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Pricing Strategy

Can I double the fees of accreditation in a holistic arena that historically feels they can charge only $100 year?

3

Answers

Humberto Valle

Get Advice On Growing Your Real Estate Business

You dead on. Finding the perfect price point for products is critical, not having a clue of what your product value is, the perceived value and what clients are actually willing and able to pay can kill even the best of products and brands. In short - Yes, you can charge double or triple. Most advisors will suggest what is easiest - don't go too high or you will lose share - I say, you're doing a lot of work already, lets do a little more and make it pay back trifold. Focus on building a brand, reach out to potential users, offer help, suggestions, promote promote promote in a clear and consistent way. Also, make sure that you do it in the right channels with the right content. But always avoiding competing on price, matching prices and not being afraid to reject clients.

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Brian Carruth

Tech Founder, Agile Development, Startup Funding

Depends on the startup. If you have IP that provides a clear advantage, that's more valuable and easier to make successful than say a mobile app idea. Traction has become investors favorite buzz word. It makes sense though because they aren't gamblers. They are looking to fund proof of concept. They want to help a good idea become a successful business.

Josue Sierra

Marketing, Email Deliverability & Inbox Placement

I think there are two parts to your question: A) List Building B) Engagement of your list once built On the list building side, I would suggest you develop a strong content marketing strategy. With a B2B audience, there are really great affordable solutions like HubSpot that can give you the tools and tracking you need to get a solid ROI on any content you create. When thinking about content strategy, its rather basic: consider how your business and industry knowledge can be turned into white papers, trade-focused blog posts, downloadable e-Books, webinars, etc. that would offer value and utility to your potential customers. Create that. Then, use SEO, social, and native ad services like Outbrain or Taboola to drive sales lead through that funnel. Make sure the landing pages you create have a strong call to action that includes providing an email. From that point, you can shift to keeping those leads engaged, and driving them through your buyer journey funnel. Other ways to build your email list can include doing a giveaway when you're at a trade show, doing free webinars that help and ads value to your client decision makers (and require email opt-in). You can also ask related businesses in your industry (non-competing ones) to send emails to their customers (co-branded) inviting them to the resources or webinars you've created. All that to drive traffic to email opt-in windows and build your list. For the second part, once you have a list, content marketing can play a key role. I assume you know who are the key decision makers on your client's side of the business. Develop content that is valuable and useful to those sales leads, and use email to deliver that content. Again, this is where HubSpot and other tools like theirs can help you outline the strategy and the tactical plan. I would also highly recommend using services like MailChimp or aWeber to maintain consistent email creative, and to follow email marketing best practices. Their websites are also valuable resources to help you become email marketing JEDI. Whatever you do, I would highly discourage you from buying any third party lists, and would strongly encourage you to always follow opt-in best practices--even if this is a B2B email campaign. There is no long-term profit in spamming your potential customers. Hope this helps!

Chris Beshore

app developer, curator Indie iOS Focus Weekly

I would start by looking at the apps and software you like to use that was created by smaller firms (not the big companies). Many of these firms also do client work, which you can find out about on their web site. If you enjoy the apps they produce and they have the expertise you are looking for, it can be a great fit. A good example would be a company like Black Pixel.

Vikas Mantute

Scale cloud platform and application growth

Hi, Platform Target: High Priority - Web Medium Priority- Android Low Priority - Apple, Windows ------------------------------------------- Medical Portal is very sensitive business, for that purpose the interaction of the user and understanding of the graphical presentation need to set on single page. Website is perfection platform that will give you that kind of flexibility of perfect interaction with the user. You can keep same functionality on Android and other targeted platforms, but you have to keep some basic User interaction functionality in that app. E.g > Medical information tips > get daily basis new updates > User interaction and fulfillment info. as per demand just like feedback. > and some more interaction that keep engage the user with app. Thank you!

Jason Kanigan

Business Strategist & Conversion Expert

Agreed with Sergio: you probably want to stay away from this one. We get branded by those we hang around. And if you're hanging around financially troubled firms, you'll get branded that way. And what happens to them rubs off on you. They go bankrupt, you were somehow involved...you must be at least partially responsible, 0.0001%, right? but still involved in their failure. Perception is reality. Executive attention of a case study based on a failed company isn't good.

Leon Rosenstock

I help entrpreneurs realize success.

