How to Price Your Coaching Packages

Welcome back, everybody. Today, we are gonna be talking about how to price your coaching packages, and I can pretty much guarantee that if you watch this video and take note of everything which I say, you will be able to charge 2, 3, 4, or even more times your current coaching fees with your existing clients. There's always plenty of questions around how to price your coaching packages, which range from, how much do I charge per hour? Should I charge low ticket or high ticket? Should I charge a monthly membership for my coaching? Do I do a group program, or should I charge for one-to-one coaching? So I'm gonna try and unpack all of that in the next 10 minutes and give you the ultimate way in how you should price your coaching packages. So, you've just graduated coaching school, and they've sent you out into the big bad world to go and pick up your first few clients. Now, one of the things which I've noticed about many of the coaching accreditations that are out there is that they're very good at upskilling you as a coach, but they're light on giving you business skills. What the most likely thing is, that they've told you to go out there and start selling your coaching by the hour. If you look at the bare economics of how to scale a coaching practice, and let's say for example you want to become a 6-figure business earning $100,000 a year, and your coaching accreditation company has said go and sell your coaching time for $100 an hour or $100 a session, that means that you need to sell 1,000 hours in order to hit a 6-figure coaching practice. 1,000 hours kind of is neither here nor there, may sound like a lot, may not sound like very much. When you do the calculation on that, that's close to 100 hours a month. Most people choose to work 9 to 5, and typically we end with 160 hours a month to work in. So that's most of your time taken up selling time for money coaching. Leaves you 60 hours to do your accounts, sales, marketing, networking, speaking opportunities, and all of the other bits of the business. It means you're gonna be very, very busy as a coach. So hourly rate isn't necessarily the best way to charge for your time. Also, hourly rate is linked to your time. It's not linked to the outcomes and results which you'll be getting with your clients and for your clients. And that's where the first shift occurs that I want you to take note of. What you need to be focused on as a coach is delivering amazing and remarkable outcomes and results for your clients and charging for that. Anchor your clients to that outcome and result. Don't anchor your client to your time. When you've anchored the client to a specific outcome or result, you can then start to reverse engineer that and look at 2 different things. First of all, what's required of your client in order to achieve that result? What steps do you need to take them through in terms of your coaching process in order to get them to the end, to that clearly defined outcome or result which you've promised them? The second thing is, how long is it likely going to be to take you and them to achieve that result? What I mean by that is, don't necessarily measure it by sessions, but measure it by a 12-week programme, or a 6-month programme, or maybe even a 12-month programme. When you can start to break your process down into a very clearly defined set of steps which you're gonna take your client through in order to achieve that result, and it's over a clearly defined period of time, i.e., 6 months, which is not unusual. I'm not gonna go into the whys and wherefores around how to sell coaching packages. I may save that for another video. Once you've defined what your package is going to look like, i.e., a 6-month transformational programme that's gonna get your client from A to B, that's how you want to position it. One of the other mistakes which a lot of coaches make is that they automatically sell their coaching on a month-by-month basis. So they'll get them to set up a direct debit or standing order. So the client just shows up monthly and they only pay monthly. One of the biggest downsides to doing monthly-based subscriptions like that is that clients start to, again, anchor to the monthly coaching session, not to the end result. And so they start to see their coaching sessions with you a bit more like a mobile phone contract or a Sky subscription or something like that, which they can pick up and put down at will. I can speak from experience. When I first set up my coaching practice doing one-to-one coaching, I got to a point whereby my capacity was pretty much full up, but the income that I was anticipating wasn't where I wanted to get to. It was about 20 or 30% below where I should have been in terms of my monthly derived revenue. When I started to look into this, I realised that I wasn't holding my clients to account to see their 6-month programme through. And many of my clients— and this was my own fault— many of my clients were leaving after 3 or 4 months, having either felt that they got the results which we'd agreed early, and so they didn't see out the full 6-month coaching programme, which is actually a really good thing, but it does mean that they ended up paying for my time because they only paid for 3 or 4 months, whereas actually we'd agreed we were gonna go through 6 months to get that result. So they got the result early, but stopped paying me, which isn't, isn't necessarily a bad thing. It's— that's an ethical and moral way to sell coaching. However, that meant that they were anchored to my time, not to the desired outcome and result, and that's where you want to get clients to. If you start selling your coaching on a monthly basis, there's a danger that clients will leave before the end of their contracted time, which naturally impacts your— it's, it's kind of a bit like selling a product at a discounted rate, and that's not what you want to do. It just economically, it's just gonna make your business fall short of its goal. So to reiterate, you need to anchor the client to the end result, which is going to happen over a clearly defined period of time and for a fixed fee. It means that you get paid irrespective of how short or long it takes for the client to see the results. Also, what I typically used see when clients left after 3 or 4 months. And by the way, it wasn't just because we got the results. Sometimes something might crop up in their life whereby they fall on hard times for whatever reason, life gets in the way, maybe it becomes too stressful or too much work from a coaching perspective, and so they decide, oh, that's it. And actually, I, I found that what that did in the long term was impact the results and the outcomes that I was getting with my clients. It's really important to stress, and as coaches you already know this, but the coaching journey can be a little bit like a roller coaster at times, especially if you're delivering it over for several weeks or several months. And so I always felt very uncomfortable about the fact that when clients got to the bottom in a dip, that I wasn't then able to help them complete the process and see out the last few sessions in order to achieve the result and outcome which we'd agreed on. That was in the early days of when I was coaching. It's really