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When the Customer Says No — Double Your Price!
In 1990, with the help of my good friend David Miller, I published my first book How to Make $100,000 or More a Year Teaching Martial Arts. The book was in binder form and was 374 pages. We decided to price the book at $79.95 since we had a very limited market. We asked a number of school owners if they would pay this for a book and they quickly said NO, but we decided to test it anyway. We did our first direct mail campaign to 12,000 schools. A whopping 4,000 envelopes came back as bad addresses, moved, or gone out of business, but we sold 100 copies to net a small profit from the first mailing.
Armed with a little confidence and a clean list, we doubled the price to $150 and mailed again, selling another 100 copies. Twice the profit by simply doubling the price and yet when we asked school owners if they would pay even the lower price, they had said NO!
That year we sold over 1,000 manuals at $150, bringing in $150,000. Had we kept the price at $79.95 and not tested a higher price, we would have made $75,000 less for the exact same information and effort!
I have repeated this dozens of times in multiple industries over the last thirty years.
What people say they will pay and what they WILL pay is often not the same thing.
You have to test to be sure!
