Do Not Cut Your Prices or Commissions

As some of you know, I’m a part of the Knowledge Business Blueprint program from Dean Graziosi and Tony Robbins. It is an absolutely amazing program. Yet, in the Knowledge Business Blueprint Facebook group, I consistently read something that alarmed me: people were discussing if they should offer their own masterminds either at a very low price or free to get butts in seats and hopefully some referrals. This is a terrible idea! No matter what it is, whether you are thinking of cutting commissions, if you’re doing something new, unless you’re doing a very short test you can get some bad results. When you bring people in for a low to free price, you’re going to get everyone coming in for all the wrong reasons. They’re going to come in because it’s cheap, and a large majority of people will not do the work.

The people who end up signing up for courses with severely discounted prices or free admission will do it primarily because they want to do something with little investment. Whether they learn something or not is not important to them because they haven’t invested enough to make it significant for them. Whereas if you charge a higher price (charge what you’re worth), the client is forced to take the program seriously. They want to get a strong return on investment (ROI) so they will attend, participate, and fully involve themselves in the program. The people who want to invest in themselves and get a strong ROI? These are your people.

I always tell people, if they want to learn they need to write down whatever it is they are trying to learn. Just the act of writing something down will increase your ability to remember stuff three months from then by 50%. To really ensure that they are retaining what you are trying to teach, get your audience to move around while you are teaching them! Get them to stand up, do some energy exercises. Brendon Burchard did that when I took the High Performance Certification training a couple of weeks ago in San Diego. I remember so much from those days because he made us move around.

One of the biggest blunders we make when creating prices for our services is that we apologize for what we are worth. Even if someone says, “Well, so and so’s going to do it for x percent,” or at such and such of a price, unapologetically stick to your guns. You and your services have value and you should advocate that! Will there be people who think your course and/or services aren’t worth the price you are asking for? Yes! But as I mentioned earlier, these aren’t your people. This is the type of client who will suck all your energy and they’re not going to give you what you want. What you want is a client that values you for what you have, for the knowledge that you’ve got, and for what you bring to the table. Those are the people who will pay the price that you charge.

Obviously you want to look at the market and price yourself accordingly, but what I normally ask people when I coach them on pricing, is what they want to charge, and then I generally tell them to double that figure. Especially amongst us ladies, we often undervalue ourselves. Stand up for what you’re worth. Charge those big bucks if what you’re offering is worth it.

Do not charge based on how many hours or how much work you put into your program. If you are charging clients $1000 for your program, but based on that program they’re going to make $10,000, that’s what you sell. You sell the outcome price. When belonged to Frank Kern’s private client group, I paid $40,000 for just the mastermind fee, and probably about another 15 to $20,000 to get there three times a year. But that was okay, because six weeks after I went to his program, I made $300,000. I wasn’t going to pay $40,000 or $60,000 over the course of the year, unless I knew I was going to make really good cash, and you shouldn’t either. You shouldn’t pay for anything that you don’t think you’re going to get that kind of an ROI on.

Do not apologize for your price. Do not apologize for what you’re worth. Calculate whether if someone does exactly what you say, will they get 10 times what you’re actually charging? So, if you charge a thousand, they should be able to get an ROI of $10,000, based on doing exactly what you say. The thing you have to promise is the outcome that people are going to expect. Hopefully you found this encouraging if you are in a pricing paradox right now. You will find the people who will take you up on that offer. Just make sure you are pricing yourself in the category you want to succeed in.