Episode 430: Signs that it’s time to increase your prices

Is it time for you to increase your prices? 

Not sure? Then today’s episode will be perfect for you!  I have collected eight signs that it is absolutely time for you to look at increasing your prices.

Let’s dive in!

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I think reviewing your prices consistently and looking for opportunities to increase your prices is really important, especially in the first few years of your business.

We often under-price our services when we’re first starting out. We would rather have a lot of clients who are paying us less than be top-tier pricing in the market.

I think a lot of people also underestimate how much their audience might value the work that they do and the transformation that they facilitate.

I’m definitely an advocate for consistently reviewing your prices and looking for evidence that it’s time for you to increase them.

In today’s episode, I’ve got eight signs that you should pay attention to that could indicate it’s time for you to review and increase your prices.

If you are experiencing three or four of these eight things, I would definitely recommend that you increase your prices. If that’s the case, make sure you check out episode 310 of the podcast, which walks you through the steps to increase your prices in a way that also creates a cash injection for your business.

Often when people increase their prices using that price increase strategy, it can be a real growth opportunity that grows their audience, momentum, reach on social media, and income.

You can find that step-by-step process here: tashcorbin.com/310

But first, let’s dive into the signs that it’s time to increase your prices…

Sign 1: You’re fully booked

By this, I don’t mean you have eight clients five days a week. That’s being overbooked.

If you work with VIP clients, I want you to think about how many people per week you reasonably want to work with. Are you starting to feel like you are at max capacity?

If you’re at max capacity, then we can’t increase the income that you’re making in your business by increasing the number of people that you’re working with. That’s just going to make you overbooked.

How else can we increase your income?

We can increase your prices.

This can often end up creating a waitlist effect where people sign up to work with you, but they don’t start for another couple of months. That’s a good thing.

We can find ways to increase your income without increasing your workload. We can even increase your income whilst decreasing your client workload.

If you are starting to get booked out, that’s a really good sign that it’s time for you to increase your prices.

Sign 2: Your clients tell you you’re charging too little

I am definitely someone who needs to learn how to shut my mouth more often with the people that I work with because I’m often the client who is telling providers that they’re undercharging and should put their prices up.

My partner David consistently says to me that I should wait to finish working with someone before telling them to increase their prices because they often listen to me and then it becomes more expensive to work with them.

But I am totally cool with that!

I would rather pay more to work with someone and see the look on their face when they realise they have been consistently undercharging.

All in all, it’s quite rare that clients tell you you’re undercharging. If you are hearing that here and there, I think that’s a big sign that it’s time to increase your prices.

This comes with a caveat though: You need to hear this from your clients, NOT a business mentor or marketing guru who is telling you to increase your prices without any sound logic behind why you should increase your prices. That is the sales technique they use to make it look far more valuable for you to hire them.

I’ve seen a lot of people fall for that and really hurt their business by going from $1,500 packages to $5,000 packages without any real strategy behind it.

This only counts as a sign if you’re being told to increase your prices by your clients.

Sign 3: You’re getting your clients results far more efficiently

This occurs because of your experience gained.

For example, if you’re building websites or crafting people’s brands, it may be that your turnaround time is much faster now.

But this still counts if you’re working with people in a VIP one-on-one session.

When I was in the earlier stages of my business and was charging a lot less for working with me for my VIPs, we’d get less done in each session. We would have far less strategic transformation per session in the work that we did together. That’s because I didn’t have the depth of experience, knowledge and industry insight that I have now.

I have now served thousands and thousands of clients in the years that I’ve run my business. I started in 2013, so I’m heading into my 12th anniversary in business next year.

For me, I have been doing this so much that what I used to cover in a 45-minute session with people is not as much and it’s not as strategic as what I do now.

What I do now is worth more in the time that we get to work with each other.

A good rule of thumb that I have here is every ten VIP clients and every three months, I recommend just looking at your prices.

You might not increase every single time – but just do a review.

Have you developed in your experience and expertise to the point now where you get people results a lot more efficiently, you have a quicker turnaround time in the work that you do, or you’re offering more value for the time you spend with your clients?

That’s definitely a sign that it could be time to review those prices.

Sign 4: It’s been a long time since you increased your prices

If it’s been over a year since you’ve increased your prices, the cost of living has increased by at least 4-5% in most countries in that time.

Your cost of living as an individual and what you need to draw out of your business is going to have increased as well.

If it’s been over a year since you’ve increased your prices, that’s definitely a sign that it’s time for you to have a look at them.

Sign 5: Your business is more successful and you need space in your calendar

It’s not that you need to create space in your calendar because you aren’t very good at what you do, you don’t have a lot of clients, or you’re keeping yourself busy with a lot of busy work that’s not developing much growth in your business.

That doesn’t indicate it’s time for you to increase your prices.

But if you are becoming so successful in your business that you’ve got a lot more client inquiries, you’ve got a lot more clients that you’re working with, you’re replying to a lot more DMs and emails because you’ve got a lot more leads that are coming in, that’s giving you signs that your business is going through a growth spurt, and that can take up a lot of time and space.

If the numbers are telling you there’s an increase in demand coming and you need to create space for that, a price increase can do a really good job of that.

Let’s say you’re charging $200 a session, you work with 10 clients a week, and that’s about your capacity at the moment. You’re making $2,000 a week, but you want to stop doing client-facing work one day a week so that you can focus on building a group program.

