Colin Sprake explains why dropping prices loses you money and attracts the wrong clients. Set clear rules on pricing, returns, and payment terms, then stick to them. Customers will respect boundaries and you'll keep the profitable ones.
Welcome to our Business Brilliance series. My name is Colin Sprague from Make youe Mark Training and Consulting in Vancouver, Canada. Visit our website that you'll see throughout the course of this video. At MyMSuccess.com we do corporate trainings, seminars and consulting work in business, sales and marketing. Today we are talking about rules and capitulation. Now, some of you are that are watching this video are going to probably laugh and chuckle as we go through this because I'm sure many of you have customers that you'd rather not have. Customers you want to fire, get rid of and what have you. Because somewhere along the line, you capitulated. Now, what does capitulation mean? Capitulation means to give in. And when you give in to rules or regulations or to your customers, they start to make the rules. It's very simple. In your business, there's only two sets of rules, your rules and the customer's rules. Whose rules would you rather be following? If you don't make rules for your business, or policies or procedures, whatever you'd like to call them, then the customer makes them for you. Your return policies, your warranty policies, your purchasing rules, your rules around the kind of money that you take, whether it's credit card, what have you, payment terms, what do you do in your business, what rules do you have set in your business? Rules are really, really important because if you don't have them, like I said earlier, the customer will make them for you. And what happens is when they make them for you or you break down and give them a set of rules that you truly not happy with, but you know you've broken your own rules that you have, you end up capitulating when you capitulate. And most people do this on price. Have you ever had a customer come up to you and go, I will only buy from you at a certain price. If you break down on your price and give them that price, what do those customers normally end up being? Those customers normally end up being painful customers because what do they do? They bring their family and friends back to get the same price. So all of a sudden you've broken your own rule by capitulating on your price. And now you've got clients you truly don't want. I can tell you, you watching this video today have probably got clients in your database that you wish you never had. And the reason why those clients are there is because you broke the own rules in your business. So check out the rules that you have in terms of what you do in your business. What do you do in terms of pricing. Because if you capitulate on your price, if your dollar value, if you're a consultant and you're out there at $150 an hour and someone goes, wow, that's expensive and you break down and you give them a hundred dollar an hour pricing, that's capitulation. And then from then onwards the customer is starting to dictate the pricing in your business, which really means dictating the rules in your business. So what I'd like you to do is think about all the rules and regulations that are in your business or that you don't have. Put them in place, put them up somewhere where they are visually seen inside your office. Do not leave them in a binder. You need your rules up where they can be seen all the time. When you can see your rules, you won't break down and you won't have clients come in and end up being your database that you truly don't want. All the clients you have should have set rules and be clients you truly want. And believe it or not, clients love rules. If they have set rules to operate within, then they know exactly that you understand your business, that you are very confident with what you do in your business and and that your business is extremely professional. So please set rules, never capitulate, and only operate your business according to your own rules, not according to your customers rules. My name is Colin Sprake. Thank you for watching our series of videos on YouTube and enjoy the series. We have a number of videos that are coming out on an ongoing basis and our next video is going to be amazing. That's called keeping your pipeline full. And if you want to understand what that means, it means no matter what economy we are in, if you keep your pipeline full, it takes the economy out of the equation. But what happens most of the time is people don't understand that keeping your pipeline full is probably the most important thing in your business. Where times are good, we forget to keep the pipeline full. I'll be speaking about that in our next video. So I look forward to seeing you on our next Business Brilliance segment. And thank you for joining us today and I hope you're getting immense value from what we are teaching and come out and join us sometime at one of our seminars. And remember to Visit us@mymsuccess.com.
