undisclosed number for the future. So that’s scenario one, right?
In scenario two, same street, same conversation, same everything, but a person comes up and shoves a coupon in our faces and says, “Hey, today only we’re selling these cookies. And if you buy four, you only have to pay for three of them.” I’ve got samples. I hate that guy. Get out of here. We get in front of the store, we see the line, and we’re pitying those people that have lower standards than us. And then when we smell the cookies, that’s incentive to write a Yelp review about their bad sales tactics, how we’d never buy from them.
So what’s important to note here? All the same things happened, they were in a different order. But in one case, the first scenario, we’re almost definitely buying those cookies, we’re like being pulled in from the very beginning. In the second scenario, we’re almost definitely not buying. So we know it’s not about the cookie. And also price never came up. They could have been $3 each in the first scenario, 50 cents each in the second, and it wasn’t really what was leading us in to buying. So everything that happens before the price matters more than the price itself. That’s where the psychology comes in and what I teach in the book.
Rich: So if the price is so dependent on everything that comes before it, obviously we don’t all have cookies that smell good. Although my office is right next to J’s Oyster Bar, and they start cooking garlic at about 10 AM in the morning. So I can understand the benefit of that approach.
For those of us that don’t have products that smell good, what are some of the things that we could do that would be similar? And maybe what are some of the tactics we might want to stay away from to avoid that second scenario?
Melina: Yeah. So fortunately, as you bring up, it’s not only for those that are working in a bakery or something to have this tactic. And those that priming, that thing that’s going to draw someone in to get that little kind of bit of appeal, getting their subconscious brain excited about what it is that you do is the thing that comes first.
In my case, the podcast is a big thing that I’m putting out into the world that’s helping people to see what it’s like to work with me. There’s a mix of things we’re doing here. We’ve got reciprocity of giving that away. We have a little taste that gets some of this loss aversion going, get an idea of what it’s like to work with me, as well as that priming that’s drying them in.
And when it’s time to buy something, they’re more likely to want to come to me than someone else because they’ve gotten familiar with me and my style. And people who don’t like it, which happens, I’m not a fit for everybody, I’m okay with it. They can self-select out. They’re not going to call. So it actually helps in the process of buying that I don’t have a bunch of people where we’re trying to figure out if we’re a fit for each other.
People already know what it’s like to communicate with me before they even decide to make that call or not. So that’s a big thing to do in the case of the two cookie scenarios. And this, that priming, the scent of the cookies that’s drawing you in is the most important thing that you need to be starting with. Something that’s enticing, that’s building curiosity, that is starting to divert attention to be focused on this thing and how much we want to engage with it.
When we just are trying to throw logic in your face and the coupon and going way too fast too soon, is when it’s really repellent to people and they’re not going to want to engage no matter what. So you want to be thoughtful to what is going to be exciting to someone, what’s going to be interesting to them, understanding what they value so you can speak on their level in a way that they think, “Oh, this is perfect. It’s exactly what I’ve been looking for.”
Rich: And it just for me, sometimes it always comes back to those early days of dating where if you are coming on too strong, you come across as desperate, and then nobody wants any of that action. The first bit you pull away and suddenly become much more fascinating, much more interesting.
Now obviously you’ve seen the benefits of podcasting. I have my own podcast. I also know the benefits of it, but not every business is going to be right for a podcast or has the bandwidth for a podcast. What are some other things that businesses can do, whether they’re a service-based business, anything from web design to plumbing to maybe they’re selling something. What are some of the other priming tactics that you’ve seen work or maybe some of your clients have seen work that listeners might adopt for their own needs?
Melina: Yes. So definitely agree. I do not recommend that everyone go start a podcast. They are a lot of work.
Rich: Who needs the competition anyway, right?
Melina: Yeah. But they take a lot of time. Time in anything that you’re going to do, you want to make sure you can invest the time to do it right. So I’m a big advocate in not trying to sprinkle in and do a little bit of everything. You want to be thoughtful to where your people are, what they care about, and show up really, really well. If you can be present in one consistent spot in a way that your people find it and get it, that’s always going to be better than sporadically doing things all over the place.
So yes, podcasts being one option. We also have a blog or a newsletter, if you wanted to be on Twitter or X, Instagram, TikTok, any of the socials. LinkedIn has a lot of options these days, YouTube. You can also be having a lead magnet. A really compelling thing that if you think about what’s the little taste of something that someone is able to get, that’s that first big win that they can get really quickly, that’s going to be an easy exchange for an email address. Something where you’re able to connect with them, and that they want to then more tidbits from you.
