Ep 251: The Two Questions That Take the Guesswork Out of Pricing with Per Sjofors

SHOWNOTES

“Your price selects your customers.” That one line from Per Sjofors stopped me in my tracks. Per — known as The Price Whisperer, a name he didn’t even give himself — has spent years running pricing experiments across companies in four countries. Some sent revenues up 30% in a quarter. Others were complete disasters. And that’s exactly why he says small businesses shouldn’t run pricing experiments at all — there’s a smarter way.

Per has been the CEO of multiple companies across the US, the UK, Switzerland and Sweden, and his secret sauce is applying behavioral science to pricing and go-to-market strategy. He’s also the best-selling author of The Price Whisperer: A Holistic Approach to Pricing Power.

We Also Talked About

• Why everything your business does — marketing, messaging, targeting — affects what you can charge.
• The two exact questions to ask 50 potential customers to find your pricing range.
• Why copying competitors’ prices means following someone else’s guess.
• Why cost-plus pricing ignores the only thing that matters: what buyers think it’s worth.
• The pricing-page mistake that preconditions customers to think you’re expensive.
• Why you should always present a proposal rather than just sending it — and what to say when a client insists you just email it through.
• How price anchoring works, from a Thai restaurant menu to Apple’s $17,000 watch.
• Why raising your prices can attract better customers and slash support costs.

Resources Mentioned

• Per’s book, The Price Whisperer: A Holistic Approach to Pricing Power (affiliate link)
• Per’s company, Sjöfors & Partners — sjofors.com
• Per’s YouTube channel — youtube.com/@thepricewhisperer

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Trudy Rankin is the host of the Online Business Launchpad Podcast, Director of West Island Digital and the founder of the Online Business Lift-Off program.

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Episode 251: The Two Questions That Take the Guesswork Out of Pricing with Per Sjofors

[00:00:00]

Trudy Rankin: A company doing 9 billion, that’s with a B, dollars a year in revenue called Per Sjöfors with a problem. Every time they raised their prices, sales fell off a cliff. So Per looked at their pricing page and told them to change just one thing.

The result? They doubled their prices and nobody noticed or complained. And there’s a reason his suggestion worked, and it applies just as much to a one-person business as it does to a $9 billion one.

In this episode, we look at why copying a competitor’s prices is riskier than it looks, the two questions you can ask complete strangers that take most of the guesswork out of pricing, and why your cheapest customers might quietly actually be your most expensive ones.

Now, Per’s been the CEO of companies in the US, the UK, Switzerland, and Sweden. He wrote the best-selling book on pricing power, and he’s known, and he did not name himself this, as The Price Whisperer.

Welcome to the Online Business Launchpad [00:01:00] podcast. I’m Trudy Rankin, and I help people who need a flexible work from home option grow the online side of your business so that you can earn more, stress less, and have greater freedom in how you live.

Trudy Rankin: And today I have got Per Sjöfors with me, and if I was to pronounce his name in Swedish, you would not recognize it.

So that’s the Anglicized version of his name. And Per’s actually someone who’s known as a pricing strategy expert. He calls himself The Price Whisperer, which caught my attention. He’s been around the world a little bit. He has got experience in building businesses in different countries.

He’s been a CEO of multiple companies. And just for a short, you know, the US, the UK, Switzerland, and Sweden. He’s had quite a bit of experience in working across [00:02:00] countries that might not be exactly the same culturally, and we might get into that a little bit later. And his expertise has been built up over the years by working in these countries and working as a CEO, but one of the things that also caught my eye was that his secret sauce is using behavioral science to basically build pricing and go to market strategies.

And he’s also a best-selling author, and we’ll talk a little bit about that later as well. But one of the things or one of the reasons why I wanted to have a chat with Per is that for many of my listeners, many of you listening out there, you have small businesses, and pricing can sometimes be an unfathomable black box.

And especially when you’re first starting out, it can be a real challenge trying to figure out how you should price your products and services. Have you got it right? Have you got it wrong? If you get it wrong, you have… You know, you really run the severe risk of basically having your business collapse and [00:03:00] burn to the ground.

