AMHF 0019 – Premium Pricing Strategy for Aviation Products & Services

One of the questions people ask us most is:

“Is my product priced too high? Is that why were having problems with sales?”

The answer is usually, “no, your price is not too high, but you’re not doing a good enough job of explaining the value of your product in relation to competitors, or other alternatives that customers have to using your product.”

Most people only think about price in relation to their direct competitors, but you need to think about it in terms of the cost, and value, of EVERY alternative your prospect has to using your product.

We discuss four pricing strategies (particularly our favorite, the premium pricing strategy!) and their pros and cons in this episode.

Pricing Strategies for Aviation – Transcript

Announcer: You’re listening to aviation marketing Hangar Flying, the community for the best sales and marketing professionals in the aviation industry. Your hosts, John and Paula Williams, are your sales and marketing test pilots. They take the risks for you, ensure strategies, relevant examples, hacks, and how-tos. Be sure to subscribe on iTunes so you won’t miss a thing.

Paula Williams: Welcome to aviation marketing Hangar Flying, episode number 19. Today we’re talking about pricing strategy. So one of the questions we get and asked an awful lot is.

John Williams: Should I reduce my price?

Paula Williams: [LAUGH] Right, and often when people aren’t making the sales that they want to this is their first reaction is, is my price too high and in almost every case we advise them.

John Williams: Not reduce price.

Paula Williams: Right, we want to look at every other possible option before we reduce their price. And today we’re going to talk about a lot of the things that go into pricing strategy, and this is one of the most popular posts on our website and has been for a number of years, and it’s also the most popular question we get asked.

So, we thought it would be good to do a podcast on this and talk about it today. So, I’m Paula Williams.

John Williams: And I’m John Williams, and we’re testing out new equipment. [LAUGH]

Paula Williams: And we are ABCI, and ABCI’s mission.

John Williams: To help all you folks out there sell more products and services in the aviation world.

Paula Williams: Absolutely, and we are always testing out new equipment, aren’t we?

John Williams: And it would seem so. We got new microphones, new recorders, building up the studio as we go along.

Paula Williams: Absolutely, and that’s one of the reasons that we need to charge some of the prices that we do, so that we can do some research and development, so that we’re always improving our products and services.

And of course, we want to be smart about the way we do that. But if you don’t have the cash to try some experimentation and other kinds of things, you’re really going to fall behind in technology as well as equipment, as well as the service that you provide, as well as the quality that you provide.

So we have four main pricing strategies that we’re going to talk about today and if you were to take a piece of paper and draw a big plus sign in the middle and then you have four quadrants on your piece of paper. And then [COUGH] over on the left hand side we’re going to talk about low quality.

On the right hand side we’re going to talk about high quality, and then on the upper part we’re going to talk about low price and on the bottom we’re going to talk about high price. So we’re going to talk about several low price strategies and then several, actually only two, but high priced strategies.

And what the pros and cons are of each of them and some different circumstances in which you might want to consider them, right. So let’s start with the first quadrant which is low quality and low price, which is what we call economy pricing. Now this is the model that people like Walmart show, the low price leader In a market and there is some logic to being the low priced option, but we have found that there are several problems with an economy model right John?

John Williams: Yeah.

Paula Williams: Yeah, but first of them is really perceived value. And especially for an aviation product, you do not want to have a low perceived value. Now if you’re an airline, maybe you can get away with flying for peanuts and things like that, but there’s a certain standard of quality that is expected of the aviation industry because people are putting their lives on the line for this, right?

John Williams: So, flying for peanuts. Was that a pun?

Paula Williams: Flying for peanuts. That was actually a real, honest to gosh, marketing strategy for one of the airlines.

John Williams: Yeah, right.

Paula Williams: And it worked for a while. Then it got to the point where everybody was trying to have the lowest fair and they’re all kind of cutting their throats on Travelocity and Expedia.

And there is some I suppose market share to be had from having the lowest price but that’s when you’re selling to the mass market not necessarily when you’re selling to an affluent market or to a private aviation market or a general aviation market, right?