There are numerous possibilities. What was the original strategy outlined in your business model? Before even considering pricing you should understand that you need a value proposition. You also need to target a market segment with whom you are going to develop relationships. You also should be concerned about getting some engagements the experience your online service provides. Price is usually a product of all of the above understanding that price is relative to the value you offer. The more value that is perceived the more someone is willing to pay for your services. If your service is in the Uber type category, peer to peer, you could charge for the initial session but then you will most probably lose out if a recurring sessions are booked between the trainer and customer. To give you more options I would require a better understanding of your business and your vision. I also how and what you are offering to better understand how your target market will respond. I could be available to discuss this next.

Dr. Shishir

Angel Investment, Venture Capital, Idea Validation

It is a tough job, really painful sometimes however when it starts showing gains then it becomes pleasure. Real Estate is a highly paying profitable business when managed appropriately.

Jason Kanigan

Business Strategist & Conversion Expert

You have four jobs to do. 1. Attract/identify leads. 2. Qualify those leads. 3. Convert the qualified leads. and 4. Fulfill the orders. Do you have a system for each of these? 4. can lead into 1. with referrals. You want as pre-qualified a lead as you can get. Qualifying is filtering. In or Out, doesn't matter which. Do you know your numbers? How many qualified leads do you need to know you'll get a project? This is different for every person or business. For me, I need a very small number of qualified leads to make a sale. For you, it might be different. How many unqualified leads do you need to get one good qualified lead? Back out into the activities you need to be doing every day. I'll bet (no offense; so are 99.9% of other people) you're sitting there and hoping stuff will come your way. Maybe spending 30 minutes a day looking for new work. Well that is not enough. Needs to be 70% or more of your time spent prospecting! Guaranteed that your prospecting activity, like everyone else's--mine included--is too low. Fill your funnel. Unqualified leads >>> Qualified leads >>> Sales. Work back from the end result. How much money do you want to make in a month? How many sales does that mean you need to make? How many qualified leads does that mean you need? And how many unqualified leads does that require you to get? Now you can see how many conversations you need to be having...you can break this down to every week or every day. In my business, for instance, and remember my numbers will be different--perhaps VERY different--from yours, I need 1 sale a week. To get that 1 sale, I need 4 qualified leads to ensure I get that sale. Could be 1 in 2 but let's say 1 in 4 to be safe. Now the funny bit about my business: while conversion for me is easy, finding qualified leads is hard. There are many tire-kickers and broke people who want my help, but are not mentally or financially in the position to afford it. So I need MANY unqualified leads to get one good one! Again, your business could be different. So let's say I need 20 unqualified leads to get 1 qualified lead. This means my revenue plan for the month looks like: 20 x 16 = 320 unqualified leads >>> 4 x 4 = 16 qualified leads >>> 4 sales 320 unqualified leads! If I sit around, hoping passive marketing does the job, will I ever get there?! No! I need to plan out my activities based on Video marketing (Youtube) Facebook marketing Forum marketing Prospecting calls Referrals (these are great; the way I set it up, 2 referrals virtually guarantee 1 sale; so these 2 referrals take the place of 80(!) unqualified leads, which I can now subtract from my total) Talks to audiences Webinars and whatever other marketing efforts you decide to run. The point here is: do you have a plan? Until now, I doubt it. Almost nobody does. And do you have a high-enough activity level to support your money target? Most people do not. And then they wonder why they didn't succeed. They were beaten before they began, and terrifyingly they had no idea.

Dr. Shishir

Angel Investment, Venture Capital, Idea Validation

Academy is an initial stage venture where you join in the early phase of your startup, however accelerators should be joined when the product is ready. Accelerators can speed up your business.

Brian Carruth

Tech Founder, Agile Development, Startup Funding

It's dependent on the app's purpose. If it's social and you need to be on both platforms, I strongly encourage hybrid. A webapp is cheaper and can perform the same as an app with a dedicated backend. If you are more of a service app, an iOS version may be a slightly higher price than the webapp, but you'll have the experience of going through the Apple testflight testing and then their approval process. Once you get on apple, Google is easy. You'll also get a better idea of your target user's willingness-to-download. I've worked with both native and hybrid. I'd be happy to find a time to discuss further if you like.

Ethar Alali

Lean Enterprises, Mathmo, Algo-Geek & Coder,

There are a few options. If you've done the basics through Codecademy, then you're ready to move on to the specifics of a platform (such as PostgreSQL as you've mentioned). Though this can equally be a minefield. The reporting engines/formats differ from platform to platform. As does SQL believe it or not, in the sense each of the mainstream vendors adds their own specific bits to the standard. They are all compliant for the basics though. All of them will support the latest version of SQL (ANSI standard 2011), but PL/SQL is different to Transact-SQL in the way it uses cursors. In addition, each has an even bigger variation when it comes to multidimensional queries such as MDX, since there is no standard for MDX and some vendors use their own expressions and languages to carry out such queries. I can certainly help with tutoring, having been working in SQL since 1997 (and still do), although I think it's worth focussing on getting a little better at the specifics of the SQL vendor extensions you want to use, including their Cube, Pivot and Grouping functions as well as more complex joins, as they'll be the baseline skills for future reporting exercises, including analytical processing.

