Coaches - When to Tell Someone Your Prices

We've all experienced this as coaches, as consultants, as freelancers. A prospective client will drop into messenger chat or send us an email and before we've even had a chance to understand anything about them, the very first question which they ask is how much does it cost to work with you? In this short video I'll be explaining when is the right time to give somebody your prices and why. So there's something going on right now which I call the dirge of Facebook which is where all of these online marketers and online coaches are trying to rush the sale. They're trying to take people's money as quickly as possible. They're doing a lot of the right things in terms of how they're marketing themselves on Facebook, on Instagram, on LinkedIn or wherever it might be. However, as a result of trying to rush to the sale, they're inadvertently leaving money on the table and so losing revenue, not even realising that what they're doing is harming their business. What I'm referring to is that when you do a piece of marketing as a coach, whether it be on Instagram or Facebook, LinkedIn, it doesn't matter, at some point people are going to lean in because they like what you say, they like you and they want to know a little bit more. However, the client doesn't always know what is the right question or the right sequence of events that they need to go through in order to work with you. What they do is they ask silly questions which are out of sequence. The most obvious one, and I get this all of the time, is people will jump into my messenger and the first thing they ask is, I really want to work with you, I really like what you're saying, how much does it cost to work with you? And the worst thing that you can possibly do is give them your feet out right there and then and I'm about to explain why. We had a client who was a coach and the one challenge that they felt they had within their business was that they needed more clients and so they were constantly on this marketing sort of flywheel of always promoting their business and never really feeling like they were making much progress. At the time we were trying to coach them around their prices and to get more confidence around increasing their prices but I couldn't work out why they were dropping the ball and when they were seemingly very busy they weren't actually closing that many new clients. When I started to look at the sequence that they were taking prospective clients through, messenger kept on coming up time and time again. So many of their prospective clients were jumping into messenger chat and when I looked at some of the messages that they were receiving, the most common question which they got asked pretty much straight out the back was your program looks great how much is it? The problem was that this particular coach was just giving them their price and their rationale behind giving prices out straight away in messenger chat was to filter people out, filter prospective clients out, thinking that if people were buying just on price the people who didn't have the money they didn't really want to work with. My gut instinct was though that some of these prospective clients had actually been in their ecosystem for quite a number of months if not years so they were super warm and I didn't understand why this coach was turning them away straight away based on price. So I challenged them on that. They said they didn't want to be wasting all of this time doing consultations unnecessarily when people were just going to say no that's too expensive. Handling that as an objection during the sales consultation is a very different matter to filtering people out during messenger and I said hey let's just try out an experiment to see where we end up with this. So for one month we did it their way. They gave people a price, they ran their messenger chats exactly how they wanted to. We started tweaking how they were replying and responding to some of those messages and starting to work out how we could qualify some of their prospective clients better. We then did it my way for a whole month and what we did during that time was we never gave out the price in messenger. Instead the single goal when somebody contacted my client, this coach, through messenger was to get them booked onto a consultation call. Just a short 20 to 30 minute qualification call just to make sure it was a good fit. When we went back and had a look at the statistics from month one versus month two we realised that their conversion rate increased by 40% because what was happening was when they moved a prospective client onto a consultation call they were able to take them through a process, qualify them, ask questions and make sure it was a good fit but most importantly they were able to see whether the coach and the client gelled together and also the coach was able to educate that client about what was going to happen on the programme, what outcomes they could expect, what value they were going to get through going through a coaching process. That's just something which you can't do in messenger unfortunately because you just don't have the time. You've got a limited number of characters you know when you're sending messages out and it doesn't matter what platform you're using. You just don't have the opportunity to be able to educate somebody in the same way that you can do when you're conversing to them face to face. Therefore giving your prices out too early in the sequence of events is a really dangerous game to be playing. It doesn't filter people out accurately because they're anchored to the wrong thing. They're just anchored to price and that's it. Now that's absolutely fine if you're selling a commoditised item like a tin of baked beans or a hammer or a box of screws or something like that but when you're selling a service no matter how well it's productised you do need to be able to explain the value of that