And that continual buying in on a regular newsletter, say, where they want to open that up and get into that repetition of saying, “I like Melina. I like her stuff when it comes around. I’m the type of person that opens her emails. I want to see what she has to say.” That is that continual, tiny, little, micro buy in is making it that when you do have something to sell, they’re already in that habit of buying from you. That can make it easier to move forward.
So big thing to know, don’t have whatever it is you’re giving away for free should not be exactly the thing that you’re selling. Because that is a hard sell, in the, no one’s going to buy the cow when you give away the milk for free. So you want to be thoughtful to that.
You want to know how it’s going to work in a selling cycle of what it is that you give away for free versus what you do that’s paid, so that the connection makes sense. Like you could have an amazing lead magnet that’s a dating checklist, but if you sell resume writing services, it’s a total waste of time. You don’t need those people on your list.
And just don’t do another boring version of the thing. Nobody needs another email that isn’t worth reading, right? But if you have something thoughtful, we all have those emails or things that we are excited to read them when they come into our inbox. And you can be that for somebody.
Rich: It’s funny, your comment about not giving away the milk for free. I remember years ago when Apple podcasts tried doing paid podcasts, everything had always been free. And Ricky Gervais at the time had one of those popular podcasts out there, and suddenly they started charging for it. And it was no different than the free version and it failed miserably. And I’m like, if they had just done something different. Like maybe the paid version is the video where you could watch him and all his facial expressions. But it was the same thing, and therefore there was really no perceived value there at all.
So we’ve talked a little bit about priming, but what are some of the other tactics that people can use? Because there’s always that moment where we ultimately have to tell people what’s the cost of this product and they have to make that decision. What are some of the ways that we can actually make that a little bit easier for somebody to swallow so that they will move forward?
Melina: Yeah. So there are several concepts in the cookie framework. Like we talked about priming, framing is one. So how you say it matters more than what you’re saying. I mentioned reciprocity, giving a little bit of a gift. We have the loss aversion piece that somebody doesn’t want to lose something that they already have. We also have scarcity, which can be very valuable, that ‘today only’ type of language.
And then social proof and herding is something that is really overlooked, but super important when it comes to buying. So we humans are a herding species, and so we like to know that other people like us have bought a thing and been happy about it. So this is why ratings and reviews and testimonials are so important. Also, language, like most popular. And I know that logically it feels like it shouldn’t matter. It shouldn’t be that important to say something like ‘most popular’ or ‘best value’ even. Because people can figure that out or they should know it’s popular or whatnot, research has found.
And so when the concept was really being established, there was a restaurant that went through, and they started to put ‘most popular’ on what was their actual most popular dishes. So we’re always going to be honest with everything we put out there. And in this, they saw a 20% lift in sales of that item when it said ‘most popular’ on it.
So if you line it up to where that thing is also something that is profitable for you, that you want people to be buying, you need to work on those numbers and things too. And just putting those two little words there could increase the likelihood someone’s going to get it by 20%, like, why would you not want to do that?
So the thing being how we say it, getting back to framing, having that confidence. Like you were talking about in that dating scenario, where if you feel it seems really needy and desperate, it doesn’t work in selling things either. And so being able to confidently say the price and be able to say, ‘most people get this thing’, right? That’s the herding coming in there again, makes a really big difference.
So if you say, “Okay, it’s $500, and I know that’s going to feel like a lot and it may be difficult to come around and just raise the price. And if you don’t feel good about it, we could do a discount if you need it.” And they didn’t even ask for anything yet. But when you’re coming across in this way, then there’s a feeling that something is off, and obviously you’re not worth whatever that amount is because of how you presented it.
Whereas if you say, “It’s $500, would you like to move forward with that?” The end, right? We can say it like it’s the time of day or the weather. And to say, “And most people pay by credit card, would you like to do that?” It helps us to feel more comfortable moving forward with that buying process. Then if you don’t feel confident, you can’t expect they’re going to feel good about buying.
Rich: Yeah, and I noticed you even used a little bit of herding with “most people pay by credit card” as well, which is great. I do agree that confidence thing is really helpful.
And years ago I took ballroom dancing, and I discovered I was taught that if I make a mistake, it’s my fault. If my partner makes a mistake, it’s also my fault, because there’s a lead and I’m supposed to give good frame. And it almost sounds like in that situation that’s what you’re doing, is you’re giving good frame and you’re leading them down the path with a certain amount of confidence as well.
Melina: Yeah, the along those lines. The last two concepts I’ll potentially talk about today have to do with anchoring and relativity. And so in this is understanding that context is really important and numbers matter, and the way we present information is very important. So when we think about presenting options and we were building out service options that we have for people, different packages, we think from the bottom up, right?
