The Courage to Charge: Confronting Pricing Anxiety in Your Business

Ever been afraid to reveal your prices to customers, dreading they might reject you for being too steep? I recall a real-life encounter where I quoted a higher than usual price, and to my surprise, the customer agreed! Through this experience, I learned that it's crucial to stand your ground on your pricing, even if it means facing rejections. Sometimes, rejection isn't a bad thing. It might just help you refine your marketing strategies and target the right audience. Originally aired 9/25/23.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Hey, before we get into the show today, I just wanna tell you this. This episode was filmed about two weeks ago, prior to when you're hearing it, and the advice in it has just proven itself to be very, very legitimate. I have experienced much more success in only a couple of weeks with higher prices, so I hope you get something out of this. I have seen that it works firsthand. For me, it just takes five seconds of bravery to tell your customers what your price is, and the fortitude to stand behind your price.

Speaker 2: 0:36

Hey everybody, Mike here and welcome to Task Force Entrepreneur. The podcast I started went from being a tech engineer to starting a house cleaning business. Yep, that's my story and I'm sticking to it. I hope you enjoy the show.

Speaker 1: 0:52

Hey, what's up everybody? Mike here, welcome to Task Force Entrepreneur. In today's show we're gonna talk about how to overcome price anxiety. What I'm really talking about is you have something to sell a product or a service and you feel that itch to constantly make your price lower. And this is something that I feel like is almost universal. And when I think about it, I think the reason that we as human beings have this anxiety over charging a higher price. I feel like it's almost a symptom of self-doubt. I think we do it because we think that the product or the service is not quite as good as it should be to charge a certain price, or we're afraid that we're going to give a certain price and someone's going to say it's not worth it, and then that's certainly. You know that's a blow to your ego. Whatever the reason is, you just gotta get past it, and this is something that I've struggled with.

Speaker 1: 1:56

I. The first time I had a conversation with a customer about price, I had actually heard a podcast I think it's called the Cleaning Life with Shannon Miller, so it's a cleaning business focused podcast. Obviously, I own a cleaning business, so I was listening to it and she said something that stuck out to me. She said I have a minimum $250 charge for a cleaning if it's a one-time cleaning. So if you call me, according to her, and you say, hey, shannon, I just need you to clean my house one time and it's super tiny, should only take you an hour she's gonna charge you $250. Even though it's clearly I mean by anybody's measure it's overpriced, right, but the thing is it does take time to get out the door and pay somebody and pay for benefits and insurance and you know mileage and all of that. Right, there was a cost to all of that. So in my case, I had this conversation after I had heard that podcast and I had a very, very nice guy call me and he said hey, I wanna hire you guys to clean one of my new. He had bought a new house and it was relatively small. I think it was like 1,100 square feet and everything was perfect. I mean, really nice guy seemed like a really straightforward job, but it was a one-time clean and it was smaller than what we want to target as a company.

Speaker 1: 3:25

Typically for mission cleaning we really go after anything, I would say over 1,500 square feet. So you know, for this I was open to it if he would meet that minimum, but if not, I was going to pass on it. And that's exactly what I did. So the way I addressed it is I said listen, I'm gonna be completely transparent with you. Because of our costs, because of the structure of us as a company, we pay our employees well and you know I wanna make sure that they're taken care of. We do have a one-time $250 minimum for, you know, getting out the door right For a one-time cleaning. Now, if you want us to come back every two weeks, then we'll waive that, of course. So it can definitely be less if it's reoccurring work.

Speaker 1: 4:15

And you know I said it and there was a long awkward pause. And then he goes well, what do you get for that 250? And me, as a salesperson, having, you know, ten years of sales experience, I knew instantly that that was buying signal. He was at least entertaining it. He was just trying to, in his own mind, justify what am I getting for 250? Because up until that point he was probably thinking you know, okay, they're going to mop my floor, they're going to sweep, they might clean my toilet, but other than that, that's it. So at that point it was time for me to explain all of the wonderful things he's going to get and all of the things that make us such a great cleaning company and to help him justify it in his mind. And you know what happened After I explained everything, he asked a couple more questions, you know.

Speaker 1: 5:09

He basically said, well, what about this? I said, yes, sir, what about this? Yes, we do that as well. He said, okay, I think 250 is fair. Look at that. I mean I could have easily turned that away, right? I mean it would be real easy to just say, well, you know, it's smaller than what we normally do, but the reality is it turned into a profitable job and who knows, maybe it will become a steady client and obviously in that case, then that that one time, you know, minimum fee would be waived because it's a smaller place, right, but it could turn into a great customer relationship.

Speaker 1: 5:47

So I guess the takeaway here is if, whatever your service is, whatever your product is, you have to take the leap and just trust that you're doing the right thing and stick to your prices. And some people are going to say, no, that's okay. In fact they're doing you a favor because they weren't your customers. And I'm going to go a step further. If someone says no to your price, something is wrong with the marketing or advertising that you were doing as a business owner. This means that you are reaching the wrong people. I can tell you, with mission cleaning, I was getting a lot of calls from very, very small houses wanting very, very small amounts of work. That just didn't fit in with what we were trying to do and I realized that it was a problem with our advertising. We were targeting the wrong people. Literally as soon as we made some tweaks to our Google ads campaign, we started seeing an improvement in the, I guess, a better fit in terms of demographics, of the type of people we were looking for, which you know, generally, we're just slightly larger houses, right? So that's really all there is to it.

Speaker 1: 6:53

You got to have a little bit of. You know, I always say you only need like five seconds, 10 seconds of bravery, that's it. You don't need to be brave for long, you just need five to 10 seconds of bravery. You just need to say it, put out the words our price is $300. Pause and don't justify it too much, right? I mean you can explain why you're worth it, but don't go in the weeds and explain a whole lot. You know well our insurance is this much for month and all of that.

Speaker 1: 7:23

The price is the price. If you want the best, you're going to pay for it and I hope that we can work together. But if not, I have some people I can refer you to and I wish you the best of luck. And, honestly, you'll be surprised how many times this tactic will resort and the customer saying no, no, no, that's fine. Yeah, that price is fine. We can work with that. It just takes a little bit of guts. Hey, if you found this podcast helpful, useful, maybe it just inspired you to have a little bit more guts in terms of your pricing. Whatever the case is, if it helped, do me a favor and leave me a review. It would be very much appreciated. Thanks and have a great day.