So it’s really important to get it right. So Per, thank you so much for being on the podcast and being willing to answer questions.

Per Sjofors: Well, Trudy, it’s a pleasure to be on the show, and I’m looking forward to this, and I hope I can provide some insights to the audience.

Trudy Rankin: Yeah, so let’s go ahead and start out by just getting you to just talk a little bit about your background.

How did you manage to get into the situation where you can call yourself The Price Whisperer? And just talk a little bit more about that.

Per Sjofors: First of all let me tell you this, that I didn’t name myself The Price Whisperer. I was part of a networking group here in Los Angeles and one of the guys, who’s calling himself The Pitch Whisperer, I was known as The Pricing Guy until he told me that, “No, no, no, you are The Price Whisperer.”

And I said, “Well, that sounds a lot better.” But the reason I’m in this business, and obviously there’s a [00:04:00] company behind me, but is that just like you said in the intro, I ran companies in several countries… Well, in Europe, and then, um, here in the States, and pricing was always an interest area for me.

So we did experiments, and some of those experiments were very successful, meaning that next quarter revenues were up maybe 25, 30%. Others were complete disasters. And what I’d learned about pricing in business school was, first of all, it was very little of it. And second, the little there was, was academic and theoretical and not really applicable to real business.

So, it didn’t help us to understand why some of those experiments were very successful and others were disasters. And when it was time for me to set out on my own I decided to take that interest in pricing and to devise a process to understand why some [00:05:00] pricing experiments worked and why others didn’t work so that I can ensure that every pricing experiment is successful.

And that’s what we did. And the fundamental theory here, the fundamental basis for what I do is that I realized that everything a company does affects its ability to price. It’s sort of funny because I did develop this process, and I can…

want to talk about it a little bit, if that’s okay. And it was only half a dozen years later, I realized that what we actually do is the practical application of behavioral science, right? And I’m saying that everything a company does affects its ability to price, and that means that how it targets customer affects pricing, its [00:06:00] selected marketing channels, its selected marketing messages, the product or service features they promote, the sales strategy, and so forth.

All of this affects what companies can price because it affects willingness to buy and willingness to pay.

Trudy Rankin: It’s one of those murkier areas because as soon as you said that everything affects the ability to price or to charge I kind of went, “Oh my.”

You know, for a small business owner who has to wear all the hats and who’s desperately trying to do all these things and figure everything out, that can feel a little bit overwhelming. And so you’ve talked a little bit about the process that you use to basically do that.

How do you go about if everything is affected or everything affects your ability to price, what process do you use to go about figuring out how to make-

Per Sjofors: Yeah, let’s talk a little bit about that, but then let’s [00:07:00] then go, jump into some specific advice that I have for small business owners.

The process is to do online research. And market research really. But market research on steroids. So not the kind of market research you get on, get from a market research company even though the process may be similar. But from that research and the methodology that we developed, and we developed AI software that manages the data and so forth and from that you can understand how all of that everything affects willingness to pay.

And it really works. I mean, I have examples from our case files of companies who changed their marketing and doubling in size, right? Just by changing the marketing message to a message that is better aligned with what their customers want to hear. And if you look at many [00:08:00] companies, they look at the marketing messages and let’s say they’re online and they say, “All right, people click more on this message,” or, “When we have this message, we have more click-throughs,” and stuff like that.

But that doesn’t say that it generates a willingness to pay that is higher. It just means that they get more clicks. And often you can trade sales, actually always you can trade sales volume for revenue. Higher sales volume always give you lower revenue than a price point that optimize revenue at a lower sales volume.

Trudy Rankin: Okay. Can I just stop you just for a sec? Can I get you to repeat that again, and just give us an example?

Per Sjofors: I said that companies can always trade sales volume for revenue, and sales volume for profitability. And what that means is that the price that leads to the highest sales volume, and the price that leads to the highest revenue, [00:09:00] and the price that leads to the highest profitability are three different price points.

Trudy Rankin: Uh-huh.