So we’ve got the lowest price one, or you could have this next one, or there’s this other one. And we’re building up to the biggest thing. What I see as the biggest mistake people make is presenting them in that way, starting low and working your way up. And also having the thing that you want most people to buy being the most expensive thing. So when you get to what you think is the best option, people then stop, and you don’t create something beyond that. And that is another mistake.
So you don’t want in general the thing you want people to buy to be the most expensive thing that you sell, because then it doesn’t feel as appealing. So you want to create something bigger than that. What I call the wingman for your best offer. Getting back to our kind of dating scenario here, its job isn’t to be bought. If it is great, you want to build something that you would be happy if people were to buy it. But its whole job is to make that best offer look really good. And if you make it where often it’s our high anchor, it’s the most expensive thing, then we can work down to the thing that you really want people to buy, and it feels more appealing when it’s not the most expensive thing.
And I have a simple little example I can share of this. So imagine you go in to buy a couch and you see one you like. You ask the salesperson, “Hey, how much is this couch?” And they say, “Oh, it’s $900. Oh, sorry, my mistake, $700.” So we have that moment. We go in, same couch, same place, “Hey, how much is this couch?” They say, “It’s $500. Oh, sorry, my mistake, it’s $700.” So same couch. It was never $900 or $500, but it feels incredibly different in both scenarios. In one it feels like a good deal, and the other , wow, that’s way overpriced. I guess I should be looking for $500 couches, right? So that relative number that comes up before has a big impact.
And similarly, if the most expensive thing, if you do an in person day for $10,000 or something, and that’s just what you have. And you may think, but what else do we do? How do I go beyond that? You could have a weeklong rate or something that you could start with. You could also have a version where you say, hey, we have two days together in the south of France, and you pay for the travel but we’re there and it’s $30,000 for those couple of days. And most people don’t necessarily want the getaway attached to it, and so we have this thing for just $10,000. And again, it just feels different when presented that way.
Rich: Absolutely. And I’ve had that experience with getting heating a heat pump in my house. And originally he sent over, and I hope he was being honest, originally sent over a price point of $17,000. And I’m like, holy cow, there is no way I’m just heating one room. And he asked, he followed up and I said that was out of my price range. And he says, “Oh my God, I sent you the one for the entire house for another client. Let me re-send it over.” And it was like a third of the cost. And I knew enough about the psychology where I’m like, I know why I feel like that’s a good deal right now, but I do think it’s actually a good deal. So that kind of stuff definitely works.
So if I’m hearing you correctly, if we’ve got say three tiers – good, better, best – kind of a thing, we really actually need to come up with one that’s even higher than that without the intention of ever necessarily selling it. So if I’m doing lobster bakes out on the island, like I should, and I feel like this is as much as I could charge for it. I should come up with a version that includes a helicopter ride out to the island for $10,000 more. And if somebody ends up buying it, then I’ll have to buy a jet plane after that or something. But the bottom line is, we should always have that reach product that reached here to make everything else feel a lot more accessible and reasonable for the person.
Melina: Yeah, in general, yes. And a couple of caveats there if you already have a good, better, best, potentially the good thing isn’t quite there enough. And if you’re trying to sell the best, you need to nudge up and maybe drop that bottom thing. So we don’t want to have 15 options because we have a paradox of choice problem that comes up there as well. We don’t want to overwhelm people. So be thoughtful. Just because you’ve always offered something doesn’t mean you have to keep offering it.
And you also have options to be bundling things together. So if there isn’t something new, you can do… I give an example in the book about someone that maybe if you’re selling courses and you want people to buy your $900 course. But it’s the most expensive one, and you also have a $600 course and a $500 course. And then you say, “Hey, you should buy a course. Doesn’t this one seem good?” If you can do them all though, and you say, “Hey, it’s $2,000 to do them all. Or, you can just start with this one. It’s $900.” Then that feels relatively better being that it’s at that price point. And you didn’t have to discount anything to be able to get to that, so you don’t have to discount to do a bundle. And you may find though, people will say, oh, I didn’t even know I could do all three. Sure. I’ll go ahead and get them all.
And so what you may find, and often it’s not that everyone needs to raise their prices all of the time, or that you need to expand your services. But what I found with clients over the years is, when you build out the thing that you think is way more than anyone’s going to want, you may be surprised that people get really excited and buy the thing. Which is why I say, be sure it’s something you want to do. So don’t build in something with a whole lot of handholding when you hate the idea of doing that ongoing type of work. So be thoughtful to the thing that you build, but when you design it and think, okay, if not everybody needs this thing, but maybe they would want a person on site with their team, that’s going to be there for six months and they’re going to do this, that. You build the thing out and someone buys it, you want to make sure it’s something that you’d be thrilled that they do.