programme, that product to a prospective client in order for them to start to anchor to the right thing. So there's actually three things that we'll be looking to anchor a prospective client to when you go through the consultation process. Now I'm not going to go through the entire consultation process. I'll save that for another video. However it's super important that you understand the three basic things that you need to anchor a client to. Now price is one of them but you've got to do it in the right way. So in terms of those three anchors, the first thing that we want to anchor a prospective client to is going to be the outcome or result which your coaching programme is going to deliver when that client goes through that sequence of events, that coaching process. The second thing which you're going to anchor a client to is then the length of time that it takes in order to deliver that result or outcome. Quite often in this fast moving world that we live in, online, people want results and they want them now. However as we know as coaches that's not always possible. It's just simply not the case. Quite often you have to take clients through a series of coaching sessions in order to achieve a lasting positive result or outcome from the coaching process. The final thing once they understand what their commitments are going to be to the coaching process and what you're going to be working with them on through that coaching process and over what period of time, the expected results and outcomes, then finally you can have a conversation with them about price. But at that point it's about value. It's not actually about how much it costs and whether they can afford it. It's about value. Do they see the value in going through that coaching process and getting that desired outcome or result? Hopefully you're now starting to understand with those three anchors in place why it's difficult to get to that outcome through messenger chat. Now I know exactly what you're all thinking. How do I handle that messenger conversation? Because if somebody asks me for my price and I don't give it to them, is that going to look like I'm avoiding it or I've got something to hide? Well, the simple answer is maybe. But is that your problem or is that their problem? Because if they're just bashing you for a price and they want it now, that to me strikes maybe as being a little bit of a red flag. Do we really want to be working with impatient clients who want everything right now? Perhaps not. We want to slow the process down enough so that we can start to understand our prospective client better, start to qualify them and understand whether they are actually a good fit for our coaching program or not. That's much more important. So in terms of the messenger conversation, just say something initially at the start, which is along the lines of, well, hey, yes, absolutely. I'm happy to give you a price for the coaching program. But is it OK if I ask you a few questions first? So we do a little bit of permission-based coaching with them through messenger chat just to start to understand a little bit more about the client, maybe the challenges which are experiencing right now. You then might want to start to ask them qualification questions. What's the problem? What is it that you need help with? Why do you want coaching with me? Why did you choose me as a prospective coach? How long have you struggled with these challenges or problems for that you need help with? How quickly do you want to get it fixed? Do you have a budget in mind for coaching? So all of these qualification questions are just starting to build up a rapport with your prospective client and build a deeper understanding about what their needs are. Because there is also a slim chance that actually you go through that process, ask them questions and you go, do you know what? My coaching program isn't really a good fit for you, but I can make recommendations to this coach or this coach. This person might deliver better results for you or deliver a better outcome or maybe they specialize in your area. I don't actually specialize in this field. But having that messenger conversation first and qualifying them first gives you the opportunity to give them the best possible piece of advice. Now price is actually irrelevant at this point. So price doesn't come into this until we've ascertained whether it is a good fit or not. So once you've gone through and qualified them, you'd say, well, hey, listen, I can give you the price, but I can actually go one better than that. Why don't we just hop onto a call? We'll get to know one another. I can walk you through all of the ins and outs of our coaching program so you can make an educated decision about whether my program is a good fit for you, whether you feel it's good value or not. If you decide that actually it is too expensive when I give you the price, listen, I'll actually help you find a coach that fits more within your budget if that's appropriate for us to talk about that. So again, like it's just a qualification process. And what I've noticed a lot of coaches tend to get sort of duped into is they'll give them the price. Then if they give them the price and it's too expensive, they then feel like they've got to justify their existence for being. So they'll actually start coaching and offering a ton of advice through Messenger and go and watch this and here's some tips on that. And that's not a bad thing to do, by the way. But if we overdo that, what we're doing is we're eroding the value which we build up in our actual coaching program if we start giving away all this advice for free. And then when somebody says they're kind of like going, well, this is expensive anyway, and this person has given me loads of stuff for free. Then again, you're anchoring them to the wrong things. So you've got to get the balance right in the sequence of events. And by the way, when I say sequence, there's another video you