Nick Custenborder

Clarity Expert

I found some helpful information here https://developers.google.com/adwords/scripts/ It looks like a basic understanding of JavaScript is sufficient to write your own script. There's a 17 minute video on that page that gives a good introduction to deploying a custom script. Best of luck!

Dave Hecker

Outsourcing Expert Gives Unbiased Advice

Eastern Europe is a big place and each country has different requirements and constraints for money transfer. So, it really depends on the desitnation you are sending money to. The most common type of payment is wire transfer, as many countries in that region don't allow PayPal. If PayPal is available that's very popular, and after that you see everything from moneybookers to bitcoin being used as payment. In our experience, it's best to ask your developers what they prefer and try to accommodate them. The reason is that it's usually (but not always) a bit more trouble for the offshore team to receive/handle the inbound payments than it is for you to send them. For example, for some companies in Ukraine the easiest way is to receive wire transfers. But, they might need to to have a signed copy of the invoice that you are paying and present it to the bank each time you make a payment, just to get a released. There are also a lot of fees that your vendor might need to pay for inbound payments, etc. Compare that to the US where you can easily send a wire transfer only and for a small fee. Services like Skrill or PayPal are generally easier although it still might be tricky for the vendor to redeem money and sometimes it takes a while for them. The 2 or 3 percent fees with those services is frequently, but not always cheaper. In terms of legality, this shouldn't really be a concern as any legitimate payment technique should be fine legally. Basically, if you are making a legitimate payment for a legitimate service to a legitimate vendor, there is no reason to think that any standard and reasonable payment system would not be appropriate legally. Just make sure that, in the event anyone were to ask, you could quite easily provide evidence that the services and payment were legit. I disagree that you need to be concerned about money laundering as mentioned in another answer below. If you are legitimately engaged with an overseas software team and nothing illegal is going on, there should be plenty of documentation, emails, and delivered code to easily prove that what you are doing is legit in the very unlikely event that the IRS or government were to inquire.

Keith Gillette

Strategy + Systems • People + Process

What's the business model for the freelancing platform? Have you looked at http://equitydirectory.com/? They are a startup concierge matchmaking subscription service for founders looking to share equity or cash/equity splits with contributors. Are you familiar with http://SlicingPie.com? I think a dynamic equity split system like Mike Moyer's "Grunt Fund" is a perfect match for a platform approach to startup collaboration.

Shaun Nestor

Content Marketing Advisor & Agency Consultant

I recommend you do some A/B (or "Split") testing. Choose a sample of your audience and market the product at $0.99. Market the same product to another group at $5. We expect that the lower price option will sell more, but we don't know until we experiment. In my experience, sometimes a lower price lowers the received value of the product in the mind of the consumer. If they expected to pay more of it, there is a chance that they will be leery of the lesser-priced item. Additionally, if you market your product correctly, and enable the buyer to value the product more, you can surely charge the higher price. Consider the price versus value of a bottle of water. If you have been stuck in the desert for a week with no water, what do you *value* the water? What is it worth to you? $1? $10? $100? Probably $100. If you are floating in the middle of a large fresh water lake, what value is that same bottle? $1? $10? $100? Probably $0. On a hot day after mowing the lawn? Probably $1. Same bottle. Different value. I hope this helps. -Shaun *I assume your product is not really $0.99 or $5; you can still apply this tactic.

Nancy Friedman

Name and tagline developer

Focus on your audience, not on yourself. Focus on the one thing -- not three things, and certainly not fifteen -- that makes your company distinctive from your competition. Think about your brand personality: cute and perky? bold and strong? serious and thoughtful? Now look for vocabulary and constructions that fit your personality. Use Twitter to practice distilling your message. Nothing like a 140-character limit to force you to be succinct. Use the thesaurus tool at Visual Thesaurus to explore constellations of synonyms: www.visualthesaurus.com In your case, I'd focus on words from the lexicon of music. See my posts on building a better tagline: http://nancyfriedman.typepad.com/away_with_words/2012/03/building-a-better-tagline-part-2.html

