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If you’ve got more nervous tics than a Lyme disease research facility* when you tell customers about your pricing, you’re not the only one.
Just like with kids, behavior is communication. So if you find yourself squeaking out your prices and looking anywhere other that at your customers, then you owe it to yourself to figure out why that’s happening and take action.
WHY IT MATTERS:
You deserve to be paid appropriately for the service that you provide. It’s hard to do that if you’re not sure that what you’re offering is worth it. You can create more price confidence by making sure the experience you deliver is value packed. When you deliver more value than what you price your services, you’ll be able to say your price calm, cool, and collected.
WHAT’S NEXT:
Where The Lack of Price Confidence Comes From
WTF Is A Five Pineapples Experience?
The Five Pineapples Miracle Growth Recipe
Where The Lack of Price Confidence Comes From
While some solopreneurs feel confident in their pricing, in my experience, it’s not the majority.
After working with and alongside personal service solopreneurs for the last 7 years, there seem to be a few common reasons for a lack of price confidence:
Lack of experience in general or a lack of experience doing it on their own
Not understanding their pricing and/or pulling a price out of a hat
Their service is their unconscious competency - meaning it’s become easy for them, so they value it less themselves
Lack of interest due to a mismatch in service offering and target market
They know how to deliver the service but are unsure of how to deliver an experience.
Of course, there’s also Imposter Syndrome, though I’d argue that it's often blamed when it’s really one or more of the reasons above.
To solve the lack of experience, the only solution is to get more reps in.
To address pricing, the solution is to do the research and understand what it takes to deliver your service so you can price accordingly. (Fun fact: I’m working on creating several tools to help with this.)
When your service is your unconscious competency, the solution is to dig deeper into understanding why your customers deeply value the service you offer.
The mismatch in service offering and target market can be solved with a mix of customer research, testing the service positioning and/or different service offerings.
Then, for those who aren’t sure how to deliver an experience, that’s where I come in - to help you create a vision and systems to create your own Five Pineapples Experience.
WTF Is A Five Pineapples Experience?
I want to be clear right off the bat—a Five Pineapples Experience isn’t about creating the perfect experience or getting five-star ratings every time.
That’s categorically impossible.
It’s about building customer relationships driven by experiences.
Like how good music gives you chills and great sex gives you the after-glow, a Five Pineapples Experience is meant to create a “Damn, that was good” feeling after working with you.
And when your customers are talking about you like a hot piece of gossip they can’t keep to themselves, you’ll feel a lot more confident about charging for your services.
The Five Pineapples Miracle Growth Recipe
Okay, ‘miracle’ may be a strong word. Nothing here is new or revolutionary. Thankfully, new or revolutionary isn’t the answer to creating an experience that gives you more confidence in your pricing.
What you need is a temporary period of hyper-focus to set up your foundation, create systems that support you and your customers, and add a dose of your own wonderful weirdness to make it unmistakably yours.
After that initial period, you create check-ins with yourself to make sure what you’ve built is still serving you and your customers. You’ll need to make adjustments over time, but it’ll be a lot easier to do once you have your foundation set.
There are, you guessed it, five “ingredients” to the Five Pineapples Miracle Growth Recipe. The ratios of the ingredients depend entirely on your business but the below will give you a great idea of what it takes to create your unique, craveable experience.
Create customer service that builds trust
A big reason customer service tends to get a bad rap is that it is often used reactively instead of proactively.
When we are more reactive, it’s easy to get overwhelmed and take things personally. This leads to us missing things, not communicating as clearly as we would like, and our attitude likely isn’t going to be as good as it would be otherwise.
On the other hand, when we have our ducks in a row (aka have our shit together and know what the fuck is going on), everyone is happier.
More could always be said about customer service, but here are the nuts and bolts if you want to avoid feeling the need to run through the wall like the Kool-Aid man every time someone reaches out to you for customer service.
Human-centered policies that protect both the customer and the business
Proactive communication that keeps customers in the loop and helps guide their experience
Resources that allow customers to self-serve or otherwise help them in some way
Feedback systems that help hone the way you help customers
Your ZAPs - Zombie Apocalypse Plans. Basically, your guide in case shit metaphorically (or literally) hits the fan
Helpful and kind interactions between the customer and the service provider
Systems that allow you to do all of the above as consistently as is reasonable for humans
A more proactive approach not only makes customers happier but also saves your sanity. You end up with less repetitive questions, can respond to customers faster, and feel more confident in how you handle everything.
Design customer experiences that create memories
Imagine going on a road trip and stumbling upon an amazing hole-in-the-wall joint.
You take your first bite of food and it lights up your taste buds. It’s even got you doing the happy food dance. The food, the fact that this place was a serendipitous find, and the unique charm of it all just has you feeling some type of way. It’s left an imprint in your memories.
The next time you go on a road trip anywhere in the general direction of that hole-in-the-wall place, you start making detour plans just to experience it all again.
Those craveable, can’t-wait-to-do-it-again customer experiences are what we’re shooting for.
Can you do that with a service, though? Abso-freaking-lutely.
Where customer service is how you technically or logistically help customers, customer experience is all about getting into their feels and making positive connections.
How are they feeling when they reach out to you?
How are they feeling at various stages of their experience with you?
How do they want to feel, and what does success look like to them?
What feelings do you want them to tie to their experience with you?
