Instead of waiting for that mythical day when your price objections stop before you’ll raise your prices, maybe instead figure out what types of people are giving objections vs. what types of people aren’t… and then in the future just target the people who aren’t likely to give them. 😉
This post will admittedly be an oversimplification of the point, because I only have so much room here. But there are two main things to consider in regards to targeting people who are less likely to object.
First, you’ll almost always get a price objection if you’re speaking to the wrong client.
By “wrong” I mean someone who isn’t well placed to get maximum benefit from what you do.
An example would be paid ads experts targeting people who are making almost zero money in their business and don’t have a validated offer.
These people are not likely to get good results because they have many more problems besides the one that paid ads are meant to solve (which is not knowing how to scale something that’s already working).
Yet paid ads experts target people at that stage and make them offers and then wonder why they get price objections.
Of course their price sounds high (no matter what it is) because the client is probably down to their last dime and understandably nervous about their ability to make a return on their investment when they have other issues to attend to also.
Another example would be health experts targeting people who need to solve lots of other health issues before they’ll be able to really make meaningful progress on the stuff that the expert specializes in.
Clients of mine who specialize in emotional eating have told me that they got the most price objections from people who admitted that they had diabetes or some other condition that wasn’t under control.
This makes sense – it’s hard to solve multiple big problems at once and these prospects seemed to be looking for a program that could solve EVERYTHING they were dealing with.
Naturally, the emotional eating program didn’t sound like it would do that, so they gave a price objection.
Another example is attraction marketing experts trying to target people who are brand-new to business and don’t know what they’re an expert in or what results they can get for clients.
This was my own mistake, made unwittingly for years. I thought I could help ANY coach to use attraction marketing to get clients contacting them first.
But it turns out that it’s really hard to draw in clients through the strength of a message alone when you don’t know what that message should say because you haven’t worked with anyone yet.
I now know that beginners are much more likely to find success through outreach (outbound) activities and developing custom offers, rather than hoping to draw clients to them (inbound) with the perfect offer or message.
But back then, I didn’t see the distinction between the different stages of business. I just thought “coaches” were my ideal client and I didn’t realize there was a need to slice and dice that any further.
And I was scared of raising my prices because, although some people easily said yes to my fees, others were aghast and said they were way too high.
Now looking back, I see the pattern: the aghast people were mostly new coaches – the folks who weren’t likely to get good results anyway.
In fact, I’d never had a new coach get an amazing result after working with me because attraction marketing was not what they needed. I just needed to stop trying to help them!
Sometimes a price objection is just code for, “I don’t think this will work for me.”
And sometimes, the person who gives that objection is CORRECT – it will NOT work for them.
They understand that better than the person who is trying to sell them, which is concerning.
Targeting the wrong client is one major reason why you get price objections. If you keep your targeting broad, you’ll always keep attracting SOME people who aren’t a good fit and therefore if you’re just waiting for price objections to stop, you’ll be waiting forever and you’ll want to keep your price at the “lowest common denominator” to accommodate the segment that isn’t a good fit.
Now, let’s talk about the second main way to target leads who are less likely to object in the first place:
By that I mean, stop front-loading your marketing with tons of freebies – free lead magnets, free challenges, free strategy calls.
Instead, use your marketing to directly talk about the information that you’re currently holding back and saving to include in the free stuff.
And DIRECTLY sell your offer from your marketing as well. (This means through your posts if you’re doing organic social media marketing.)
The effect of making this change is that you’ll be more likely to attract people who have more money than they do time. A.k.a. – people who are more likely to want to pay an expert to help them get an outcome quickly.
A.k.a. – people who are inherently less price-sensitive. 😉
The free stuff is not as attractive to those people because they don’t have time for it and don’t have a DIY mentality anyway. They’re fine if you just share some information about your methods and processes – enough for them to see that you know what you’re talking about – and invite them to your high-ticket offer directly.
I know this because I have been a high-ticket client myself many times now, and this is my mentality.
And my many high-ticket clients have shared with me that this is their mentality also – that they appreciated that I didn’t make them go through a super-long funnel before I shared the details of my methods and how to work with me in my high-ticket program.
If you have an audience that you’ve built via offering a lot of freebies, then it may be that you’re simply selling to a group of people that… well, likes freebies, because they do not have a lot of money to invest. And they may give you price objections no matter how well you describe your methods and the benefits of your offer.
(This is not a criticism of those folks, by the way. At an earlier time in my life I fell into that camp, as I’m sure many of us have. I appreciate everyone who offered me freebies because I learned a ton from them and they helped me to get to where I am today. But we’re now talking about what to do if you want to attract high-ticket buyers easily.)
The way we build audiences in my camp is actually through making organic social media connections (“friends” on Facebook, “connections” on LinkedIn, whatever they’re called on Instagram 😆 etc.) with folks who show some indication that they are interested in personal or professional development (this is based on how their profile looks and/or their membership in a group related to their business, career, or personal development in general).
This is true for both business and non-business offers. The rough profile of someone who values their time more than their money is still the same.
We make great posts that include what high-ticket buyers want to know before investing (roughly: what’s our process, why does it work, what are the results).
And the right people come forward (into our inboxes) and tell us that they’re interested. And from there, we enroll them – usually with zero objections, price or otherwise.
So there you have it. If you (1) narrow your ideal client and (2) shorten your funnel, you’ll be well on your way to attracting the kinds of people who will not object in the first place.
You might even attract so many of them that you feel fine with raising your price because you can see that you’ll easily keep your income the same or even increase it – regardless of whether or not a few price-objectors slip through.
There’s a little more to the equation than this (including previewing your price and the reason why you’ve chosen it), but I’ll save that for another post.
If you want to read more of my thoughts on price objections, you can check out the “price objections” section of this website for a list of additional posts/articles.
If you want help with your ideal client targeting and organic connecting/posting strategy – DM me on Facebook. I go deep on this stuff with folks in my 30-day 1-on-1 intensive.
It gets best results for experienced coaches and experts who’ve been doing what they’re doing for a while and have had a good number of clients get great outcomes from their work.
More information about the 30-day 1-on-1 intensive is available here.