John Williams: Exactly.

Paula Williams: Right.

So, the lower the perceived cost often the lower of the perceived value and we’re going to show you, I like one example that comes to mind and is used in a lot of books. I think this is in Jason Mars’ book, which is an excellent one we’re going to give you the information about that later in this podcast is the $40 Rolex.

Now if you have somebody that offers to sell you a Rolex watch for $40, what’s your first thought going to be?

John Williams: [LAUGH] It’s not worth $5.

Paula Williams: [LAUGH] Right, this is the sort of thing that happens by the side of the road in Mexico. This is not the sort of thing that happens in a high end mall or in a high end jewelry store.

John Williams: And actually, every once in a while, if you buy a $40 Rolex, you actually get lucky.

Paula Williams: Mm-hm.

John Williams: But it’s pure luck, because when I was 16 in Tijuana, and this guy came up, selling me watches, And he wanted $43 for this watch, right? Self winding, so on, so on, and I said, nope, $5.

And we talked back and forth, and finally I said, $7 top. Well, why is that? I said, cuz it’s all I had, and it was true, it was all I had with me.

Paula Williams: [LAUGH]

John Williams: He sold it to me for 7 bucks.

Paula Williams: Wow.

John Williams: And that was many years ago.

Paula Williams: Okay.

John Williams: And that watch still works.

Paula Williams: Wow!

John Williams: [LAUGH] I’ve replaced the crystal on it several times, and I keep it cuz it’s not as accurate as the one I have now that Paula gave me which is within a billionth of a second all the time as long as it updates, based on atomic time.

But, nonetheless.

Paula Williams: It was a good watch.

John Williams: It was a good watch, but you never know.

Paula Williams: But chances are it would not have been, right?

John Williams: No, yeah, exactly.

Paula Williams: Right, exactly, so there are some brands that you will never see on sale. One of them is Rolex.

Another one is Apple. Sometimes you’ll see refurbished or other kinds of things. But mainly from the Apple store, they are very loath to give discounts or sales of any kind. You’re going to see screaming half off or 15% off or clearance sales or anything like that from the high end brands.

And the reason is because they want their products to have a very high perceived value. And this is not just snobbishness. This is also basically on customer experience and their experience with the people that want to buy their products. They expect a very high level of service, they expect a very high level of quality, and you simply cannot do that and have the lowest price.

John Williams: Exactly, which is why Rolex and Apple and others have such high costs.

Paula Williams: Exactly. So if you’re in the economy space that low price and low quality space, we have found that customers are terrible. [LAUGH] There was a time, when we first got into the aviation market, when we tried to offer a low-cost service.

And the reason for that was because we were breaking into a new market. We needed to get some credibility in this market by having some samples of work that we could point to and another thing. So we did a low cost and we have found that bargain seekers are terrible customers, they are entitled, they are whiny, they are horrible.

They want, even if you give them a way something for free they will still find fault with it. It’s absolutely amazing, the way that people react when you’re in that low price, low quality space. We have found that when we’re selling to people that pay more, they tend to be nicer to us.

They are a lot more fun to work with. They’re a lot more likely to use our products properly, and our service and things like that. And they treat our people better, and so on, so we really, really want to avoid that economy space whenever possible.

John Williams: When you do have a high price, you want to make sure your quality exceeds expectations, however.

Paula Williams: Exactly, that is true. And so that brings us to another strategy which is market penetration. And that’s when you have a high quality product and a low price. Now the problem with that is that if you won them on price, you’ll lose them on price, right? The best example I can give for that is the current, and I don’t know if this is true in your area, but where we live, it seems like every commercial you see on TV is either Direct TV or Dish Network, or Direct TV or Dish Network.

And this is on the radio. This is on TV. This is anywhere you look at advertising. They’re all trying to undercut each other by just a little bit, because they want the market share, right? It’s just nuts. But people switch. If you talk to any of our neighbors or talk to us, we have switched back and forth between different TV providers, multiple times in the last five years.