Knowing the answer to questions like these helps you create those craveable experiences. To find the answers, you’ll need to:
Dive into customer research
Gather industry and competitor research
Use Human-Centered Process Flow Mapping to identify opportunities and hot spots
Once you feel like you have a well-informed understanding of your customers and what they’re looking to experience, then you can start getting to the fun part - designing the experience. You’ll:
Make educated guesses based on your research and test them out to see if your guesses have the impact you’re looking for
Make outcome-based decisions based on your tests and continue to tweak over time
Update your Human-Centered Process Flow Map to help you stay on track with the experience you want to provide
Once your customer experience is designed, you don’t just stop - you have to continue to keep your ear to the ground so you can identify when it’s time to adapt the experience. You can stay ahead of customer needs by:
Creating feedback opportunities that people feel comfortable being honest in
Save impromptu feedback to look for trending feelings
Keep an eye on industry changes or other things that could impact your business or your customers
Craveable experiences don’t happen by accident - they happen by design.
It may sound like a lot of work and to be honest, it is. But here’s the secret: when you put more focus on creating craveable experiences for the customers you have, you won’t have to worry so much about finding new ones or thinking you need to keep slashing your prices to attract them.
Drop a Flavor Bomb to create stories worth sharing
A Flavor Bomb is that little extra kick you weren’t expecting, and damn if it didn’t take your experience up a notch.
It’s unexpected and creates a story that your customers want to tell their friends.
The Flavor Bomb is everyone’s favorite part of designing their Five Pineapples Experience. As fun as it sounds, it’s not as easy to pull off as you may think.
Here are a few rules:
It has to be something that every customer gets to experience
It has to be repeatable
It has to be reasonable
It has to be realistic
It has to be relevant (this is where most people get tripped up)
There are five types of Flavor Bombs:
Empathy
Attitude
Usefulness
Generosity
Speed
What makes any of these work as a Flavor Bomb is not just being empathetic or generous but unexpectedly so.
Finding great examples from personal service solopreneurs to share with you has proved tough - which just tells you how much potential impact can be made by introducing one. However, here are a few local-to-me flavor bomb examples.
An attitude Flavor Bomb example: Zunzi’s wait staff responds with, “Shit yeah!’ after every choice you make when you order.
A generosity and empathy Flavor Bomb example: Dr. Wayne Johnson in Hilton Head, South Carolina spends far more time with patients than is typical these days and uses it to make sure his patients are more than just medically healthy.
Like with anything else, designing your Flavor Bomb requires a bit of trial and error to find the right one, but it’s a fun process. And when you nail it, holy cow, it feels good, and it works.
If you like the idea of a Flavor Bomb, check out the book Talk Triggers by Jay Baer. That’s the basis of a Flavor Bomb.
Design your own experience so you enjoy your work more
No matter how passionate you are about what you do, it’s still work. We can be honest about that.
There will always be moments that suck or where you have to do things you don’t look forward to doing.
But, your ability to deliver a great customer experience hinges on your own experience in your business.
Great customer experiences need to be designed with how you work in mind and lean into who you are.
Will the way you work be okay with all customers? Of course not - but that’s the point.
You won’t make everyone happy. You don’t need to make everyone happy. You want to make a sub-group of customers incredibly happy instead of a lot of customers just feeling okay.
Knowing that, that should relieve some of the FOMO of making choices that make your life and business easier. The right customers will at least be okay with it or may find your method suits them better than how others businesses are done.
At the end of the day, when you enjoy your work more, you’ll deliver better customer experiences.
Here are some of the things I’d suggest thinking about as you design your own experience:
Stay in your zones of genius as often as possible so you can really thrive
Find ways to eliminate, minimize, or work around things that create deep resistance or where your skill level isn’t as high.
Find ways to amplify the good moments so you reap more than just a profit
Find ways to create less friction in the areas that you don’t love as much but still have to do.
Find ways to inject more of you into what you do so you feel less pressure to be someone you’re not and come off as more authentic to customers.
Create your own support documents so when shit hits the fan, you get lost, or you get overwhelmed, you know how to get yourself back on track.
Develop human-ing skills that deepen relationships
I am somewhat joking about human-ing skills, but only somewhat.
Human-ing skills are my tongue-in-cheek way of classifying several skills and tools that help you show up as a real, relatable human in your business.
It’s easy to get caught up in processes and systems, because let’s face it, we’d be lost without them.
But it’s these “human-ing” skills — the ability to communicate, empathize, and connect — that make the biggest impact. They are a mix of coaching, interpersonal, communication, and self-awareness skills.
These skills can help you navigate things like:
How to have difficult conversations, like when you’ve made a boo-boo, and you’re scared to talk about it
How to manage conflict without blowing up your relationship with a customer
When to be flexible and how to hold your ground when needed
How to communicate good and bad news
How to communicate so your customers do what you need them to do (more often than not, at least.)
How to share price increases and changes to how your business works
Knowing when and how to fire customers who aren’t a good fit
How to build relationships with customers and how to surprise and delight them in ways that matter the most to them
Know when to answer right away versus when you need to pause and reflect before pressing send.
Help you better understand and anticipate your customers’ needs
Plus a lot more.
It’s these skills that ultimately leads to creating customer loyalty. Customers aren’t loyal because things usually go well - it’s because they know you’ll be there not only if shit goes sidways - but up, down, and all around.
THE BIG TAKEAWAY:
How confident you are in your pricing will directly impact how your customers feel about your service and pricing. There are several reasons as to why you might be feeling squirmy about your price, but creating your Five Pineapples Experience should wash away any doubt about whether what you charge is worth it.