Per Sjofors: The first one do give you the highest sales volume, but not as high revenue as the higher price that leads to the highest revenue with a lower sales volume. And the same with the price that leads to the highest profits with an even lower sales volume.

And at the end of the day, profits is what drives every company.

Trudy Rankin: Well, theoretically it should do that.

Per Sjofors: Yes.

Trudy Rankin: Sometimes when you’re just getting started out though as a business, you don’t really know what you should be charging. You don’t really know about the different way of looking at pricing.

You might even not even understand the difference between, you know, the volume and the, the revenue and the profit. And so it’s a learning experience, and you mentioned getting out there and doing the [00:10:00] market research.

Given that in this day and age we have a lot of tools that can get out there and help us with doing market research, is there something different about the way you do market research than, as you said, just going out there and going, “Well, people click on this button more than that button”?

Can you talk about that research part of it a little bit?

Per Sjofors: Yeah. The cornerstone is that we developed, and this is something we did a dozen years ago or so, we developed a piece of AI that take all the data that is collected in market research, and from that we can specify how all of that everything that we discussed affects willingness to buy and willingness to pay. And therefore affects a company’s sales volume, revenue, and profits at precise price points.

So but this is again, this is a piece of software that is proprietary to my [00:11:00] company and is not available to other people. But I have some tips if you want for these very early startups that can give them some hints of how you should price.

Do not look at a competitor. How did the competitors set their prices? They were guessing. And now you’re going to follow that guess. That’s not very good. Do not use cost plus, because your cost has nothing to do with the value perception of the buyer, and therefore willingness to pay.

All right? But what you could do as a small business or startup business is to go out and find at least 25, 50 is better, potential customers. Those 50 are not your friends and family, they are not former colleagues, they are not your [00:12:00] current lead list if you have one of those.

Those are completely new people that could possibly be customers to your business, right? And you either meet them in person… I mean, if you do consumer goods you can go to the local cafes and say, “Can I ask you a couple of questions? I’m starting a new business.”

And one of three may say yes, one of two may say yes. And then if you’re doing something business to business, maybe you kind of do the same thing on LinkedIn. You’re saying, “I’m starting a new business. Can I ask you two questions?” And you can do it in the chat, right? And you describe your business, you describe the product or service that you’re about to sell, and then you ask them two questions.

The phraseology here is really important. So when you do this, use the same phraseology. And you ask them, “Now when you understand the product or service that we [00:13:00] are going to sell, what is the price that you think is so low that you think that the product or the service is not going to be good enough, that is going to have flaws, that we as a company is not going to be able to support you should you need support?”

So that’s the first data point. And then you ask the second question, which is, “Now imagine that we are going to underpromise and overdeliver, that the product is going to be better than you can imagine or service going to be better than you can imagine. What is a price that is so high that it is out of the question for you to buy it?”

So and then you take the average of these two questions from 50 people, and suddenly you have the average of [00:14:00] what is the lowest price you should use and what is the highest price you should use. Obviously, you want to remove all people who just say something that is completely unrealistic, right?

I’m coming up with a new fountain pen and people say, “Oh, I want to pay a million bucks for it.” Let’s obviously ignore those. But if you use the phraseology I mentioned, if you talk to 50 potential customers, whether it’s consumers or businesses, you suddenly have two price points.

Don’t price it under this price point, and don’t price it over this price point. And then of course you want to price close to that higher price points because it’s going to give you higher revenue than a lower price points. So it’s a very practical way of doing this.

Now, if you can’t find 50 potential customers, [00:15:00] you have bigger problems than pricing.

Trudy Rankin: That’s a worry because I know that for a lot of people that is one of the trickiest things is finding those 50 people. And-

Per Sjofors: Mm-hmm …

Trudy Rankin: Maybe it’s because they’re introverts, and they’re not comfortable going out and talking to 100 people in order to get the 50.

Or maybe it’s because they just simply don’t know how to go out there and winnow down the field of people who are the right people to ask. Because one of the questions that I had was when you were talking about doing it that way, and that is a really good way of doing it. That is excellent.

