#112 - 3 ways to raise your prices (& how to when it’s the right time…)

If you are not increasing your price over time, it's going to feel less and less fair on your end and you're going to want to deliver it less and less.

This is the Doing It Online podcast with your host, serial entrepreneur 6 and 7 figure funnel strategist and super nerd Kate McKibben, where every week we're here talking nerdy and sharing the things that actually work to help you do what you do online. But better, easier, and with a ton more profit, too. Are you ready? Let's do it.

Hello. Hello, everybody, and welcome to the Doing It Online podcast. I am your host, Kate from HelloFunnels Co and welcome to episode number 112. And today we're going to talk about something that a lot of people are aren't really talking about right now because I suppose it probably feels slightly counterintuitive, but still very important. Still very, very much something that I want you to be thinking about and that can make a big impact on your business. Yes. Even now, even with how crazy the world is going today. I want to talk about three ways to tell that it is time to raise your prices. And I'm talking about this. Yes, mostly from the point of view of people who have online courses, online programs, coaching, mentoring, but also as a service provider. These are universal truths that go across. No matter how it is that you are showing up, how it is that you are helping people, how it is that you are packaging up your expertise and your time, let's talk about it. Let's dive on in. First of all, obviously, let's address the elephant in the room, that right now we are in the midst of what I would call a freeze traditionally. And I, I think if you've been in business for since before COVID you probably remember a feeling similar to this one that happened right at the start of when countries started to lock down in Covid and things started to feel a little uncertain. They started to feel a little more uncertain than normal. And what traditionally happens when things feel uncertain is, well, it's one of three things. One is we kind of go into either, like the fight mode. Some people, all right, I'm going to roll up my sleeves. I'm going to figure this out. I'm going to go hardcore and all in, and I'm going to make this happen no matter what. Then there's flight mode. There's obviously people who are like, all right, I'm cutting my expenses. I'm firing everybody. I'm shutting everything down. I'm going into my little hole. I'M going to hide and ride it out. Neither of these are wrong. Like, as kind of everyone naturally kind of has one or the other and then what. But what most people do is actually freeze. This is what happens when you're like, interest rates are rising, cost of living is rising, there's a war going on, there's a lot of things happening, and people are feeling very uncertain and they just go, I'm just not going to do anything. I'm just going to freeze. And they're not even doing consciously, but just like, yep, nope, just going to wait and see what happens. Need to know what happens. Need to feel a bit more certainty. Right. And the thing is that humans are amazing and we're very adaptable. And the same thing happened in Covid. The same thing happened the global financial crisis, which is actually happened like six months after I launched my first business. That quite quickly, even though the situation isn't getting any better, people get used to it and they unfreeze. They realize life has to go on. They realize that they, as long as they do, they are still employed, that they can still do the things that they want to do. And if they're not, then they find, they get resourceful, they find other things around it, Things move forward. Yes, there can still be craziness going on. Yes, the. The world may still seem like a scary place, but people will unfreeze. Just I wanted to put in this little kind of like psa, I guess, for anyone right now who's going, oh, my gosh, this last month or so has, like, my launches were terrible or I've had like the lowest income I've had in a long time. We are in the freeze right now. Okay. And just know that that's happening to a lot of people, not everybody. Some people are crushing it, but it is a very common thing. It is happening to a lot of businesses. It doesn't mean that you're no good. It does mean possibly time to get a little creative, to start experimenting, mixing things up a bit. But anyway, I just wanted to. I said quick little PSA before we talk about, like, what I said probably feels counterintuitive, but it's actually really important. Let's talk about rising prices, why it's freaking important and how to know if you're ready to do it and how to do it. Let's just do all of the things. First up, why is it. Why should we even think about rising. Raising, sorry, your prices of your programs and your offerings. And there's actually lots of reasons. It's not a. You set a price once and it's going to be that price forever. If you think about it, everything like we've had obviously crazy inflation this last 12 months more than we have in a long time. But every year the price of things goes up. The price of your software that you use will be going up. The pricing of