Rich: Absolutely. Let’s say that you’ve got a virtual summit that you plan on putting on and it’s free to attend, but of course there’s paid upgrades. Now it’s already promoted that this is a free to attend event. So we’re already heading in the wrong direction because we’ve already said this is the lowest price offer. What are some tactics that marketers might do, or people who put on events might do, to get people to move past that free tier to actually start looking at one of the more expensive tiers? Hypothetically, obviously.
Melina: In theory, in case we know someone who’s got this going on. Well, without knowing what the other options are. The first thing that I’ve potentially seen with this sort of event, you could have a version where you get all the recordings after the fact that no one else is going to get those. You either have to attend live to get it for free. If you want to have access to the recordings, it’s whatever amount for that, $10, $25, $50 bucks, whatever, I don’t know. So that’s an option that you could add on as something that you could have.
You could also have a limited number of people that get to have priority access to have questions answered, or there’s going to be a follow up or something with some of the speakers that people are able to have some version of engagement. You don’t necessarily have to look at attendees paying more. There could be something for advertising and things like that, too.
Or maybe if it is that people on YouTube and stuff these days, there’s always like at the end there’s the page of the premium people that are Patreon patrons or whatnot, that they get their name shouted out in some way. That could be an option.
You could have a version where there’s a drawing for some sort of big prize for people that are in a contributing tier. And if we think about it not being necessarily saying it’s a paid event, like “if you want to pay when no one else is paying”, that language doesn’t feel very good. But “do you want to be a supporter” or words like “patron” or “that you are invested in the community and if want to help contribute” or something like that type of change in language could be impactful, too.
Rich: Awesome. I know in the book, you talk a lot about there are power words out there. So if we’re thinking about our pricing, what are some of the power words that we might use to make our pricing seem more appealing?
Melina: So the priming words I have in part three, helping people to select the words that are going to be best for them and their brand. And that is very specific to a particular organization, a brand, and what it is that you’re looking to achieve.
That being said, if you do want to establish like a problem people concerned about a lot, it would be you worry that people don’t know that it’s expensive and you don’t want to have a bunch of tire kickers, we’d say, that are going to waste time on discovery calls that are never going to buy. And there’s this balance of none of my competitors are putting in their prices on their site, and I don’t necessarily want to put the prices out there. But I want people to know it’s expensive and they actually do have to pay money, without saying, “Hey, this is expensive. So don’t waste my time if you’re not going to buy.”
And so in that case, using a word like ‘investment’, so this is an investment in yourself, or by making this investment in your business, you’ll be able to see whatever return. That word is something that makes it pretty clear that I’m going to have to give something. I’m spending something to make that investment, which can be time, money, what have you. And for people who aren’t looking to do that, it may automatically turn them off, but not in a negative way, right? There’s anything offensive about it.
And so knowing what you want to be about and what you want to convey, and picking some words that help to support that is really important. And in the book, one of the biggest decisions that I encourage people to make is that you have to pick if your business is one of quality or one of value. And I know that you listening, you’re thinking, I want both of those things. I provide quality and value to my customers. I get it. And you can’t do both because the strategy for them is very different in a quality business, which can still provide value.
But when you’re really built on quality, maybe you have certifications that others don’t have. If you’re selling products, they’re handmade or they’re using very high quality materials, if you’re selling luxury goods, whatever, that’s in that quality side and you want to have rounded number pricing. So you’re $500 not $499, and there are other pieces of how you leverage social proof, how you talk about scarcity and things that happen, and the types of words you might use about it being couture or something wouldn’t make sense on a value brand model.
On the value side you’re looking at discounts, bargains, your Costco, your Walmart, great companies that make plenty of money, right? It’s a good strategy, but you do a lot of discount sales. That $4.99 or $4.97 pricing makes sense and it aligns with that getting a deal vibe that you don’t want on the quality side. And they’re running discounts and deals and things like that all the time in a way that a quality brand shouldn’t.
So if you don’t do anything else, picking one of those routes and committing to it and knowing where you can say, hey, if we’re a quality brand, just because everyone else is doing a holiday sale, doesn’t mean that we have to. And we don’t do discounts and we don’t round down our prices. We just own that it may be expensive in a way that not everyone can afford, but not everyone is our customer. We’re okay with that. And we own the value that we’re providing through our quality.
Rich: Yeah, I like that. Get off the fence, choose one direction or another, and then lean into it. You had mentioned loss aversion earlier. So what are some ways that we could build loss aversion into our pricing tactics?
