I Can’t Believe It’s $5000

Ever thought about increasing your rates but felt hesitant?

Here's three stories to help you change the way you think about pricing so you can confidently raise your rates.

I Can't Believe it's $5000

A couple of years ago, I had a coaching offer that was $5000. One day, I spoke to two different potential clients and got completely different reactions to that offer. The first person was blown away and said "I can't believe it's $5000. How can you be charging that much?"

The second person had a drastically different answer.

"I'm surprised it's only $5000". The low price has me questioning whether you're going to be able to help me achieve my goals. I've been speaking to others who are charging considerably more."

There's clients at every price point.

Tale of Two Tailors

Near our old house, there were two tailors who offered similar services. Even though their shops were only a few minutes apart from one another on foot, the experience at each place couldn't be more different.

Tailor #1: The shop environment was cold and things felt transactional. She could turn things around quickly because she wasn't busy. The quality of the work wasn't as good.

Tailor #2: The environment in the shop was warm, it was nicely decorated and full of plants. She was friendly and greeted everyone as they walked in. The quality of her work was fantastic. She charged 3x more for the same services than the other shop down the street. And the quickest you could ever get things back to you was several days out because of how busy she was.

Being cheaper doesn't mean having more clients.
People are happy to pay more for a better experience.
Charging more makes it easier for you to provide a better service.

23 Client Roster

I had a client who wanted to increase her fees.

But she was worried about appearing "greedy". She only worked with people 1:1 and did deep emotional work with many of her clients. She had a client roster of 23 people and met with most of them weekly.

She was being run off her feet.

She had clients at different price points, including people grandfathered into some of her oldest rates. So I asked her to make a list of all her clients and the rates they were paying. Once she did, she had the "aha" without me needing to nudge her.

The people paying the most were making the most progress.

While her clients paying the least were the ones coming back week after week complaining about the same things, not taking action, and making little progress.

When you charge higher rates, people's perceived value of what you're offering goes up.

That increases their emotional investment. Having an increased emotional investment increases how much time, energy, and intention they put into it. When that happens, they get better results.

So not only does the perceived value go up when you increase your rates, but the actual value also increases.

I ran a private workshop on Confidently Raising Your Rates for people in my Impact Accelerator program yesterday. It included an exercise to help them Own Their Full + Unique Value. When I asked the group "what would change for you if you charged more per client?", one person said that their perception of themselves would increase. Another responded that they'd feel more confident in being selective about who they chose to work with.

What would change for you and your clients if you raised your rates?

-Robb

Btw - Want to hang in person in Toronto? I'm competing against 9 other speakers at Speaker Slam on January 30th. The theme of the event is Reinvention and I'm pretty damn excited as the room will be full of entrepreneurs, coaches, and leaders doing meaningful work. You can grab your ticket here.

P.S. I've had a couple people ask me this week about when the next cohort of Content That Creates Clients is. If this is something you might be interested in, let me know. :)