And there’s absolutely no loyalty there because they have not really a whole lot of differentiation between their products. The only thing that they’re competing on is the low price, right?

John Williams: Exactly.

Paula Williams: Yeah, they all offer the same programs and everything so if you’re in that situation. There is some value to getting a larger market share if that’s going to help you in some other way if you get a larger market share, and then you can offer better programming it can be a temporary strategy that could work, but for the most part it is not also not really an ideal place to be.

John Williams: It has to be well thought out.

Paula Williams: Mm-hm.

John Williams: And well researched to make sure you don’t fall into a trap.

Paula Williams: Right. Okay, the next strategy is actually a low quality high priced strategy and this is called skimming. You may have heard about that guy and I’m trying to remember his name that took that cancer drug and he jacked up the price to God knows what.

John Williams: Yeah, it went from $13 to $750 per pill.

Paula Williams: Exactly, see, and having the same quality or a low quality and a high price is usually based on a temporary or an artificial advantage. So what happened to that guy, if I recall the story correctly, is there was another company that came up with an alternative to that cancer drug.

John Williams: Yeah, they sent out, what do they call it in pharmacies? They will compound, or a compounding.

Paula Williams: Yeah.

John Williams: They sent out a formula to compound the same drug to pharmacies and now they do it for $3 a pill.

Paula Williams: Exactly.

John Williams: [LAUGH]

Paula Williams: So it’s even less than it was before this scheming strategy took place.

So he may have made a little bit of money in the short term, but he also got a whole load of crap, [LAUGH]. For that, he got called in front of some kind of a governmental committee,

John Williams: Right.

Paula Williams: Got a lot of bad press, all kinds of things.

It wasn’t anything illegal, I guess you could argue the morality of it. But-

John Williams: It wasn’t illegal.

Paula Williams: It wasn’t illegal.

John Williams: It’s a free market society, or it’s supposed to be, so he can charge what he wants.

Paula Williams: Right, and if you have like out here where we live there’s the Bonneville Salt Flats where they have racing in the summer.

And that dries out its like the flattest surface on the planet, and so they have these race cars and other kinds of things that try to set the world speed records. And if you’re ever out there, during one of those things they will have these vendors that are selling bottles of water that they bought at Walmart for $0.50 a piece.

And they’re selling those bottles of water for about $8 a piece [LAUGH] and people are buying them like crazy. Because, literally, you’re in the middle of a desert and there’s nothing for miles. So people will buy this bottled water. So it’s based on a temporary or an artificial advantage.

Circumstantially, it works great. There’s a lot of people that make a lot of money doing that. So, that’s the scheming philosophy. Now let’s talk about our favorite philosophy, which is premium brands pricing. And this is where you have a product higher quality and a high price. And this only works when you have a very strong, unique selling proposition, right?

John Williams: Yes, and it’s based on value, not on price. The good example around here in the Salt Lake Valley, as far as I know, there are two gasoline stations, just two, that sell ethanol-free gasoline, which I thought was illegal but evidently it is not. And that gasoline will give you just by using it on average 15% better fuel economy.

So they charge a premium per gallon for that stuff. I hope they have higher profit margins as well, since it’s hard to find. I don’t remember now where it fits in the price structure, it’s more than regular gasoline but less than premium.

Paula Williams: Right, so you-

John Williams: But its higher than midrange.

Paula Williams: Okay, so rather than the gas that you usually buy for our cars you will spend-

John Williams: I spend the extra because, several reasons. One, most vehicles, up until the very latest ones, have issues with ethanol because of all the water and other reasons that it’s just not a good idea to put in gasoline. And the fuel economy, for me, I get 30 miles per gallon in my car.

So 15% is something I’m pretty interested in. That’s another four and a half miles per gallon.

Paula Williams: Exactly, so it’s worth an extra what, $0.20 a gallon, or?

John Williams: I think it’s about 18, depending on a day, cents a gallon.