might want to check out and I'll drop a link to it in the notes below called the five stages of market sophistication. You should be able to find it in my channel where we talk about the five stages that buyers go through before they finally make their buying decision. Well worth watching that video. So that's what I mean by the sequence. But we want to make sure that we've kind of taken prospective clients through the sequence before we get to that point of talking about price. The other question I get asked, which is very closely linked to this, is should I have my prices on my website? This is in my humble opinion. The honest answer is absolutely not. For exactly the same reason as we described about giving out your prices in Messenger, the same applies for your website. So you're going to get a lot of time wasters, tie kickers and people like that browsing around to see who's the cheapest, who's the most expensive and things like that. But again, they're potentially lacking the education. So if they see your prices and make a decision solely based on the price, it might not be serving them to the best of your abilities. They may desperately need your help. You may be able to deliver the best possible result or outcome for them and to help them through whatever challenge it is. And yet you're allowing them just to come in and make a decision without knowing anything about you, without knowing how your program works or what the end results are based solely on price. So you're allowing them to walk away when they may have this bleeding neck going on, this massive challenge or problem that you can definitely help them with. Nope, you're just going to let them choose to make up their own mind based on price. As we know, they're not an expert like you are. They need your help more than you need their money. So it's super important that you are concierging people in properly and making sure that you're asking the right sorts of questions rather than letting them just make up their own mind. You're the expert. So use that expertise to help people. Many coaches that I work with go through several evolutions of increasing their prices from hourly rate up to, you know, fully packaged up high ticket coaching programs. Normally what tends to happen is that they don't just jump from an hourly rate to a high ticket price. There's this whole series of events which happens where gradually as their confidence grows, they will look to increase their prices. So what this means are your coaching fees, it's unlikely that they're set at a fixed amount. You should be looking to increase your prices at least half a dozen or a dozen times over the next 12 months. The other thing as well is when you're on a consultation call with a prospective client, and there's nothing ethical or immoral about this, but if you're feeling confident, you can test different price points out to different prospective customers. Now, if your prices are on your website and the prospective client has already seen that, they've been exposed to that price point, then it's going to look probably more conspicuous if all of a sudden you've doubled your prices on the consultation call to what they've seen on the website. So having your prices on the website restricts you and probably what would happen is it makes you feel nice and safe and secure knowing that your prices are on your website and you can quote it and they're there in black and white. But if you just learn to handle objections properly and qualify your prospective clients properly, you can have a bit of fun experimenting with your prices. And the reality is that whatever price you agree with a prospective coaching client during a consultation, that's a fair exchange. If they can see the value for a specific price which you've quoted to them on a consultation call, then surely that's absolutely fine. That is ethical. That's the right way to do it. I should probably say at this point as well that yes, the goal with any business is to help people, obviously, but also it's about making sure that your practice is thriving, it's prosperous, that it's profitable and making you money. And if you're not charging enough, you need to be able to give yourself the operating bandwidth to be able to experiment with pricing and to be able to gradually increment your price. And the only way to do that, to get that data and that feedback, is to do it live on consultation calls when you've had a chance to be able to explain the value which you deliver to prospective clients, to be able to handle any concerns or objections which they raised during that consultation call and to be able to do it there and then in the moment. That's just something which you can't do. Like so many times, SMSs or messenger chats, WhatsApps, LinkedIn messages, emails get hugely misconstrued and you can't give all of the data there, the information there, which your prospective client needs to see in order to make an educated buying decision. I do hope you found this video helpful around the whys and wherefores of when you should give out your coaching fees and definitely please do not give out your fees through messenger, through email or WhatsApp or whatever it might be. Do focus on getting your prospective coaching clients booked onto consultation so that you can have that conversation with them. If you found this video helpful, don't forget to hit the like button and also drop me a comment with your questions in below this video. I always reply to any questions which can crop up in those comments. Don't forget to tap the like button, it just helps other people to find my channel, find my content. And also if you enjoyed this video and want to see more of them, do hit the red subscribe button below this video and I will reply to your comments. So if you've got any questions about the whys and wherefores of messenger and when to give out your prices, please do drop them in the comments below this video.