important that when you take on new clients that you have a coaching agreement or contract in place which stipulates what's expected from them and what's expected from yourself. But this is made much easier when you price a coaching package as such that it means that the client has skin in the game as well as the coach. Rather than, for example, taking, I don't know, a £3,000 coaching program and splitting it up over 6 equal payments of £500 a month, a better way to actually package that up, 'cause obviously if they're paying £500 a month, they're anchored to the monthly payment and the monthly coaching sessions. Whereas how we want the client to perceive it is that they are buying a product, they're investing in a product, which they need to see through to the end, so they can see out the entire coaching process, and that is what is gonna get the best results for them, irrespective of how they're feeling at any point during that coaching process. So what this means is we want to sell what we class as a high-ticket coaching programme in order to get the client invested in our product or service, in the coaching programme. So rather than take that £3,000 over 6 months and just divide it up equally, there's a couple of different ways to pitch it. So one is, if they have the money, pay for it in full in advance. If they feel like they get to the end of the process and they haven't had value for money, well, we can discuss that then. A better way to do it, and I'll be honest with you, about a quarter of my clients will pay in full in advance. Not everybody has that sort of money in order to invest in a coaching program at that particular point in time. That's probably why they need coaching in the first place. A better way to do it might be that you front-load the payments, so you have a much higher first installment and then lower monthly installments, which means that at that point, the client is invested in the coaching programme, and they're more likely to see out the full coaching process. So, for example, with a £3,200 coaching programme, what you might choose to do is charge £800 for it upfront, and then 6 equal instalments of £400, for example. So, there's a higher investment upfront, and then a series of smaller payments afterwards. And that means then the client's committed. Get them to sign the coaching agreements, they're buying a product, that's a commitment to themselves, they're in this game now for 6 months or 12 months or however many weeks the programme is, and that they know exactly what the payment instalments are gonna be for whatever duration of time. So when I finally worked this out after a couple of years running my coaching programme, I realised that the clients that said yes to those instalment plans were much more committed to the process, so they always used to see it out. And not only that, but I had a much higher percentage of those clients who then went on for a continuation, because they were bought into the coaching process. Because they could see better results because I managed to get them committed right to the very end of the coaching program. They went through my process all the way through, rather than kind of having a get-out clause halfway through because it got a little bit tough for them. It might sound like that's operating within my best interest. The only thing which is within my interest is getting their results. If I don't get results, then I need to refund them the money. It's as simple as that. What you want to do is get yourself committed. You want your client to be committed to see it out to the end of the process. Once you can see that this is a much better way of charging for your coaching programme, based on outcomes and results, rather than time for money, hourly rate, or session-based pricing, you can see that your clients are actually gonna get much better results out of packaging and pricing your coaching programmes in this way. The other thing to bear in mind as well is, if you've niched on your market properly, and now your product is much more clearly defined in terms of length of time, outcomes and results, fixed price, it makes it much easier to be able to pitch your coaching program to prospects. One of the biggest mistakes I see new coaches making is that they have a raft of different coaching programs, packages available, from high ticket to low ticket, free courses, cheap courses, and all the rest of it. So when the client says, what is it that you're selling me, we give them all these different options, and quite often that means that results in the cheapest. Think about it this way, if you had a lower ticket offering and a higher ticket offering, so a £500 programme versus the £3,200 programme, you can automatically see a lot of your clients are gonna migrate towards the cheaper one because they're like, oh, well, I still get Robin anyway, so I'll have the cheaper product. And what that means is, and a lot of coaches really struggle with imposter syndrome, especially when it comes to sales. They don't feel very confident in selling. So the moment somebody says, oh gosh, that's expensive, they go, oh, well, I've got this cheaper one, you can have that, because it's easier, there's less friction there. But that cheaper product or package might not actually be the right product for that client. So we've always gotta make sure that when we're qualifying prospects, that we're pitching and selling the right programme to them. We don't want to give them an inferior product that's not gonna get them the results which they want. I'm not suggesting here that you don't have a tiered set of packages, but you have to make sure that you're staying true to the cause. When somebody says, okay, this is a great conversation, but which package shall I go for? You make sure that you recommend the right package them, even if that is the more expensive package. You'll notice a lot of businesses typically won't ever have a cheap and an expensive product either. They'll typically have 3 to 5 core products, and with a view that a majority of their clients will end up on one of those. So this means we have a cheap, a mid-range product, and then we have a super expensive product. Now, the super expensive product may well be some kind of inner circle or one-to-one intensive or something like that. The mid-tier package, which is where most clients end up with, is the one that's gonna get results for 80 to 90% of your target market who you speak to during your consultations. And that one's going to be the sort of high-ticket one, which you, you want a majority of clients to go into. And then you have a low-ticket one, which is where it's kind of your starter kit. This is the one whereby clients just aren't ready for that mid or high-tier package. And so we've got to have this lower-tier package just to get them started, to build momentum. To prepare them for the higher-ticket packages further down the line. So I hope you've enjoyed this short video about how to price your coaching packages. My name's Robin Waite. I'm the founder of Fearless Business. We are a business accelerator for coaching practices around the globe. We help coaches to confidently charge more for their existing products or services which they're selling. 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