For years I was taught that it was a cardinal sin of business to ever tell your price to someone before you got them on a sales call.
Now, I know differently. 😉
The argument usually given for holding back is that a price will always sound too high to someone until you give them “context” for it.
Which means talking to them, finding out how much their problem is costing them, and then explaining how much your services could help them save/earn, and finally naming your price after all that, so they see how small it seems compared to the return they’ll get.
In theory, this makes sense. And, I do agree that before your prospects will pull out that credit card and invest, they’ll want to see how your price corresponds to the value and results they’ll get. (Unless you’re a famous guru whose reputation carries you.)
HOWEVER… this still isn’t an argument for holding back your price prior to a sales call.
(It wasn’t until recently that I realized that one didn’t necessarily follow from the other 😂 )
Because you can articulate that value in many other ways besides on a sales call.
Like in your marketing. 😉
I’ve developed an approach that fully builds the value on the “front end” – which means in your content and the other stuff people see from you before they’d ever reach out for a sales call.
Building value, in my approach, is a combination of two things:
1) Sharing deep insights on how to solve problems so that people can see that you know what you’re talking about and are not just blowing smoke. This does part of the job of proving value because they can see that you’ll have real answers for their challenges when they invest with you. (For examples of this, read just about any post on this website or on my Facebook timeline. Most people never share the depth of knowledge and insight with their audiences that I and other “Strong Method” followers do, so it makes sense that they feel they haven’t built enough value yet to be able to just drop the price on people.) And…
2) Framing your actual OFFER in a way that people can see exactly what they’re going to get, and exactly what the results are likely to be. (This sets up the whole price vs. value comparison mentioned above.) For an example of how I do this, see here.)
When you do these two things consistently and repeatedly, you have already built the value. So there’s no danger that people will think your price sounds too high if you tell it to them before a sales call.
(Well, SOME people may think your price sounds too high no matter what. But would those people be convinced of the value by a sales call when they weren’t convinced by your amazing explanations in your content? I doubt it…)
The thing is, if it were really true that your price will always sound too high if you quote it to someone before a sales call, then no one would ever invest if you did that. Right?
So how come a lot of us are putting our prices out there before a sales call and people still invest with us? 😉
(In fact… many of us have GROWN our revenue significantly as compared to earlier times when we were cagier about our price)
I’ll tell you exactly what happened when I started being more explicit about what my price is:
I got fewer inquiries in the DMs about working with me (about half the number I got before)… but the same number of clients and the same amount of revenue coming in.
(Actually, as of this quarter, revenue is UP 20%)
A lot of my inquiries used to begin with “what’s the price.” So, probably those people just aren’t sending me messages at all – because I’ve been more explicit about it and they don’t need to ask. (This is GOOD because it saves me time chatting with them if they already know the info)
And all of this tells me that putting the price out there hasn’t hurt me at all.
Also: I don’t do sales calls AT ALL anymore.
I never started out explicitly intending to eliminate sales calls. It almost happened by accident when I started getting people messaging me saying “Do I have to get on a call with you or can I just pay now?”
And I realized that in asking that question, they were signaling to me that my content had done more than enough to build the value of my offer in their minds.
(So, that might be a barometer that you can use for whether your content is pre-selling people enough on your value: Are people starting to whine good-naturedly about your making them get on a sales call because they don’t feel like they need one to know your offer is right for them? 😉 )
All I do now when I chat privately with people is qualify them.
(That is, make sure that they are a good candidate to get the results that I know are possible from my methods.)
I do very little (or zero) explaining of what I do, how I do it, or the value of it. Just here and there if someone has a specific question that they didn’t happen to see answered based on bingeing my content.
And people DO enroll based on this way of doing it! 4-8 high ticket enrollments per month consistently – way more than I ever got when I held back the price.
In fact, Q1 of last year was when I made the most specific announcement I’d ever made about my prices, and that was also the first quarter ever where I made over $100K in 90 days.
Now, before I wrap up here, let’s address one more commonly-given argument for holding back a price:
“We have multiple offers and they are each a different price so we need to find out what the person’s needs are before we could quote them one”
To that, I say: Why not just spell out EACH of your offers, and their corresponding pricing, as clearly as I do in the above example?
Explain what type of person each offer is for, what results it is likely to get for that type of person, and what kinds of issues it addresses to achieve the results.
If you put all of that info out there, people can start to self-qualify for the right offer according to their needs.
They can (and should) still reach out to you privately to confirm, of course – before you’ll officially take them on as a client and send them an invoice.
So there is no danger in letting them do MOST of the self-qualifying themselves (in fact that’ll save you loads of time), as long as you’re not putting public “buy” buttons out there too – they still have to do a final confirmation with you before you’ll let them be enrolled.
Now, to those who say “All of our offers are completely custom so there’s no way we can quote any price before having a lengthy discussion with each prospect” – I’ll just say: Your offers are probably not as custom as you think. Your process, in fact, is probably 80% (or more) the same from client to client.
But perhaps you haven’t analyzed it to see which is the 80% that you can standardize (as well as who your truly IDEAL client is, of all those you currently work with – you may do wildly different things for a handful of clients but those are probably not ideal clients and outside your norm).
When you do that analysis, you’ll be well on your way to having 1, 2, or 3 standard offers and then you can follow the advice above. 🙂
Oh, and one more thing: if you raise prices regularly and are worried about putting an exact number out there only to have it quickly become outdated, there are plenty of ways to deal with that too while still being as specific as you can.
One example of what I used to do was to say, “The program price is above 5K but below 10K. Right now it’s on the lower end of that range, although I’ll be raising it several times in the near future.”
The truth is, I have no judgment for anyone’s opinion on this “putting the price out there” question, because I have changed my own mind on it so many times. So, wherever you are in your thinking – I get it, and probably would have passionately defended it myself at one point in time. 😉
I just want everyone to know how much better the results have been since I finally settled on this way. There’s really no way that being up-front about your price will hurt you if your content is amazing and fully sells people on your value.
In fact, it will not only NOT hurt you, but it’ll likely help – you’ll likely make more sales in less time, just as I have. And who doesn’t want to do THAT?
And, if you need help getting your content to be so amazing that it pre-sells people on the value so they’re not scared of your price… DM me on Facebook. It’s exactly what I do with folks in my 30 day 1-on-1 program.