Those questions are good. I haven’t heard them phrased quite like that before. But the question that I have is if you’re talking about… you said don’t do cost plus to set your pricing. You said focus on the value. How do you tell what the value could be for a potential customer before you’ve ever had any potential customers, and you’re out there talking to, you’re trying to get your 50 people lined up?

Per Sjofors: Obviously, the two questions I mentioned will tell you [00:16:00] what customers value in general with the product or service and how much they’re willing to pay. Now what it doesn’t tell you is if you promote the different value statement, will they be willing to pay more?

It doesn’t tell you if you promote other features or functions in your descriptions, are they willing to pay more? But you can continue to do this. And when you have maybe 100 people, and if you kept track of what you’re saying then maybe you’ll find that these 30 people where I used a different value description, they trend to have a range of pricing within that too low to high, that is a little higher, right?

Trudy Rankin: Mm-hmm.

Per Sjofors: And I mean, this is ongoing. This is not something you do for two weeks prior to launch. This is [00:17:00] something you do a little bit every day forever, right? When an entrepreneur’s been doing this for a while there’s a lot of data that will tell them what messages to use, what customer target to focus on, and so forth.

And data always trumps guesses and so forth. And like I said, if this is a small startup business it’s crucial to spend some time doing this, right? And also, like I said, if you’re in business to business, use connection requests on LinkedIn. Ask for help. Almost always when you ask for help, you get help.

Trudy Rankin: That is one of the nice things about talking to people is that if you do tell them that you’re asking for their advice, and you’re not trying to sell them anything, you just want their advice, people do try to help.

That’s one of the really great things. So do you find LinkedIn a really good [00:18:00] place to go out and, you mentioned it a couple of times, would that be one of the best places if you’re trying to get do your research online?

Per Sjofors: The research online we do is very, very different.

Because to feed the you know, sometimes thousands of people into the survey, there is something called panel companies that has databases of people who say, “Yes, I’m willing to fill in this long survey and make a little money.”

So that’s a very different way of doing it. But for the benefit of the audience, again, there’s a couple of other things I want to talk about.

And that is the absolute necessity to ensure that before you present a price or before a potential customer can see a price, that they have accepted the value proposition of your product or service.

That is one of the most common mistake. I mean, you’ll see it, [00:19:00] once you know this, you’ll see it everywhere. You go to a website, whether it’s a consumer or a B2B website, and there is a pricing page, and what do you see on top? You see the prices. And then the value proposition is below.

That’s exactly the wrong way of doing it, because obviously we read from top to bottom from left to right, and the first thing that anyone should see is that value proposition or a summary of that value proposition before they see the price.

Because otherwise they make the decision on price.

And many times companies have these prices in huge font, and the value perception is tiny font. That sends a message to the potential buyer that you are going to use price as your primary decision driver, and that creates [00:20:00] downward pricing pressure, right? Let me tell you a story.

I got a call here a couple of years ago, well, maybe now it’s more than that, from a company. They’re a big company, $9 billion, $10 billion in revenue. And the guy said, ” We’re not profitable, and our investors are not willing to give us more money.

And as soon as we increase our prices, our sales just fall off a cliff, so we can’t increase our prices. What should we do?” Well, I looked at that company’s pricing page, and it was one of those… This is a B2B company. This is one of these long pricing pages where you have to scroll, then scroll, then scroll.

And as I was scrolling, I was reading, “Oh, we are really cheap. We are the most affordable option you can have.” There were [00:21:00] endorsement from customers saying, “I selected this company because their prices are so low,” et cetera. So it really didn’t matter what the prices were when I eventually had scrolled down to the pricing.

My perception was that this was darn expensive, right? Because I’ve been precondition to expect very, very low prices, whatever that may be. So I just told the guy, “Remove all that stuff about your low prices. It has nothing to do there on your pricing page.” And there were no value proposition.

The value proposition was the low price. So, then I followed up. I had another call with him, like three or maybe four months later, and he said, “Per, we followed your advice. We took away all that text about how cheap our product is, and we doubled our prices, and nobody noticed.

And now we’re [00:22:00] profitable too, so thank you very much.” Right?

