Most of us believe that the reason we’re not converting as many discovery calls as we wish we were is because our price is too high. So we lower our fees, thinking that if we just make coaching more affordable, more people will say yes. Then we lower them again when that doesn’t work, and again (and potentially even again).
The problem isn’t the price.
What We’ve Got Wrong About Value
We’ve come to believe that simply giving somebody an hour’s coaching is going to demonstrate value, when in actual fact it just gives them an experience of an hour’s coaching which may or may not include a breakthrough or a lightbulb moment. It certainly doesn’t demonstrate the outcome that the client might reasonably begin to believe they could achieve, even if we’ve talked about goals.
As a rule, most of us don’t give an indication of price, and so the potential client we’re talking to has no idea what we’re going to charge. Telling somebody that we’re going to charge £150 or £175 a session can feel like an ambush if they’re not expecting that or if that isn’t in their budget.
People won’t pay anything at all for something they don’t understand and don’t see the value in. Now, as we’ve been taught that we must deliver coaching to someone in order for them to ‘see the value’, this is counterintuitive. We believe that the hour we’ve given them has demonstrated the value. It hasn’t. It’s demonstrated that we can coach, but it hasn’t necessarily demonstrated why they should pay us to continue.
The Downward Spiral
When lowering our fees doesn’t bring more clients – and it usually doesn’t – we start to think that nobody wants to pay for coaching. From that, we extrapolate that the coaching profession is saturated, that the market for coaching is saturated, that nobody wants to buy coaching, that nobody’s interested. The thing is, that’s simply not true.
The market for coaching can’t be saturated until everybody who could benefit from coaching has had the opportunity to be coached, and we’ve barely scratched the surface of that particular issue. Until we as a profession get to professional standards of articulating the benefit of working with us, so that people understand what we do and why they should purchase our services, the market isn’t anywhere near saturated.
The problem isn’t market saturation, the problem is our utter inability as a profession to describe the benefit of coaching without resorting to trying to describe the coaching process. This is a problem because nobody buys processes.
What’s Actually Happening
If we apply the rules of professional level client acquisition skills, we will each have a different target audience or niche (they’re all the same thing). Therefore, the outcome that our potential client can reasonably expect from working with us will be different, or will be described in a different way, depending on who our target audience is.
Until we’ve all got really good at describing the benefit (the value) of working with us, then the market isn’t anywhere near saturated. When we can’t articulate that value clearly, when we can’t help potential clients understand what’s in it for them specifically, they will be reluctant to pay any amount.
Lowering our fees doesn’t solve the problem of unclear value. It just means we’re charging less for something people still don’t understand.
When Pricing Works
When we’ve marketed at a professional standard, by the time somebody lands in our diary, they already know
- who we are,
- what we do,
- that we do it for people like them
- what it costs because we are utterly transparent with our pricing.
It is best practice to have our pricing everywhere – on our LinkedIn profile, on our website, ad included in the communications confirming the appointment that somebody’s booked.
There may be occasions where somebody’s missed the pricing despite the fact we’ve been transparent with it, and they might book a call, get the confirmation document that contains pricing information in it, and then cancel the appointment. In the beginning, that can feel absolutely devastating, but as time goes on, it’s not devastating at all. It’s actually saving us time, because we can’t build a business coaching people who can’t afford to pay us. We don’t want to spend our time in sales conversations with people who are going to say no thank you anyway because they can’t afford us.
Just to confirm, that doesn’t mean I don’t believe the person who can’t afford a professional rate doesn’t deserve coaching, they absolutely do deserve coaching. However, maybe they need to have a group programme rather than one-to-one coaching, or maybe they could be a pro bono client in the future. Let me reiterate, we can’t build a business coaching people who can’t afford to pay us. The pro bono work and the group programmes come after we’ve covered our financial basis.
We’re Creating A Trust Problem
We are the only profession who is not transparent with our fees. Accountants display their fees, therapists display their fees, architects, solicitors, every other professional service provider – they’re all transparent about what they charge.
We really needs to change our approach, because not displaying our pricing creates a level of mistrust immediately. Nobody likes walking into an ambush, and walking into a situation where you have no idea what the price is going to be, can feel exactly like an ambush.
When we give someone an hour’s coaching and then name a price they weren’t expecting, we’ve created a deeply uncomfortable situation. They feel ambushed and we feel rejected. Neither of us feels good about the interaction, and the relationship – if there ever was going to be one – can be damaged before it even begins.
What Needs to Change
Lowering our fees won’t bring more clients because the fee isn’t the problem. The problem is that we haven’t done the work to help potential clients understand the value of what we do before they get on a call with us. We haven’t been clear about who we work with, what they’re struggling with and what outcome they could achieve from working with us. We haven’t been transparent about pricing so they can make an informed decision about whether to book time with us in the first place.
When we do that work properly – when our marketing clearly articulates who we help and what benefit they can expect, when we’re completely transparent about our fees, when potential clients come to a conversation already understanding what we do and what it costs – then the price conversation becomes straightforward. It’s not a surprise ad it’s not an ambush, it’s a confirmation of what they already knew.
The coaches who charge professional fees successfully aren’t the ones who’ve found clients willing to pay more. They’re the ones who’ve done the marketing work to make the value clear before the conversation even happens. To be clear, I’m talking about our own clients, one who pay us directly, not associate work, or employed work.
If we’re lowering our fees because we think that’s what’s stopping people from saying yes, we’re solving the wrong problem. The real problem is that we haven’t made the value clear enough, we haven’t been transparent enough about pricing, and we’re asking a discovery call to do work that should have been done by our marketing.
Lowering our fees just means we’re charging less for something people still don’t understand and that’s not a business strategy. That’s a race to the bottom that ends with us believing nobody wants to pay for coaching and giving up entirely.
The solution isn’t cheaper coaching. The solution is clearer marketing, transparent pricing, and the confidence to charge what we’re worth once we’ve done the work to make our value unmistakable.
An Opportunity
If you’d like the change for a robust conversation about this – or to just flat-out tell me why I’m wrong – why not join my next free challenge, Nail Your Niche? We run it several times a year and there’s even an option to upgrade to a VIP version, which gives you 3 x 60-minute group mentoring sessions with me for just £99 (inc VAT) – that provides us with time for a lot of robust conversations!
Are you ready to learn why having a focus for your coaching business will make all the difference to your pricing? Register for the next challenge by clicking here.