Paula Williams: More than what you would pay normally?

John Williams: Yes, exactly.

Paula Williams: Okay, exactly, so it’s not based on price. It’s based on the value or the number of miles that you get out of that, and also the engine life and other factors that are important to you.

John Williams: Of course.

Paula Williams: Okay, so that has a USP to an educated customer that is well worth it to pay extra for.

John Williams: And what’s interesting is even though most, I won’t say most, many customers are not educated. I have convinced many people at the pump to buy it because of what I tell them. I said I’m not getting paid by these guys to do this, but I only tell you what happens when I use this gas.

Paula Williams: Mm-hm.

John Williams: Without fail, they’ll say really? I’ll say yes. So they try it.

Paula Williams: John, who does not work for a gas company or anybody else has told all of our family and friends that you need to go to this particular gas station and use this particular pump to get this particular kind of gasoline.

John Williams: Of course, why not?

Paula Williams: Exactly, because it will save wear and tear on their cars, and John ends up fixing a lot of people’s cars, including his daughter’s and things. So it saves us work or saves him work, and it’s a good value for the money. So if you want to be in the premium space, and you should want to be in the premium space.

Have we convinced you of that?

John Williams: Absolutely.

Paula Williams: [LAUGH] All right. So if you want to be in the premium space, here are some things that you need to consider and some questions that you can ask in order to get yourself there. So first of all, what are the alternatives to using my product?

How much does it cost the customer not to use my product? And how can I demonstrate the value of my product in a way that resonates with my customer? And we’re going to give you a couple of examples here that have to deal with some of our aviation clients.

The first one is SSC. So SSC flies out of Greenville South Carolina and a lot of their customers are reformed airline passengers who fly out of the Spartanburg airport which is nearby but its not that nearby. So there’s a distance there and then also a lot of the airlines don’t fly exactly where our where SSC’s clients want to go, so there is an advantage over the airlines, because they get them closer to where they need to go.

It saves them a heck of a lot of time. They can go to a meeting and be back at night, and be home with their family by dinner time. As opposed to taking three different airline flights to get where they’re going, or an airline flight and a long rental care ride.

So it’s definitely a time advantage. The other option is net jets, or some of the larger charter companies. So how do they compete with them? Basically, they fly out of a smaller airport, they fly smaller airplanes, they have a better price point than a lot of the larger charter companies. They are one of the luxury brands.

Other unique selling points – they have a lower turnaround in their pilots than a lot of the larger tech companies, sorry, larger charter jet companies.

John Williams: Yes, I think the average time for a pilot to stay with a company currently is eight and half or nine years.

Paula Williams: Exactly, versus these other charter companies where their average is often less than a year.

John Williams: Or slightly more than, right.

Paula Williams: Yeah, so that’s a huge advantage. Their pilots really kind of become part of the family to a lot of their clients that they fly often. So there’s a couple of ways that you can look at this one is a dollar value how much time and money do you save by getting to your getting closer to your destination faster or how much can you actually save on a charter fair so that’s a dollar value.

And then there’s kind of an emotional value, and that is how much better do you feel having your own pilot and more personal service than you would with either an airline or with a charter company that treats you more like a number.

John Williams: These guys are amazing. They’ll arrange for a rental car before you ever leave, when the rental car comes up they’ll help get the bags out of the jet, put it in there, make sure everything’s okay and coordinate with you when you want to go, return.

And they’ll do everything they can to make your trip one that you’ll remember.

Paula Williams: Exactly.

John Williams: Positively remember.

Paula Williams: [LAUGH] And then you get home and your car is washed and it’s pulled up on the ramp, and everything is all set for you to just jump in and go home. It’s a higher quality experience.

And you just feel really, really well taken care of. And I don’t know if you saw this, this is a recent news story about how a 4 hour flight became a 30 hour nightmare for people who are coming from the Dominican Republic to New York City and it was suppose to be a 4 hour flight, did you hear about this?

John Williams: Yeah, I missed that one.