Trudy Rankin: That’s when you kind of go, ” I’ll take a little slice of that, thank you very much.”

Per Sjofors: Yeah. Well, that’s right. They eventually, this particular company grow to 14, 16, 18 billion, and then they were bought by somebody.

So the context of pricing, what I just mentioned about pricing on a website is equally valid when it comes to pricing in a proposal or in a quotation.

Trudy Rankin: Mm-hmm.

Per Sjofors: So that means that if you’re in a company that sells through proposals or through quotations, you always present that, always.

You never just send it, meaning that if you’re remote like you and I are here, you do it on Zoom or Teams or some other platform. If you’re near to a customer, you can do it in person, but the whole point is that [00:23:00] because you’re presenting, you are controlling how the potential buyer reads the document. And you are controlling that they read, or at least you discuss the value proposition before the price is being shown. So they know what they’re going to get from the money they’re going to spend, right?

I speak to companies all day, you know, and they say, “Oh, we have this sales guy here. He’s really good. He’s getting 45 quotes out a day.”

But his closing rate is really bad, right? Of course it’s really bad, because he doesn’t present the proposal, right?

Trudy Rankin: Sorry, I just want to follow up with that, because that whole concept of presenting the proposal can be a little bit tricky. So how do you handle situations where the company basically says, “No, no, no, just send the proposal through. [00:24:00] We don’t have time”?

Per Sjofors: Well, you say this. You say that, “Oh, the proposal includes the situational analysis. I want to make sure that that situational analysis is correct, because otherwise our proposal is going to be invalid.”

Trudy Rankin: Ah, yes. That makes a lot of sense. That does make a lot of sense.

I’ve got a couple of questions that I would specific-

Per Sjofors: Yeah, go ahead. Mm …

Trudy Rankin: specifically like to ask, because of basically the listener base. So a lot of the people who are listening, they are small business owners and that’s what they do.

They work really, really hard, long hours. But a lot of the people are actually people who have come from another country, and now they’re living in a different country, and they’re trying to grow their business in this different country. Now, I know you’ve had experience with that. I’ve had experience with that.

And can you just talk a little bit about the impact of culture, pardon me, on basically running experiments or [00:25:00] setting pricing or doing that whole go to market strategy stuff. How does it impact, in your experience, does culture tend to impact on how you do that?

Per Sjofors: Maybe, but not, I don’t think very much. What do impact is that I mentioned that everything affects a company’s ability to price. And that everything is different in every country, right? Otherwise I really don’t see that the process would be different, at least not in the countries that I’ve been involved.

But I can tell you this, my first CEO job I got from an investor in Switzerland, and I’ve never set up a company before. I’ve never been a CEO before. The company was supposed to represent and support some American-made professional electronics. I’d never built an organization to [00:26:00] support electronics before, and certainly not internationally.

And it was in a country where I didn’t know the language and I didn’t know the culture. And I was obviously scared shitless. But you learn fast, right? And the one thing that I’ve learned from these various companies that, that I run is, the first one is never give up.

Secondly, always do the right thing,

Trudy Rankin: Mm-hmm.

Per Sjofors: I mean, a couple of things specifically. At one point, I was CEO of the subsidiary of a German enterprise software company and, here in the US, so the subsidiary. And they had this pricing spreadsheet that was so complicated that nobody could understand it, and that was by design.

Because they said, “Oh, we don’t want to, [00:27:00] that our customers really know what they’re getting for what they’re paying.” That is a really bad, really bad way of doing it. So I simplified it, and they went ballistic, right?

But you can’t have pricing that is so complicated that I didn’t understand it.

Our salespeople, they didn’t understand it. The customers didn’t understand it. And the result is no sales, right?

Trudy Rankin: Yeah.

Per Sjofors: So I simplified it. Pricing needs to be simple because if customers don’t understand it, if you confuse the customer, the customer is not going to buy from you.

That’s how simple it is. Talking about different countries and everything is different, and willingness to pay is different. And in fact, we’ve done several projects in Australia, and Australians have a willingness to pay that is pretty high, to be honest, [00:28:00] right?

