What to charge for your coaching

What to charge for your coaching?

Speaking from personal experience, and in discussing this with colleagues this is a question that causes a lot of anxiety – especially for people starting out with their coaching business.

Here’s how I recall the argument going on inside my head when initially trying to decide what to charge for my services……

“If I charge too much then I’m sure people aren’t going to purchase my coaching. 

Yet on the other hand if I charge too little then I’m going to struggle to keep my business afloat”

The standard sales funnel

If you’ve been doing any business at all online you’ll be familiar with what a standard sales funnel looks like.

In the example below you’ll see that the strategy is to move a new customer who is initially a cold prospect to being a hot prospect.

As a cold prospect your new customer doesn’t know that much about your business or your products and services.

What has probably attracted them to your email list is some sort of free offer.

They are happy to take the free offer, but beyond this they won’t be inclined to immediately reach for their credit card and start buying from you.

The free offer is known in the business as a lead magnet.

Through ongoing contact with your business, and because of the value you provide along the way, the customer begins to learn more about you and what you have to offer, and they proceed to make their first purchase.

This first sale is often called a ‘trip wire’ an and typically would only cost the customer $7 – $20.

Then having received really good value from you in that first purchase the customer begins to like you and your business a whole lot more…to the stage where there real trust is developed.

Typcially as trust grows your customer is even more receptive to other product or service offerings that you put in front of them. 

At this stage online marketers will then be presenting their business’ flag ship product offering which could range in price from say $97 through to several thousands of dollars.

Will a $7 purchase mean real results for the customer?

Here’s a few questions for you.

How many free offers have you signed up for online?

And how many low ticket offers have you purchased of the $7 – $20 variety?

And finally, how many of these are still sitting on your hard drive….just sitting there, never, or barely used, and now probably forgotten.

If you’re anything like me you could have hundreds of them.

Let’s take that one step further.

What, out of all that material, has truly generated big life changing results for you personally, or for your business

Low ticket pricing and its effect on your business

There’s a few things to consider here.

First of all is the perception that new clients will have about you and your business.

If your initial sales pitches are from $7 and even up to $100 does this position your business as a premium service provider.

If these numbers represent your most common price points then you are also going to have to make quite a few sales to generate any sort of reasonable income that could support you full time.

And to get those sales you’re going to have to work really hard, and quite possibly spend some of the income you generate on expensive advertising to generate leads.

As one of my early mentors explained…it is just as difficult to make a $7 as it is to make a $1000 sale.

If you are selling your services at $1000 or more this creates quite a different perception in the market place about the quality of what you have to offer.

A different perspective about pricing your services

What about this?

Instead of a lengthy sales funnel where you lead your clients through an initial purchase of say $7, then an upsell to $10, then to $37, then up to $97 etc, which could take them 6 months to climb through…

Your first sale with a new client is $1,000 or $2000.

Imagine having 50 or 100 clients investing $1000 to join your group coaching or a masterclass program with you.

Would that get you excited?

Charging those kinds of prices and actually getting clients to sign up is entirely possible.

I’ve written a bit more on this topic when talking about my top tier coaching program.

Seriously, don’t you think your content is worth more than $7?