How to Price your Product or Service
There are two fundamental methods for determining the appropriate price for a new product or service. The good news is that both of them are functional. The bad news is that a major blunder could bring your company to a halt. However, there is some good news: calculating where you need to be when pricing a new product or service is not difficult.
If your company provides intellectual property or intangible services, such as leadership coaching, you must still conduct a pricing analysis. If that’s the case, simply interpret the product as the value you give in the following suggestions.
When it comes to calculating a product’s pricing, the first step is to identify its genuine cost. How much will it cost you to manufacture and promote it? The true cost, not to be confused with production cost or landed cost, is the most crucial statistic to consider when pricing a product because it’s the only method to guarantee that you won’t sell below that price. Not only must the cost of developing and producing the product be included, but also overhead: salary or freelancing fees plus any mandated taxes or benefits, freight, operations (such as phone, rent, and Internet), and so on. When it comes to pricing something, all of these factors are important since they determine how much it costs you to run your firm. In a nutshell, these expenses must be met in some way! Then there’s the money.
If you don’t have any historical data, you can calculate your annual overhead cost by adding up all of your budget lines that cover day-to-day operations and determining what proportion of total revenue it is or is scheduled to be. Let’s say you discover it’s 30%. Then decide whether you want to amortize all of your one-time development costs (research or design, creative work, samples, packaging, license fees or royalties, etc.) over the life of your product, say three to five years. If you go with the latter option, each year’s product cost will be increased by a third or fifth of the entire development costs. to your product cost, multiplied by the number of units you create each year. If you’re lucky, your product or service will outlast your product development cost timetable, at which point the cost will be $0 for the rest of the years.
What about the profit? You should check your head for holes if you don’t factor that into your genuine cost. It would be insane to labor so hard to break even unless your business is truly a non-profit. Naturally, you may have strategic reasons for producing no or very little profit at first, such as capturing market share, but make sure you can cover that relatively risky expenditure with future revenues, perhaps from other items, to balance the entire picture.
Research the cost of similar products on the market once you’ve worked out your fully-loaded product ost. Are they selling for less than your genuine cost plus profit right now? If they are, this is a big issue. You’ll have to figure out a strategy to make your goods for less money, as well as examine your overhead and product development expenditures. Alternatively, you must be able to persuade potential customers that what you have to offer is so much better than the competition that it warrants a premium price that covers all of your genuine costs and profit.
It’s usually simple to find out how much similar things are selling for on the open market. A product search can take less than a minute thanks to Internet marketing, Amazon, Overstock, and other sites. Look at what others are doing, price your product as competitively as possible, and see if you can sell anything. The point is to approach everything logically.
Another frequent method for determining the ideal price for a new product is to just put it on the market and watch what happens. A method that is more intuitive and experimental. Increase the price if you sell a ton. If none of them sell, slash the price as low as you dare. However, keep in mind that this strategy could lead to bankruptcy just as easily as it could lead to huge success.
In fact, the market will decide how much your product is worth. A prevalent misunderstanding is that a product’s price is decided by its cost. The truth is that a product is only worth what it is. While the genuine cost is an excellent place to start when it comes to pricing, the worth is where the price should really be.
While there are various pricing schools of thought, we propose that you look at the competition, price your product near to it, and then make little adjustments up or down until you discover the appropriate price for your product. The market has the advantage of always telling you what it truly desires.
