Price pressure is a sign of weak positioning, even now

You’ve probably heard about big tech companies shedding jobs and tightening budgets. You’ve heard talk about a coming recession. You may have felt the tightening venture market personally.

But have you also noticed your customers aggressively negotiating on price?

If so, that means they see your product as replaceable. Either your product is not really a must-have, or it is so similar to other options that they’ll just look for the cheapest one. Whichever it is, they’re not appreciating your product’s value… and that’s a positioning problem as well as a business problem.

Even in tough times — and exactly how tough these times are is up for debate, it’s not like these are unambiguously horrible economic conditions — companies will gladly pay for products that they consider valuable. If they’re nickel and diming you, they just don’t consider the product valuable. Which means either you’re doing a poor job communicating that value, or you’re going after the wrong type of customer (or your product sucks, but I’m going to assume that’s not the case, but most products, even ones that suck, have one differentiating value that matters a lot to the right market).

Price pressure is a sign of poor positioning. Fix your positioning, and you’ll get customers to pay up, and to do so quicker, with more urgency.