Lee von

Unique Insights, Creative Solutions

Here are some quick and easy tips: 1) To make it easier for bots to crawl your site, link to important pages within your site with simple HTML URLs (not through javascript). 2) Add Alt tags to all your images 3) To choose keywords, search google with each keyword to see how many results come up for each. Then use google trends (google.com/trends/) to see how popular each of those keywords is. If two keywords have similar popularity, but one has much less competition (i.e. less results in google), then that keyword is preferable. After all that, explicitly ask google to crawl your site by using 'google webmaster tools' (google.com/addurl) Here's a nice guide for further info: https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo and you can use this site to do quick audits of your site as you continue to work on it: https://website.grader.com/ As you move forward, if any issues come up feel free to send me a message, best, Lee

Rebecca Caroe

I know how to find customers for your business

I'm unclear about your requirement for "industrial". But i can offer Nimbus Portal Technologies as a success - they offer document management and secure team/client communications in the cloud. http://www.nimbushome.com/ They are the dominant supplier in AU/NZ mainly because they integrate with Practice Management software. If you can clarify your question further, I may be able to better answer.

Sharique Nisar

Strategy Consultant | Marketing | BI | Analytics

I have a full list of professional having details like: NPI PAC ID Professional Enrollment ID Name Gender Credential Residency Residency Graduation Date Fellowship Hospital Fellowship Graduation Year Medical school name Medical School Graduation year Board Certifications Primary specialty Organization legal name Organization DBA name Line 1 Street Address Line 2 Street Address City State Zip Code Primary Source LinkedIn Page Would you want to see this?

Shaun Nestor

Content Marketing Advisor & Agency Consultant

HubSpot's Sidekick (www.shaunnestor.com/recommends/sidekick <-- affiliate link, otherwise, www.getsidekick.com) and their CRM work with each other to identify this kind of data. I'd be happy to work with you and show you how to use them. All the best, -Shaun

Shaun Nestor

Content Marketing Advisor & Agency Consultant

Very few brands will openly discuss how much they spend in advertising. This is a highly-sensitive data and a competitive advantage. You can use industry averages for cost of acquisitions, however. If you use $1 per click and/or $15 per client acquisition, for example, you can do simple math to figure out what your marketing budget should be. Measuring, improving, and showing ROI is a topic more complex than I want to get into on this forum. If you'd like, we can schedule a call or schedule some training on this. All the best, -Shaun

Lee von

Unique Insights, Creative Solutions

Your skills would be most useful if you were starting your own startup and needed to make an early prototype to show to investors or potential cofounder developers. Your experience in debugging, testing, and agile, could help you get a job as a product manager, and the fact that you have a background in some sort of 'coding' will help too. It's very unlikely that it would help you get an actual dev job though, since you wouldn't be able to translate your programs into actual code that could be taken over/continued by other devs. Even if the programs you mentioned do allow you to export as code, it's unlikely that it would be exported in a way that's very usable by other devs.

Jason Kanigan

Business Strategist & Conversion Expert

So my first question is, "What the heck is that?!" Like you're a purple-and-yellow zebra-striped three-foot tall jungle bird. I have no idea what that is, that certification. And your target market won't, not right off the bat, either. They aren't looking for a "Strategic Intervention Coach". They aren't searching for that term. No one cares about your certification until AFTER they've realized the problem they're in...and are looking for a way out. Find out what they *are* searching for. Get in front of them that way. Your certification is valuable, but only after you've found someone who's in the terrible situation that you know you can help them out of. Write a Kindle book (or several) addressing the most common symptom(s) of situations that indicate a serious problem you are capable of fixing. Make Youtube videos about the same subject(s). Drive viewers to a signup form or your book(s). Buy clicks on search terms your target market is already using to find help from. Send them to your solutions. Talk about the symptoms of their problem first: don't jump into "I'm a Robbins-Madanes-Certified coach." They don't care yet. Do that second, not first. Referrals. Here's where I'd put 70%+ of my sales & marketing effort. What people refer those who are in the problematic situations you fix to someone like you? I'd imagine it's hard enough doing what you do. Why add the problems of prospecting and qualifying to that? Have people who understand what you can do send you already-qualified prospects. People ready to buy. Don't forget...you still have to SELL. If you'd like to go through some details on these items, and look at a few more possibilities, let's talk.

Nick Loper

Small biz marketing and outsourcing help

I think we need to reframe the question around what audience do you want to serve? Who do you want to help? Focus on building the best possible resource to solve a certain problem, and trust that the money will follow. One affiliate example I often point to is TripAdvisor. They didn't set out to "become an affiliate and build a website." They set out to build an authoritative brand in the travel space, and now earn a ton of money from flight and hotel bookings as an affiliate. They solve a specific problem (with my limited travel budget, what are my best options?) and found a way to monetize that.

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