You can see that you’ve got lots of leads coming in and you’ve got a lot of interest in filling up the rest of the spaces in your calendar, but you want to create some spaciousness there to focus on your next growth phase.

Increasing your prices can be a great way to do that.

Let’s say you increase the price to $250 a session. In order for you to have the same amount of income, you only need to work with eight clients a week.

That’s effectively freeing up a fifth of your week! You’re freeing up a whole day if you do two clients a day, five days a week. You’re freeing up that day, you’re protecting that time and creating that space, whilst not decreasing your income.

The reason why I word it this way is because what I don’t want you to do is increase your prices and then lose half your clients.

We don’t want to suck the cash flow out of your business.

We need to look at the data to see what the demand is, what that audience growth is, and what that lead generation growth is to be sure that creating that space in your calendar and reducing the number of clients you’re working with one-on-one is supported and the demand will be there to buy the next thing you’re working on.

This is one where many VIP clients will come to me and say that they need to increase their prices because they need to create more space in their calendar. But when we actually look at what’s taking up space in their business, it’s not demand-driven… it’s just busy-ness.

We are better off creating that space by reducing the number of things that they’re doing that aren’t creating any results or contributing to the growth of their business, rather than taking away client-facing time.

The decision to increase their prices is born out of a frustration that their marketing and sales stuff is not working.

But really, we’ve got a value proposition issue, we’ve got a messaging issue, or we’ve got an offer craft issue where they haven’t crafted their offer in a way that’s speaking to what their audience is looking for (which drives up the desire for people to work with them).

We want to create that space.

Yes, that’s the sign that it’s time to increase your prices. But the data is proving that there is an influx of demand and that we are seeing a growth spurt in your business so we need to create space to work in a different way.

Sign 6: You have a lot of fence-sitters in your audience

There are a lot of people who are sitting on the fence as to whether they want to work with you, and a lot of people tell you it’s on their wish list to work with you one day.

So many people come to me and complain about the amount of people who tell them they’re on their wish list. They get very frustrated with their audience for not just buying. But it takes a lot for people to tell you you’re on their wish list!

People don’t say that lightly.

If you say that to the wrong business owner, that’s opening yourself up for spam-fest 1995.

It’s going to be wild if you tell the wrong person that they’re on your wish list and that you want to buy from them one day.

I once tagged my partner in a post on Facebook for someone’s product because I wanted to put it on our vision board. I then got DM spammed SO BAD.

At first, I thought they were reaching out because they had seen that I had quite a big following and they wanted to collaborate or something. So when they first started DMing me, I was replying because I got excited that maybe they were going to do me a deal on the $4,500 product.

But no – it turned out to be a bot that was SO SPAMMY. For six weeks, I got around nine messages per day.

I couldn’t get out of it! I was trying to use all the keywords that would trigger a bot to stop, but it just kept spamming me until I blocked their page.

A lot of people have had that experience at some point online, and based on that experience, it takes a lot for someone to then say that it’s on their wish list to work with you.

Treasure that. That is someone saying that they see the value of what you do, and they’re going to buy from you one day.

That person deserves to be adored, loved and treasured, and that goes on your gratitude list for the day.

If that’s happening quite a lot, two things are going on.

The first is that there’s no sense of urgency. That sense of urgency doesn’t always have to be driven up by just making people have a deadline or telling people there’s a price increase coming.

But if it’s happening a lot, that can sometimes mean that there’s no urgency in your messaging (as in you’re not making it clear why it’s better to sort this out sooner rather than later). That’s definitely a messaging thing that we would look into.

Alternatively, the reason for this could be that people are assuming you’ll always be around. Maybe they’ve been in your world for quite a while, so it’s easy and comfortable for them to sit on the fence.

They just constantly tell themselves they’ll buy from you one day, but it’s easy to kick it down the road and push it to the bottom of the list.

Sometimes increasing your prices and giving people that warning that the price increase is happening (which is one of the steps in my other price increase episode) can make a significant difference to fence-sitting.

For this sign, I would be looking to combine this with some of the other signs in order to properly inform your decision to increase your prices.

But it can be a valid sign if you’ve got lots of people who you know are interested but they’re procrastinating it.

I would definitely also look at your messaging and some of the urgency in your messaging (not manufactured urgency) first. And then I would take that as a sign that it might be a good time to review your prices.

Sign 7: You’re starting to resent when you make a sale

It’s not that you’re resenting having to do sales or marketing activities, but it’s actually that when you see the sale come through, you’re not as excited as you used to be and you’re starting to feel a bit resentful for it.

That is definitely a sign that it’s time to increase your prices, because that to me says you’ve got enough demand to increase your prices and you’re undercharging (because it no longer feels like a fair energetic exchange).

If you start to resent it when you see sales come through and you’re not as excited as you used to be by people saying yes, that’s definitely a good one.

Sign 8: You’ve got a plan to increase your prices but you’re procrastinating

There are a lot of people who read this podcast who have probably already checked out my other episode on the steps to increase your prices, and they know it’s overdue, they’ve mapped out a plan on how they would do it, but they haven’t yet actioned that plan.

If that is the case for you, then that is a sign that it’s time for you to increase your prices.

If you haven’t got that plan, I definitely recommend checking out the other episode I’ve been mentioning to learn how to increase your prices in a way that gives you a cash injection now, maximises your conversion, and ensures you’re setting yourself up so that you don’t end up with crickets after the price increase.

You can find that episode at: tashcorbin.com/310

Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of the podcast!

Until next time, I cannot WAIT to see you SHINE.