your whatever, if you're using paid traffic, that price goes up. The price of your staff goes up. Just the general price of your cost of business as well as your cost of living is rising year after year. If the cost of bread can improve, increase every single year, then the price that you charge for your outcome, for your services, that should be increasing as well. If you it's not, okay, I set it in stone once and it's going to stay that way forever. Kind of like rule of thumb is every one to two years you'd be looking to make a price increase, depending on how significant a price increase you wanted to do and obviously your market and your initial price point as well. The other thing to factor into it is that over time as you've been showing up, as you've been delivering, as you've been helping more clients are hopefully investing in yourself, learning more, improving your own skills in that time, then your expertise and what it is you're actually delivering has also improved. Therefore you should be charging more for it. And think about if you are a service provider. And we've, we've seen this a lot with the people coming through our Funnel Pro certification that quite often people sort of set their prices really early on and then they, maybe they increase them by like $5 an hour here or something like very small just every now and then. But they're quite, there's a bit of fear around the off. I put my prices up, no one's going to buy. I don't want to rock the boat. But over that time they are becoming more and more and more experienced and what they're actually delivering for that money is becoming more and more valuable. But because of inflation, because of everything else, they're actually really getting less for it every single year. It is super important. It's why it's one of the things we really focus on inside Funnel Pro. Once people have gone through the sort of the technical side of it and they have upgrade their skills, they have up leveled their knowledge around strategy and their confidence and they're feeling like really good with that, the very first thing we get them to do is like, right, let's look at how you now structure your premium pricing because you are now a premium service provider, so you should be pricing accordingly. The third reason that you need to be raising your prices is so as well as your own internal knowledge and know how that and skills that you bring to the table, hopefully. And if not, you might want to go and fix this, but hopefully you've also been improving on your program and your delivery over that time as well. I know most people do because we're constant fiddlers and we're perfectionist and we go, oh, here's a little extra bonus I thought would be great, or oh, here's an extra training that I think would be helpful. Or maybe you've gone through and simplified things down. Maybe you've brought on some extra coaches to help create a better experience and maybe you've added in extra calls or whatever it is. And I'm not saying that you have to be adding extra for it to be more valuable. Sometimes the opposite is true. But more than likely, you've been creating things this whole time because that's what you do. That's what we all do. We're creators, we love. We're always coming up with the new ideas and new things that we want to give to the people that we work with and to help them in more and more ways. Now, all of that stuff is in the program, so the price should reflect it. Okay. Hopefully you're kind of feeling convinced around the, you know. Okay, well, yeah, it should. And remember, and you've probably heard me say this before, but I really do believe that for there to be flow in sales, for there to be sales to feel easy and effortless, for them to. For you to feel like it's easy to convert. It's, you know, that it's not a push, that it's not something you resent. Then it needs to be a fair energy exchange. And because of all these reasons that I've mentioned, if you are not increasing your price over time, that's going to feel less and less fair on your end and you're going to want to deliver it less and less. And that's when people start to try and burn down things that are their bread and butter or that have worked really well for them because all of a sudden they're like, but I don't want to have to go on that call. I don't want to have to do that anymore. I don't have to serve these people. It's almost like it's not worth my time. Your mental hourly rate has increased over time as you've upped your skills. As you've upped your value and you're still serving and you're still selling at this lower level rate, you have some decisions to make. You can, obviously there's different ways of doing it. You can look to restructure your offer to make sure that it does feel more in line with its current price. If you don't believe that your market can tolerate a price increase and I'll give you a quick little trick you can use to try and test that in a second. Or you can put on the big girl big boy pants and increase your price. And you know it's going to feel scary the first time you do it. It absolutely is. But it's a, it's part of business. It's a thing that we have to do. Let me just give you my quick little guide for how to know