If you’re scared of raising your price and feeling like maybe prospects will think it’s too high and won’t buy… here’s something to consider:
Not all prospects are the same. 😉
Not everyone comes from the same financial situation, and not all potential clients value coaching or professional services in the same way or to the same degree (or at all).
If you’ve spent a lot of time talking to broke people in your sales conversations, and everyone (or almost everyone) seems shocked at the price and says there’s no way they could afford it, it’s quite understandable that you’d start to question yourself and think that maybe you’re charging too much.
But if you think back, I bet there was maybe ONE person, that needle-in-the-haystack of all your sales chats, who didn’t give you a single objection and breezily paid the highest price you’ve ever charged.
And maybe you even got the feeling that they would have paid more if you’d asked for more – and kicked yourself for not doing that.
The existence of that one person in your history proves that you’re definitely not charging too much – you just need to connect with prospects who can easily afford your fees. 🙂
That might sound like a really obvious point.
But in my experience, people really overanalyze this and get themselves into such a state of anxiety and self-doubt when they get a lot of prospects saying they can’t afford it – wondering if they have mindset issues or money blocks or however the heck they label it.
And the answer is often (not always, but often) a lot simpler than all that: It’s not your fault at all – you’re just speaking to someone who doesn’t have the money.
Phew! Right?
I’ve come to realize that the ideal high-ticket coaching client, the one who will drop $5K or $10K or $20K without blinking, is someone who values their time far more than their money, and has easy access to funds.
When I started targeting that type of person for my offers, all of my supposed mindset issues/money blocks disappeared, because I was getting connected with people who could easily afford me.
Now, it’s definitely true that sometimes people who can’t easily afford it will get resourceful – will ask a family member to sponsor them, will take a loan, whatever the case may be.
And, further back in the history of my business, I had some clients who told me that they did that, after I went through the whole “objection handling and help them get resourceful” scripts that I learned in the various sales trainings that I took.
But I almost always found that the fact they couldn’t easily afford it created a weird dynamic in our coaching relationship, wherein they were SO nervous that the program wouldn’t work for them and they felt that SO much was at stake if it didn’t work out, because the fee really wasn’t easily accessible for them, and anything but smashing success from the program would leave them worse off financially than when they started.
And I had to cross over from doing what I do best (strategy) into reassuring and soothing and convincing those clients that the program would work and to try to calm themselves etc. (not at all what I do best!).
Just ick, on both sides.
(Well, it certainly felt icky on my side, and I can only guess how it felt on theirs. Actually, I do have a clue, because at various points in the early years of my business, the shoe was on the other foot and I was the person who was convinced to buy when I didn’t really have the money, and then I was the one who was panicked and stressed through the whole program over the possibility of it not working out for me.)
So how do you connect with prospects who can easily afford your services?
There’s a lot of depth to this, and I go into it much more with my 1-on-1 paying clients.
But here are a few things to consider.
First, you’ll want to really think through and define some demographics of the ideal prospect who could easily afford your services.
When I help clients to think through this, I usually start by asking about the professions of their past clients who paid their fees most easily or with the fewest objections.
For example, for folks with non-business offers, many will say things like, “Well, as I think about it, most were lawyers.”
Or, “Most were doctors or other health-care workers.”
Or, “Most had the kind of professional job that required a college or graduate degree.”
This makes total sense, as we know based on the salaries of those kinds of jobs that those people may be more likely to have disposable income.
For folks with business offers, we usually come up with things like, “Well, the people who said yes most easily were usually making at least $100K per year in their business.”
Or, if the offer is specifically for people launching a business, “I think my ideals were already in some kind of successful career, in real estate or sales or corporate. So they had savings to use to launch their business.”
Or, “The people who didn’t give me objections mostly had been in business 5 years or more and had at least an employee or two.”
Whatever you identify as the professional/financial situation of your ideal client is HUGELY helpful. Because if you do organic marketing (like I do) where you add people as friends/connections on social media, they will often say something on their profile about their profession, or if they have a business they may say things to indicate how successful (or not) it is.
Once you’ve started to identify those things that you can use for basic targeting, here’s something else to consider:
When you use your marketing to write about how your ideal client can solve the problems that your offer solves, tailor your writing to problems that someone in this particular professional/financial situation would have.
For example, I mainly work with clients who are earning pretty well from their businesses, or at least have been in business for a while, so I won’t write about problems like “struggling to get your first client” or “worried your business won’t make it and you’ll have to go back to a job.” My ideal folks are beyond those problems.
Instead, I’ll write about how they would like to be getting leads coming to them with less work, and enrolling with fewer objections. Or how they want to work with a new “level” of client and have their business function more easily.
Writing about those challenges is inherently more likely to attract people whose businesses are more advanced, and who therefore are more likely to have money to invest. (These two things don’t always go together, so it’s not a perfect correlation, but they often do.)
If you help professional women with anxiety or codependency, and your ideal client is a doctor or a lawyer, you’ll probably want to include problems like “can’t handle the stress of being available to clients at all hours” or “taking on your patients’ pain as your own” in your writing.
Again, that will help with attracting people who will be in the professional/financial situation that is most ideal to be able to afford you and to see the most value in having help to fast-track their transformation (because those careers are demanding and they have more money than time).
Here’s one more thing to consider:
Share your prices publicly, or at least an approximation/narrow range.
When you do that, in my experience, price objections pretty much cease. Only people who can afford it reach out.
Caveat: This will only work if your content proves that you know what you are talking about and that you understand your ideal client’s problem better than any other provider your readers have ever seen/heard before.
And I’ve written about that a lot in other posts and emails – about how you can make sure that you’re explaining things deeply and completely enough so that readers see that you really, truly know what is causing their problem and that you have a real method for solving it.
When you do that, ideal clients have to admit to themselves that you’re the one they need, that there’s no comparison between you and any other provider, and that they’ll pay whatever you ask because you’re in a league of your own.
Which is why they’re not scared of the price that you post publicly.
If your content DOESN’T show that you’re really this amazing expert, then yeah, the prices you post will seem out of context and might scare prospects away (whether they have the money or not!).
So it’s critical to have your content be on point.
(If you want to know more about how to do this and see a lot of real-world examples of me critiquing people’s content, check out this content training that I did in a while back)
So, to sum up: the type of prospect you’re aligning yourself with matters a lot when it comes to what value they will or won’t see in your offer, and how easily they’ll pay.
And once you realize (and explicitly define) who the true ideal is, you can use your messaging and targeting to call them forward.
And (most importantly) there’s nothing wrong with you/your mindset if you’re getting price resistance. You’re just not connected with the right people. 😉
If you want help with the stuff I talked about in this email (defining the client who will pay your fees easily, finding the right things to talk about in content to interest them, getting them into your organic audience, etc.) then you might be interested in my 30-day 1-on-1 program.
(More info on the program is available here)
It’s a good fit for coaches and other experts who are already earning 5k-10k+/mo from their business (OR have years of experience doing what they do in another context besides their own business – this can substitute for the income requirement) and would like to easily earn 20k-100k+/mo in part-time hours and with no sales calls (you don’t need ’em when your content does so much filtering! Fun 🙂 ).
If you’re interested in the program, the next step is to send me a DM on FB and we’ll have a very brief chat over Messenger to see if it’s a good fit. If it is, we can get you started in the program as soon as next week.