Paula Williams: Man, so Delta flight 944, taking 159 passengers from Punta Cana to John F. Kennedy, but first of all, it had to circle overhead because of heavy traffic at the airport. Eventually the pilot announced they were diverting to New Hampshire because they were running out of fuel.

The airport in New Hampshire didn’t have a customs agent to process the passengers. So the agents drove from Portland, Maine while the passengers sat on the plane and waited. They gave them a hotel that night and then they put him back on another plane back to New York City, and had a lot of turbulence and horribleness on that flight.

So it was just one thing after another some people were bailing out and buying Amtrak tickets and renting cars or anything else [LAUGH] just to never take another flight on this airline again. And so that is definitely a great selling point if you have a service that allows people to avoid that kind of inconvenience, right?

John Williams: Absolutely.

Paula Williams: Yeah, okay, so here’s another one. And this one is Vlog versus Camp. And they will tell you that they are not competitors, and they’re really not, because Camp is Aircraft maintenance software versus something that is actually more of a complete aircraft log book that is owned by the aircraft owner.

So you can look at this in a couple of ways. Camp is actually owned by the maintenance provider and if you take your airplane to three or four different maintenance facilities over its life and usually more than that, you’re going to have several different entities owning those maintenance records, right?

John Williams: Yeah, they’re not all composite in one location.

Paula Williams: Right, so if you ever had to completely replace your log books, you’d be making a lot of phone calls and hoping for the best, that you can actually reconstruct your log books out of a patchwork of maintenance records.

And there’s going to be a lot of things missing, like your 80130 certificates and a few other things, right? Paint colors, another one that comes up. [LAUGH] They just aren’t really kept in those maintenance records so if you need those-

John Williams: Well they are kept in a maintenance record but when camp does it and other people do it there’s no.

They’re supposed to give you paper copies and you’re supposed to put it together when you get back. But if you lose something because you didn’t backup the whole paper copy, then you have a problem trying to go back and recreate the darn thing cuz you’ll have to call wherever you had the.

First you gotta figure out where you had the thing maintained and if you’re a typical. Part 91 or 135 guy flying all over the country or the world, you’ll get maintenance wherever you need it.

Paula Williams: Right.

John Williams: And trying to figure out where that happened over the last three years could be interesting if you fly a lot.

Paula Williams: Right, and then hoping that they still have your records and that they will send them to you in a timely way. And hoping that that doesn’t delay things so that your aircraft is on the ground broken longer then absolutely necessary while you’re trying to catch things up and get legal.

So there is a huge competitive advantage to an aircraft owner or an aircraft manager or anybody who has an interest in making sure that that aircraft is air worth at any given time and has dispatch reliability. There is also a huge competitive advantage in terms of knowing that that aircraft is protected.

So the dollar value can be up to one-third or 30% of your aircraft’s value which depends on the quality and condition of your aircrafts paper log books. And if you try and sell an airplane, it has perfect, pristine, fabulous log books, versus one of the exact same make and model that has really kind of sketchy missing pieces, messed up log books.

You’re in trouble.

John Williams: Well we could on, that’s a whole another topic, but yes.

Paula Williams: Yeah, so.

John Williams: You’re absolutely correct.

Paula Williams: You could miss out in a sale of up about to a third of that aircraft’s value in that resale. The additional value is or the emotional value really is peace of mind being able to sleep at night knowing that your asset is protected and you’re making those people have complete access to all of the aircraft’s records, right.

Okay, so that’s another example. One last example is ABCI’s aviation marketing master class. And we compared that to several things in a recent article, Sandler Training’s leadership, what is it called? It’s called their president’s circle. Which is a Sandler sales program which is really excellent. But it is only for sales.

How can I sell my product more effectively? The David Eccles School of Business which John completed several years ago, but they did a lot of business education and other things and they touched on marketing and sales. And American writers and artists programs which focus mainly on copy writing which is a very important skill, but it certainly isn’t everything that you need to know if you are selling a product or service especially in the aviation industry.

