I am seeing a move towards small entrepreneurial businesses pricing their services with Black Friday discounts. Ugh.
We are not Walmart (thankfully!).
Last holiday season I needed a new laptop and saw a great price there, went to the store early one morning after seeing it in stock online, and found that they never had it and never will.
Needless to say I was peeved.
From that point I swore that the Black Friday bait-and-switch game was not something I would ever engage in again. It just feels slimy IMHO, more like empty-the-warehouse, than a great price on a hot product.
On the flip side, neither would I ever offer Black Friday LinkedIn coaching pricing to my clients. They are getting the same mental value from me a month before, and a month after, Black Friday, as that week itself.
So let’s not play “let’s make a deal” or enter into the mind game of “pay me what you think I am worth.”
If you have to think that hard about the value of what I am offering you relative to telling your career narrative and be amazing-er than the competition, it’s not going to work well, for either of us.
Value is a perception, of the offeror to the offeree. And vice versa. One side is always naturally suspect of the other. There are too many variables for certainty.
I honed the value of what I offer. My proposal is customized and detailed, like the curriculum of a college course. You need to want to take advantage of that value proposition I offer, as you hear me articulate it, with the passion I naturally use in my conversation with you to qualify you, just like you are qualifying me.
Then we recognize each other’s half in the value proposition equation. I deliver. And then some, I am told. That’s why so many clients write LinkedIn recommendations of me, or serve as references, or refer me to others. Not bragging; it’s the truth.
Both sides have to work at the success it will evoke, but they enter the arrangement when they “get” the value concept that is offered.
It’s a carefully driven two-way street down LinkedIn Avenue, not a mad Black Friday break-the-doors-down shopping spree.
Evaluate how you deliver your value; value how you are evaluated.
