When you give a gift online — to your child, to a friend or to your spouse — how does that make you and them feel?
Well, if the gift really is given freely, you feel as great giving it as they do receiving it, regardless of the monetary value. We know this from receiving the world’s most useless coffee mug, designed, painted and fired in a kiln by your third grader on one of their field trips.
The unique gift to you is priceless, and you drink coffee from it every day to honor their thoughtfulness. To the rest of the world, it has little or no value, especially if they do not know you or your child. Chances are, that same person who does not value your ugly mug highly has a version of their own mug in their cabinet.
Funny how online gifts work great only when freely given.
Chances are, you have also received a “gift” with implied or blatant strings attached. Buyer (or recipient) beware, because these can be tricky.
Your sales team deals with this every day, deciding on whether to discount, hold firm on a full-priced product or best gift your product outright.
The choice becomes energetic more than monetary. Let’s explore why you should only have two prices: full-priced and fully gifted, based upon energy, not money.
The Case For Full-Priced
Markets have become so incredibly efficient that it becomes pretty difficult to sell vitamins, shoes or any service for anything more than a market price. Online competitors optimize prices rapidly, and that benefits all of us as consumers.
So you and your company thrive by selling a good product or service, at a full and fair price. Simple.
This represents a contract of sorts. The customer agrees to pay a price, and you make a promise with conditions of satisfaction — regardless of whether it’s a product or service.
If this seems so simple, then why are there so many legal disputes? We fight about everything from small claims issues to multiyear, multimillion-dollar lawsuits over terms or misunderstandings of the products and services we pay for.
I suggest that one culprit is the hidden assumption that when we as merchants discount our price past a certain point, the customer should then discount their expectations or conditions of satisfaction. The discounted orders should be shipped slower, behind the full-priced orders. The customer engagement team dreads calling back the “shoppers” or hagglers. There then exists a two-tiered fulfillment process — for people we like (who pay, or for whom we gift) and for those who get discounts or use coupons or some other price-lowering mechanism like haggling.
When you simply have a full-priced product, coupons do not exist, because you do not honor them. Your sales team does not have permission to “blow the doors off” with a price good only until the end of the month.
You provide a well-priced (and full-priced) product, and it comes with full promises attached — without any restrictions.
You can then confidently run a business, hire and staff the needed people to satisfy the conditions attached to buying and using the products sold.
The Case For Gifted
Gifted or “free” products usually come about for a small number of reasons: You want to promote a new product; a dear friend wants to use your product; your company makes a mistake and offers a free or gifted product to the customer.
Notice that free and gifted cost the same but have very different energy attached.
Just like your coffee mug from your third grader, that “gift” is priceless, but the value in anyone’s hands but yours is “worthless.” Therein lies the big difference.
When you gift a product, you feel as great about that as they do. You do not resent the customer. You honor them with your gift to India. You do not discount their expectations for use or service tied to the product. They get the same warranties and customer support as your clients who paid full fare. In fact, if it really is gifted, you attempt to exceed your normal service promises as part of your gift!
Funny how gifts delivery work that way only when freely given.
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