Melina: So with loss aversion, surprisingly, we humans don’t like to lose things. The way that has represented though in business is, we have a tendency to say something along the lines of, “Hey, people like to get things, we should give them more things.” And we think on a logical level when we think about what we like and don’t like. You may say, “We don’t want to ever have to take things away because I wouldn’t like that.” But that means it’s a very motivating tactic. If something is going away or there’s that FOMO aspect, that we don’t want to miss out.
But if it’s always there, it’s always running. There’s no urgency, there’s no reason to take any action, then I don’t really have to worry about it too much right now. So you can have a balance with something like scarcity to say, maybe you do a course, but instead of it being available all year round anytime, no matter what, you only open it for a certain period of time. And you can be talking about who the person is going to be on the other side. “Think about how amazing this will be when you’re living this new life. But you got to act now” or, “You don’t want to miss out on this opportunity before it’s gone.” That’s one of the easiest ways to be incorporating loss aversion into your messaging.
Rich: Awesome. I know there’s a lot of great stuff in this book. We’ve talked about just a few things. What’s one more thing that people will find in this book of value once they purchase it?
Melina: When you think about pricing, I know that for most people it’s really stressful and it’s something that we get in our own heads about because we worry if we get it wrong everything is going to fall apart. And so because of that, your brain puts it in this “I’ll deal with that tomorrow” world all the time. And then tomorrow never comes and you realize, oh no, the launch is next week, and we haven’t picked a price yet. And then it’s stress and it can be difficult to get out of your own way when it comes to pricing.
So while the psychology, a lot of it, and what I talk about in the book is looking at the person who’s buying. There is an entire chapter that’s called “You”. And there’s actually a “Back to You” at the end of the book. But it’s sharing all the ways that your brain can be tricking you to keep you stuck and having a hard time approaching pricing, and putting yourself in a box that you don’t have to be in. And so helping to understand the psychology that’s keeping you from making decisions that feel safe but are actually keeping you stuck. Breaking free of that and being more confident is a big aspect of what is included in the book. And then again, knowing that for most people, with price you’re saying, “please just tell me what to do”, or “can you just do it for me” sort of the thing, I hear from people all the time.
This book is a series of answer this question, do this thing, then do this, then do that. It’s like as close to doing it for you as I could get in a book.
Rich: Nice. It is interesting, because as you were giving that last example, I think so much of pricing is tied into our self-esteem and our self-value. And it’s really difficult for a lot of entrepreneurs when they’re just getting started, or even if they’ve been in business for a while, to recognize the value that they’re delivering to their customers. So even if you can just help with the mindset of what people are going through so they start to realize, I’m providing so much value to my customers, I need to be charging more. Because I know that companies that don’t charge enough are not investing in their people, they’re not investing in R&D. They’re not investing in getting any better. And like you said, they just become stuck. So this sounds like just great advice for any entrepreneur who’s looking to really grow and be able to run a successful business.
Melina: I think so, too.
Rich: Awesome. Melina, thank you so much for your time today. I really appreciate you coming back on the show. So for people who are looking to learn more about pricing, who want to learn more about all the great things you’re doing, where can we send them online?
Melina: Thank you so much for asking. You can of course find me on all the socials as The Brainy Biz, B I Z. I’m Melina Palmer on LinkedIn. And there’s information about the podcast, all of my books, speaking, consulting, at thebrainybusiness.com.
For every one of your listeners we do have a special, some of that reciprocity in action. If you go to thebrainybusiness.com/aoc, you can get a free chapter of any of my books to check out and see if it’s a fit for you. If you like it, try before you buy.
Rich: And I definitely recommend doing that if you like podcasts. And I’m guessing you do because you’re listening to this one. I’m a big fan of Melina’s podcast. I’ve been binging it for a long time playing catch up, definitely worth checking out. So be sure to do that. And we’ll have all of the links that Melina mentioned in the show notes. Melina, thank you so much for stopping by today.
Melina: Of course. Thanks for having me.
Show Notes:
Melina Palmer understands the psychology around why customers behave a certain way, and the bias in decision making. Her books are game changers for those struggling with pricing for their business. You can check out her popular podcast and connect with her on LinkedIn. And don’t forget to grab a FREE chapter from one of her books, exclusive for Agents of Change listeners!
Rich Brooks is the President of flyte new media, a web design & digital marketing agency in Portland, Maine, and founder of the Agents of Change. He’s passionate about helping small businesses grow online and has put his 25+ years of experience into the book, The Lead Machine: The Small Business Guide to Digital Marketing.