if your market can and not just can, but is like happy to take on a higher price point because sometimes the again it becomes this like internal voice and this internal game that we have around pricing and around our own self worth and our own value and just imposter syndrome and all of those things. And the reason that we've priced something where we've priced it is actually because of a story in our head and not based on any facts or any data. But let me just give you this, the easiest way to check. Go and have a look at the last. And it depends on your velocity of sales. So we're going to have a look at the last lever 3 months, 6 months or 12 months of sales preferably particularly as I said, when markets are a bit up and down like they are right now. You want to look at the more recent ones particular. But again it depends. You want to have a good number, so not like three. You probably want to have at least 20 to 30 sales to be able to look at the average. And look at that and go, okay, well what percentage of that was pay in full and what percentage was a split payment? And then if you have more pay in fulls than you have split payments, then usually that means there is more space in your market for you to increase your price. That's just my quick little lick your finger, stick it in the air, test the temperature of your current pricing. Okay, so now hopefully now you know why it's important why and why you don't just set a price once and leave it forever and how actually it's probably costing you money to do that. You've probably got a bit of a gauge on whether or not you can increase your Price. How do you do that? How do you increase your price? Do you just whack a sticker on and change? Log into your ThriveCart and change the numbers and you're done. Well, you can if you want, but there's a few other ways to do it. And again, feel into what feels best for you. Now, these are all strategies that we dive into, really, step by step, break them down, videos, templates, all of that inside Ecourse empire. But I'm just going to give you like the high level here. Right? First of all is the test before you invest model. And this is one that I'm quite partial to, particularly, as I said, when markets are a little bit like they are. Now, I made a hand gesture that you wouldn't be able to see it because it's a podcast. How do you test it? Well, usually the best way to test a new price. And again, before anyone goes, oh, that feels inauthentic or incongruent or anything like that, please remember one, never do anything that feels inauthentic. But that's not what we're about. Your marketing should feel great. The way you sell should feel great. Two, it might feel that way just because of a story you're telling yourself and not actually because it is. And because three, all big businesses do this, okay? So this is what all businesses do. There's nothing illegal or dodgy about it. Don't have a little panic attack. Please just hear me out. Like I said, test before you invest. Price testing is something that all companies do, okay? McDonald's does it like they all do it. They'll do it in different areas, they'll do it in different regions. They might take a few like McDonald's maker. Okay, we're going to see if we put the price of Big Mac up by 20 cents in these three restaurants and not in these ones. What happens to ourselves with Big Macs? They do it. They test it. They're constantly testing, constantly optimizing. How can you test it? Well, the easiest way to test it is inside your evergreen funnel, if you have one set up. Because that is a price that people only see when they're new into your world. They won't have seen any other pricing. It's not publicly available. So if you test it and you go, oh, that price wasn't great, didn't really convert, you can take it down. You can also make sure that the messaging around it is that this price, this offer, this little combo is its own special unique thing. It's not the normal thing we sell it's just a thing that's sold here, so it's okay for it to be different. That's like my preferred way of doing it. And you want to get a decent number of people through seeing that price. If you already have an existing evergreen funnel, then you've already kind of got your baseline, you know what that converts at. If it's a webinar, rerecord the ending. If it's an application, then you just update the sales page or if you're having conversations in chat or whatever it is, however you're closing your people, then you can just change that, run it for a couple of weeks, see how it's converting and then if it's not converting, well, change it back. And if for those of you who are like, well, a couple people bought it at the higher price, what do I do for them? You've got options. You can jump in and go, hey, just want to let you know we've actually, we're cutting our price and because you just bought, we're going to refund you the difference. You can say you can make sure that they've got some extra things in there. So it's a bit of a juicier offer and bonus anyway, so they're not actually missing out, they've just bought a higher level of offer. There's different things like again, we're not about trying to trick anyone or do anything dodgy. We're