So those things are very good at one specific thing but they’re not very good at the general information that people need to know about marketing and sales and about the specific information that people need to know if they’re buying and selling products in the aviation industry, right?

John Williams: Yes.

Paula Williams: Yes, [LAUGH] and we did compare them, and the costs are just, especially for the e-MBA program are just astronomically out of the park for some of these things. And of course, we’re not comparing apples to apples, we’re deliberately comparing apples to oranges. But how could people get the same education that they get in the master class?

John Williams: [LAUGH] to learn what we teach.

Paula Williams: Mm-hm.

John Williams: You would have to go to several different sales training programs, several different marketing mastermind groups, several different marketing organizations and it would just be well, it’s taken you what 20 plus years to figure this out, and taken me not that many, but ten or more on the sales end of things.

Paula Williams: [LAUGH] Right, but you’re faster than I am. But yeah, it is interesting to look at how else can people get the same value as they would get from purchasing your product, and in a lot of cases we’re in a category of one. There really isn’t another practical way for people to do that so we can charge-

John Williams: We brought it all down to the basics and show you how to make it work.

Paula Williams: Exactly, so we can show people that this is a really good value. So, the dollar value, when we talk with an individual customer. How much is it worth to you to get better at selling and marketing your product?

If you could sell or market your product even 10% better or 20% better. Luxury goods and premium products are just more fun to sell. How much more would you make each month or each year. And generally speaking, that far exceeds the cost of the master class.

John Williams: Heavens yes.

Paula Williams: Absolutely.

John Williams: We finally got it back down to a reasonable amount.

Paula Williams: [LAUGH] Yeah, right! And the additional value, or the emotional value of the master class is really by saving time and frustration. By having a group of people that you can depend on to help you. It can be really anxiety-producing to be spending a lot of money on advertisements that don’t work, and to be spending a lot of time trying to sell and getting a lot of rejection.

So there’s a lot of emotional angst that we can really help people prevent. Simply by pointing them in the right direction and avoiding some of those mistakes. Okay, so that’s how you use comparative value to really place your product in a premium pricing strategy, right? Okay, so this is what we call our rich friend test.

Can you sell this to someone you know, like, and trust? That has the means to buy it, and of course, the need of it, with a straight face and with a clear conscience. If the answer is yes, then can you add $100 to the price and do the same?

John Williams: And the answer to that should be an outstanding and very clear, yes.

Paula Williams: Well, and then you would need to add $100 to the price.

John Williams: That’s right.

Paula Williams: And then ask the question again, could you sell this to someone you know, like, and trust, that has the need and the means to buy it with a straight face and a clear conscience, meaning they cannot possibly get that same value elsewhere and its something that they absolutely need.

John Williams: And if you think that we’re smoking something-

Paula Williams: Mm-hm.

John Williams: Let me have you go research a very well known company called Cessna.

Paula Williams: Cool.

John Williams: Since and I know this since 2007, and know it very well from 2008 forward. Since I bought a 172 in 2008, I bought another one in 2009.

They raised their price on those 172s each and every year without fail regardless of what the economy is doing. Regardless of anything they always raise the price. Now, how do they sell that? We can raise the price to anything, and then if they want to and if you can convince them, they will give you a reason or you can give them a reason to lower the price for a one time sale.

Paula Williams: Right.

John Williams: It’s called negotiation. But as long as you raise the price, then everybody understands what’s going on and they’re not going to be involved in a race to the bottom.

Paula Williams: Exactly, so then you have the quid pro quo. You can ask for something in exchange for a discount.

Ask for regular referrals in exchange or a good testimonial in exchange for a discount or at least that they will complete a survey. Or that they will complete your compliance program, things like that, in exchange for a discount. So those are all very legitimate things. Another company that does this, and people keep recommending them, is Disney.

John Williams: Yes.

Paula Williams: Last year they had the measles outbreak, and so people stopped taking their kids places where they thought they could get the measles, right? Disney’s answer to that was to raise their ticket prices, and of course, it coincided with some other things that they did upgrading their fast passes and things giving people these little plastic bracelets that are kind of an upgrade over the stamping your hand kind of deal.