In general terms.

If you have too-high prices, the worst thing that can happen is that you lower the prices and everything is hunky-dory again, right?

Trudy Rankin: Although that can, that can actually trigger a little bit of anxiety because if a small business is thinking, “Well, if I have to lower my prices, then I’m not going to make enough.

I’m not, you know, is making my plans on that higher price,” et cetera, et cetera. So is that a false way of looking at it? How would somebody manage to talk themselves out of that mindset?

Per Sjofors: It really, even for a small company, it really goes back to those two questions they have to ask their potential buyers.

What we do in my company is that we’re doing the same thing, but a lot more elaborate, you know? But for a company… and with many more questions, but the end result is that we can get the precise point, price point for maximum sales volume, maximum revenue, and [00:29:00] maximum profitability.

You get a sense for where the prices should be, the range of prices, which is better than guessing, which is better than cost plus and so forth.

Trudy Rankin: Yes. Yeah. I want to come back to just to one more thing that you talked about early on and that is that you were talking about how you’ve run many, many experiments over the years around pricing with the businesses that you have led and worked with and helped. Some of them are a success, which is, you always hope for a success, but some of them were disasters. What specifically, and you’ve already touched on some of the bits I’m pretty sure, but how would you advise somebody who’s running a small business that’s small enough that if the pricing experiment ends up being a disaster, it could kill the company?

Per Sjofors: That’s why you shouldn’t do pricing experiments.

Trudy Rankin: As a small business?

Per Sjofors: Yeah, a small you should… the problem, and this is why, [00:30:00] this is my conclusion from what I learnt is that, and it goes back to behavioral science that you want to talk about a little bit, and we as humans are malleable and we are not rational.

We don’t make rational decisions, which is why advertising works, right?

Trudy Rankin: Mm-hmm.

Per Sjofors: And if you do pricing experiments you’re treating price as it lives in a vacuum. And pricing never lives in a vacuum because, again, your marketing, your sales strategy, your customer targeting, et cetera, all affects the ability to price or the ability to take price or the ability to gain pricing power, if you want.

And pricing power is the ability to increase pricing and not lose sales volume.

Which meant that you had too low prices to start off [00:31:00] with. I can give you examples. A small SaaS company we worked with several years ago, they were so underpriced that, we told them to quadruple prices, and they did.

Not overnight, but they inched up the price over nine month roughly, and the result, according to the CEO, was twofold. First of all, they saw an increase in sales with about 25%. Secondly he said, “And we got a new customer category. We got rid of the bottom feeders, and we got a more professional level of customers, so our customer support cost is down with 80%.”

Trudy Rankin: Now, that’s fascinating.

Per Sjofors: Because your price selects your customers.

Trudy Rankin: That is really, really interesting, and I think that is one of the key things that small business owners need to remember is that sometimes your lowest price customers or the people paying the lowest [00:32:00] price are the ones who over time you really probably don’t want to keep.

Per Sjofors: That’s right

Trudy Rankin: Just for many, many reasons. That is fascinating.

Per Sjofors: Well, this is consistent. The price-sensitive customers buy the product or service for the low price only. They don’t really learn how to use the product or service properly because they don’t invest any time in it, which means that they are clogging up the customer support lines.

And as soon as there is something cheaper available, they’re gone.

Trudy Rankin: Yes. That is something that can be a hard lesson to learn especially when people are thinking that they need every single customer that they have in order to be able to survive as a business.

That’s a really good lesson to drive home. I’m curious, because I know that you have written a book. Can you just talk a little bit about your book, and have you, you know, have you included those sorts of learnings in that book?

Per Sjofors: Definitely. Well, the book is here.

It’s called A [00:33:00] Holistic Approach to Pricing Power. And it’s on Amazon, it’s on Audible, and it’s on Kindle. All of these lessons are in there. Everything I talked about is in the book, and much, much more. I guess we’re sort of slowly getting to the end here, but there’s one thing that I do want to talk about that I think is very important for small businesses, and I mentioned this in the story about the company who messages their low prices unnecessary, and that is that when we as humans are looking at multiple numbers, we are comparing them.