about how to do this with integrity. But we're going to do something that every single business does. We're just going to do it our way. That's number one, test it. Number two, and this I would probably only really do if you got a real good feel that this is going to be the price. Like if you don't feel like you need to test it, you're like, oh my gosh, 80% of people are paying in full. I can definitely increase my price. You can run a last chance launch. Having a price increase is actually an amazing reason to have like a mini launch, a mini promotion. As you know, like inside we always coach our people to be running some sort of evergreen, like we call it evergreen launching. It's not the, all the, the all the bells, all the whistles, all the stress of a big full on launch that has all this pressure and you only do it a few times a year and if it doesn't work, then you're screwed. It's more about doing smaller, small, but effective little promotion sequences throughout the year that kind of keep a smaller amount that adds up to the same amount of sales coming through, but without the stress, without the pressure. If one of them doesn't work, it's no biggie because you've got another one next month or another 60 days. The last chance launch is a brilliant example of that. It's a brilliant way to, to do that, right? And it's because you're kind of missing out on an opportunity. Like anytime you, there's a reason why someone should buy now rather than later. And it's a, it's a strong reason. It doesn't mean you have to discount. Like, it's kind of like reverse discounting because you can go out and go to the world, hey, I'm about to put my prices up. It's the last time you're gonna be able to get it at this price. And they are going to scramble over themselves to not miss out on by dragging their feet. That's a last chance launch. And the third thing that I would recommend, again, if you're sitting there going, well, okay, yeah, sure, I want to put my prices up and there's probably some wiggle room there, but I don't know, I don't know how I feel about that. And this one is really more for your service providers who are listening. Like I said, we're kind of covering off both here. Because it's not just courses that put their prices up. It's absolutely service providers and your packages or your hourly rate. But to spend a bit of time and invest in upgrading your offers and your skills in some real and visible way, something like our Funnel Pro certification is a really great example of that, of a way that you can. It's a 12 week program. You come in, like I said, you're going to completely change your, your mindset, your knowledge, your strategy, your all, Everything you know about funnels will be completely upgraded. Like not just one level, probably 4, 5, 6. And whether you're a person who wants to build funnels for other people, but even if you're a coach, like maybe you're a business coach or a marketing coach and maybe you specialize in funnels, but you'd love to be able to advise people, sorry, not in funnels. You specialize in launches or some other methods, list building or something like that, you'd love to be able to add funnels to your services, to your packages, to how you serve your people. And by, therefore, by doing that and doing it in a way that is so much more concrete than just kind of googling, guessing right, you are therefore able to add easily upgrade your prices alongside it. Like you can go, hey guys, I'm just, I'm adding this in. I went and got upskilled. Like it's a really clear way of saying to the world here is what I've done a thing, I'm now more valuable. Therefore it totally makes sense that I can put up my prices, here are my prices and just feel really, really good about it. Those are the three different ways. Obviously there's, there's more. And next week we're actually going to talk about some different ways of structuring prices that can help you to yes, increase price overall, increase lifetime customer value, decrease a bit of friction. This can be super valuable right now, particularly with as I said, quote unquote, these unprecedented times which feel like they've the just what the world is now. But yeah, I hope that feels good. Please let us know. Please hit us up, shoot us a DM over at HelloFunnels on Instagram or screenshot this, tag us, share us in a story or if Instagram's letting us do stories anymore. I don't know. I'm very confused by their newest and if you are looking for to upgrade your skills, if you are looking to become a funnel expert yourself and be able to add that to either your coaching packages or your how you you know what you're able to add to your programs or to build funnels for other people. Our next cohort of Funnel Pro is starting very soon. All the deets are in the show notes or below or you can head to FunnelPro Co grab the details, pop in your application and hopefully we'll see you inside. Bye.

Thanks so much for listening to the Doing It Online podcast. If you love this episode, don't forget to subscribe and leave us a review. And if you're ready to take your online course sales to the next level with your own six or seven figure funnel, let Kate show you exactly how today@stealmyfunnel.com.

Sam.