So there were reasons for them raising their prices but it happened to be coincidental, and they were doing better then ever because of the perceived value people are thinking well since the price is higher there will be less crowds, it’s safer, and so on. And of course, they improved their the quality of their service too, sorry, John.

John Williams: Car dealers do it. Every year prices go up.

Paula Williams: Yep, they do. We were just looking at the price of a Ford 150.

John Williams: Yes, yeah, you go buy a Ford, F150 now and they’re on the order of $70,000.

Paula Williams: Man.

John Williams: For a half ton truck.

Paula Williams: And they’re selling.

John Williams: And they’re selling like hot cakes.

Paula Williams: Yeah, we see them everywhere. They’re really popular out here where we like just because trucks are more popular than cars but it’s just amazing that people will spend that much money. All right, so when you’re looking at these kinds of things you want to figure out what are the alternatives to using my product?

How much does it cost the customer not to use my product? How can I demonstrate the value of my product that resonates with my customer? So those are all things that you can do. And the way that you can do it, of course, and the reason that you have to charge a higher price is because you can provide exceptional quality.

So if your price is higher than your competitor’s, your quality should be higher as well, and you have the means to make sure that happens. You have to pay your people better than your competitors pay theirs because word does get around, like all of those charter pilots that talk to each other.

You have to invest more in RND in new products and improvements. I don’t know who does more RND than Apple.

John Williams: Hm.

Paula Williams: Probably nobody, but that’s where all the money goes when you buy an iPhone or those crazily overpriced, when you look at them, just by simple comparison with the other similar products on the market, they seem overpriced.

But I have all Apple products, [LAUGH] so you know, there is, I’m willing to pay extra for the quality and for the reliability and for the service. I know when I have a problem with an Apple product, I’m on my way down to the Apple store to talk to the little guy in the blue shirt, who’s going to fix my problem before I leave.

John Williams: And we have multiple large monitors in here and one of them was giving us issues we took it back to them and they took it apart and said you know what, we’ll just give you a new one.

Paula Williams: Mm-hm. And for the right kind of customers the kind of customers that you really want it is worth going the extra mile for them and you have to be able to afford it without going out of business.

And the only way to do that is to do premium pricing. All right, so we talked about our sources for the information in this podcast besides our experience with our clients who we absolutely love because they have taught us a ton about the aviation industry in particular, but there are some great resources out there as well about pricing in general and the rest of the world.

So one of them is Perry Marshall’s AD20 Sales and Marketing book which is our January selection for our book club in our Master class. The second one, No BS Trust Based Marketing. Dan Kennedy and Matt Zagula, some of our favorite people. They’re in a master mind group that we have participated in.

One of those very expensive ones that we did, the comparative value of. But their material is fantastic and you know that’s the reason why we pay a premium for that. And the third one is, No BS Price Strategy by Dan Kennedy and Jason Mars. Jason Mars’s wife is actually a speech and language therapist.

And for that service, a lot of places will provide it for free. In a lot of school districts and things, you can get speech language pathology for your kid for free. His wife is competing with that at premium prices of over $200 an hour for that service. And it is well worth it, and he explains why it’s well worth it and how he gets away with charging the prices that he does in that book.

So that is definitely-

John Williams: So there you go. There’s absolutely no reason, to charge a low price for your product.

Paula Williams: Even if you’re competing with free. [LAUGH]

John Williams: Even if you’re competing with free.

Paula Williams: Exactly, all right, so this week’s tip sheet is pricing at the pricing cheat sheet at aviationbusinessconsultants.com/pricing.

All right so please do subscribe to our podcast, it is new, still new. We’ve just reached our first thousand downloads and we’re very happy that you are listening. That’s a wonderful thing. Please subscribe on iTunes and please do leave us a review. And thank you very much for listening, we’ll talk to you next week.

John Williams: Have a good day, see you.

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