We cannot not compare them, and if those numbers happen to be prices we still compare them, and that means that there’s something called price anchoring. And price [00:34:00] anchoring means that, again, on the website or in a proposal or in a quote or if you run a restaurant, on the menu which is a price list, right?

The first price that a potential customers must see is the most expensive price. And what that means is that everybody should sell with a good, better, best, right? So at least three options or four options. If you have five options, people get confused and don’t know how to buy. So three or four options which then should be arranged not as good, better, best, but as bad, best, better, good Because that will make the better and the good appear to be more affordable.

And I mean, you can go to MailChimp, for example. [00:35:00] You can buy their services for $299 a month or for $15 a month, and there’s virtually no difference, right? So that $299 just sits there as a price anchor so that the $15 a month they want to sell en masse is more affordable. And it also sends another message, and that is that because they have this more expensive offer, whatever they offer must be solid even at the low price.

Trudy Rankin: Yep.

Per Sjofors: So a friend of mine runs a restaurant and he said, “I need to increase prices.” And it is a Thai restaurant, and he was already quite expensive for a Thai restaurant. So I said, “Can’t you put something God awful expensive up in the left-hand top [00:36:00] corner of your menu?”

And he said, “Well, we have this unusual fish that is very expensive.” So it’s not a pomfret. It was something very, something different, unusual. And he did. And again, I followed up with him and he said, “I increased my prices and sales volume went up.”

Trudy Rankin: That’s pretty cool. That is fascinating because that whole concept of price anchoring is really, really important, and I know that a lot of people, even though they might have heard that as a concept, are scared to put it into action.

So yeah, that is interesting.

Per Sjofors: The most extreme example of this was when Apple came out with a watch.

Six years ago maybe they had the regular watch was $349 US dollars. And then they had a version of it for $17,000. And all the journalists that follow this [00:37:00] fairly major product introduction talked about the audacity of Apple selling the same electronics for $17,000 and for $349.

The difference was that in one of the watches, guess which one, the case was made of solid gold, right?

Trudy Rankin: Yes.

Per Sjofors: But for all those who were interested in this product, they read the reviews and for every time they saw the $17,000 versus the $ 349, that $349 became more and more and more affordable, and the risk of buying this new technology, again, became less and less prevalent.

Trudy Rankin: That is fascinating. That is really fascinating. I think the human psychology side of things is really, really interesting. Per, it’s been really, really lovely speaking with you today. We could actually keep going for quite a long time, but we’re just about out of time.

And, uh, yeah, because we [00:38:00] could have talked about just so many different things. But if people were interested in either reaching out to you for some help or just wanted to follow what you do, where’s the best place for them to go?

Per Sjofors: Well, the best place is, because I got this wacky name is to do a Google search for The Price Whisperer.

You should get 10 million hits or thereabouts. I write a lot. I have a YouTube channel. You’ll find my book, my company and everything just by doing a search for The Price Whisperer.

Trudy Rankin: Okay. All right. We’ll see if we can, we can put some links up in the show notes just to make it easier for people to find you.

And yeah, once again, thank you very much.

Per Sjofors: Thank you. It’s been a pleasure to be on the show.

Trudy Rankin: Well, there you have it. And if pricing has always felt a little bit like sticking a finger in the air and hoping, then here’s an easy way to start taking the guesswork out of it.

This week, find five people who could genuinely be customers, so not friends, not family, not your mom, and ask them Per’s two questions. Number one, what [00:39:00] price would feel so low that you’d doubt the quality? And number two, what price would be so high that it’s just out of the question?

Five honest answers are going to teach you more than a month of staring at your competitors’ websites. Per’s book and all his links are in the show notes, so have a look there. If this particular episode was useful, hit follow so the next episode just turns up without you having to remember. And if you’ve got 30 seconds, a quick review really does help the right people stumble across this show.

And when you want practical help building the online side of your business landing in your inbox each week, come and grab my newsletter at onlinebusinessliftoff.com/newsletter. That’s onlinebusinessliftoff.com/newsletter and I’ll see you next time.

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