Price Resistance – How To Respond When Clients Resist Your Rates (Bhoomi Pathak)

Episode summary: As your coaching business experience and expertise grows, there inevitably comes a time when you decide to raise your rates to better reflect the value of your services. But when you increase your prices, you’re likely to be confronted with strong reactions from your clients. And there’s a good chance this will happen more than once in your coaching career. Or maybe a new client is resisting your existing price, and you’re not sure how to respond. Should you argue for your rates or focus on your client’s results instead?

Our host Melinda Cohan speaks with Bhoomi Pathak on this episode of Just Between Coaches about this challenging coaching situation --- price resistance. Bhoomi is the co-owner of and COO at Mirasee and works very closely with Mirasee’s ACES coaches. During this session, they’ll talk about how to communicate your rates more effectively and what to do when clients or prospects resist your price. 

In this episode we discuss:

Why it’s good to be confronted with price resistance. How has the coaching industry changed its pricing models? What mindset do coaches need to have when talking about the price of their service? Should you consider giving your client a discount when your rates go up?Why do coaches fear the money conversation so much?

“If you have someone who's resisting your price, it means they're really interested in working with you.” – Bhoomi Pathak

Guest bio: Bhoomi is co-owner and COO at Mirasee. After a career in management consulting working with Fortune 500 companies, Bhoomi joined Mirasee in 2013 and was responsible for putting in place structures, processes and execution capabilities that enabled us to grow 10x in five years. She continues to build the success team and the infrastructure to increase our scale and impact in serving our community of expertise-based entrepreneurs through online courses and Mirasee's flagship business coaching program, ACES .

Resources or websites mentioned in this episode:

Mirasee 

Coaches Console

Credits:

Guest - Bhoomi Pathak

Host - Melinda Cohan

Producer - Cynthia Lamb 

Executive producer - Danny Iny

Writer - Michi Lantz, Melinda Cohan, and Cynthia Lamb

Assembled by - Geoff Govertsen

Audio Post Supervisor: Evan Miles, Christopher Martin

Audio Post Production by Post Office Sound

Music soundscape: Chad Michael Snavely

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Writer Name: Marshall Usinger

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Episode transcript: Price Resistance – How To Respond When Clients Resist Your Rates (Bhoomi Pathak)

[00:00:01] spk_0: Mirasee 

[00:00:05] spk_1: But you know, that's not how business works. That's not how we can build relationships with people. So, um it's really important to sort of separate ourselves, I think from our services and from our business so that it's not quite so entangled with our self worth. [00:00:24] spk_0: Hello and welcome to just between coaches, the podcast that tackles difficult coaching conversations. Head on. My name is Melinda Cohen and I run a business called the coaches console. The coaches council has supported more than 50,000 entrepreneurs and creating their own profitable coaching business. Yeah. Today we're going to talk about a difficult but important topic and a reaction you'll probably confront more than once in your business career. I'm talking about price resistance as your business experience and expertise grows, There inevitably comes a time when you decide you want to raise your rates to better reflect the value of your services or maybe a new client is resisting your existing price. How do you tell your clients and what do you do when someone resists your price to talk about this? Today, I've invited Bumi Patek, the CFO at morrissey. But before I bring Bumi on I'm going to read a listener mail from a coach that reflects today's topic. As I've said in earlier episodes. Unless you tell me otherwise, any email that you send me that we read on the air will be anonymous. We want to make sure it encourage you to be open about what's troubling you without worrying about what your clients might think. Here's what anonymous had to say. Dear Melinda. I have an old client that wants to rehire me and my services. She would be a great client for me and my services are exactly what the client wants and needs. But we are stuck regarding the price. She is reluctant to pay my current rate. I am convinced my pricing is fair but I'm starting to feel insecure about it. How do I argue for my pricing? Should I make an exception in this case? Dear anonymous. I am so glad you brought this topic up. It can definitely be tough for coaches to talk about money but I have to tell you from the get go. I never argue for my rates. I argue for the clients results. If you get into a discussion about pricing before you've established the value of your services that will result in a bidding war. That's never a conversation I want to get into. In fact, if my clients are objecting to my rates or want to negotiate my rates, that's a big red flag that tells me they're making coaching all about the money and not about the results. It's also assigned to me that I need to shift the conversation. I need to get the conversation refocused on the value that my coaching will provide today. On just between coaches is our guest. Bumi Patek. Bumi is the chief financial officer at morrissey. She also works very closely with morrissey's aces. Coaches welcome. Bumi [00:03:06] spk_1: great to be here, Melinda. [00:03:08] spk_0: I'm so excited to be here and to be talking with you about this topic. I couldn't think of a better person to have on the show for this. [00:03:15] spk_1: Well thank you. I'm excited. It's such an important topic. We serve a community of coaches and consultants. A lot of our coaches and consultants to work with us. They struggle this exact same issue. [00:03:24] spk_0: Bumi, could you please tell us a little bit about yourself and your background just to give our listeners a picture of who you are and where you come from? [00:03:31] spk_1: Yeah, for sure. So my background is actu...