If you’ve ever struggled with pricing your marketing funnel services, you need to read this post.
***If you’re here for the increased pricing cheat email, it’s at the bottom.***
Pricing is a minefield. You’re pulled in loads of different directions. But I want to make one thing explicitly and abundantly clear.
The age of your business, your time on the market and the number of customers you have DO NOT mean you have to be cheap.
The only things that should affect your price are what you’re delivering and the position of your product in your sales funnel (more on that later).
Your services are in demand, people need them and you owe it to yourself to be profitable.
It’s cheeky to ask for so much money!
I remember when someone told me I need to charge $10 000 for a website. Not even a fancy website, a standard WordPress themed website. I couldn’t believe it. No way would someone ever spend that much with me.
Particularly because I’d only been doing it a few years. I had colleagues and competition who were in business longer than me, and they were charging $2000 – $3000.
I was terrified of being asked “why should I spend $10K when my nephew says he can do it for $500?”
We have loads of excuses why we shouldn’t charge so much. I’m going to cover those now and explain why you shouldn’t worry about them.
My competition are charging less
Here’s the biggest reason. You feel your competition charge less, therefore to remain competitive you have to charge the same or less.
Often, when I talk to people starting their website or funnel businesses, they’ll explain how they can charge so little because their competition have more expenses. Staff, offices, software etc. So they can undercut all that and charge less.
Or when they start, they’ll talk to competitors, even in a friendly way (and sometimes not so friendly – fuck you Martin) and explain what they’re going to charge.
“There’s no way you can charge that much! I’ve been doing this 25 years and I’ve never charged over £1000 for a website.”
We have this fear of rising above the parapet and exposing our necks. Most people will try to drag you back down, under the pretence that they’re just trying to help you.
Never ONCE has Coca-Cola ever been given pricing advice from Pepsi Co. You should absolutely ignore your competition when it comes to pricing.
There’s a HUGE misconception that part of your market research should involve competitor research. While it’s useful to understand their pricing model and who buys, you should never compare your prices to theirs.
Thinking like that is cancer.
In reality, most people will tell you to charge less because they don’t want you to “get all the good stuff”. As soon as we started charging more than everyone else, we found we weren’t competing on price anymore.
Ready for the competition sprint? Nah.
Image courtesy of Matt Lee
People tell me it’s too expensive
Moving on from that. Customers, leads, friends, family. They’ll all weigh in on your business.
Running a business is like having a kid. As soon as people see you with one, they’ll offer their advice. Even if they’ve never had one themselves.
“You can’t charge that Mike, people spend less on cars!”
In all honesty, it’s become a running joke that pricing advice is handed out by the people LEAST qualified to do so.
Fear, jealousy, inexperience. These are all reasons people won’t support your pricing model.
You will never hear me say that something you’re selling is too expensive. All I’ll ask is, what are you delivering for that price?
To use another analogy. The less time someone has been playing golf, the more likely they are to advise you on your swing.
It’s like everyone is an expert when it comes to pricing. But the REASON people say something is expensive is one of two reasons.
- You haven’t explained the value well enough
- They don’t want to understand the value of what you’re offering
That’s it. Now sometimes, no matter how good your pitch, your content marketing, social proof and proposals – people will say it’s too expensive.
Move on. There’s nothing you can do for this person.
Or, it might be that you haven’t spent enough time explaining what people get. You might not have spent enough time explaining the value that you can deliver.
In which case, your job is to make it clear that the value of the investment, outweighs the initial investment.
I’m not good enough yet
I’m going to tell you something, that anytime you’re unconfident in your own abilities, you can repeat to yourself.
“I am a better designer, developer, copywriter and marketer than Mike Killen.”
There. You are better than at least one person in the world. And I sell funnels for £35000+. So what’s stopping you?
We often equate skill to income. If someone is better at something, demonstrably or not, they’re paid more. Makes sense right?
Well, I’ll let you in on a massive industry secret.
Your skill level is as good as its ever been and you’re only getting better. Your prices should, therefore, increase every day.
We have an idea that skill is like XP (experience points) in a video game or board game. As if we’re trying to fill up an XP bar and some gold coins will pop up when we reach level 5. Once we’re Lvl5, we can charge more!
Nope. That’s super not how it works.
You set the price bar and THEN work out what you need to deliver, to justify that price. That’s all there is to it.
You are already good enough to charge what you need to charge. If you know your business has to make $10 000 a month. Or $3000 a month. Then charge accordingly.
Don’t stretch yourself into poverty by assuming you can only charge what you’re comfortable with.
Set a price and if it doesn’t make your stomach flip, it’s not high enough.
If you’ve never set a price of $10 000 for a website, then your next website is going to be $10 000.
Which means you need to find customers with budgets of at least $10 000. Meaning they probably have a turnover of $100 000+. I guarantee if you spend your time looking for THAT customer, over working with lower budget customers, you’ll be happy.
You’ll have fewer customers, more time to work on your business and your income will increase.
And it has nothing to do with skill.
I need to build my portfolio first
Your customers are never ever ever ever ever ever ever EVER going to ask you “can I spend a bit more? Your prices are too low.”
Yet. We all think that this is going to happen. If we start low, we can eventually raise our prices.
More cancer thinking.
It’s toxic to think like this. If all the customers you get are referrals, then aren’t they all going to expect the same prices for the person before?
And if you’re only selling products and services at that price, aren’t you reinforcing that this is all the market will pay?
Sometimes, I’ll admit, you might have to build some fake websites and funnels in order to show off what people can get. That’s on your time AND here’s the kicker – you can offer those to people.
When we started membership websites, we did build a few for free for customers. Or at least at cost. But that was to train our staff. We created a tonne of documentation and processes in order to deliver the same work over and over.
We also mentioned that the sites would have NO support. Interestingly, all those customers now stuck with us for maintenance and updates.
Stop building portfolio pieces and start offering to help people. Our experience shows that if we spend more time, writing and creating content for free that we can share, we have fewer people asking for our portfolio.
How much should I charge for a marketing funnel?
So how much should you charge for a marketing funnel?
What about deposits, monthly retainers, maintenance and update costs? Or revenue shares, bonuses and equity?
There are millions of options and I would advise you to check out our post on what we call “the $25K drop“.
It flips the thinking on pricing on its head. Rather than thinking “how much should I charge for all this stuff?” It asks “what do I need to deliver to justify a $25000 paycheque.
Read the post and start there. That’s going to be the best way for you to figure out what you need to charge.
Wrap up
Scary right? I totally know how you feel. Everyone including me had the fear of rejection when your price goes up.
Below is the ultimate cheat to increasing your prices. It’s in the form of an email.
Hey [fname]
I just wanted to reach out and let you know that our prices are going up as of next week.
We’ve recently expanded our team. We’ve taken on a marketing funnel expert who is going to help us get businesses like yours even better results.
Because of which, websites now cost $10 000 minimum and funnels are now $1000 a month.
Your costs won’t go up, however, any new projects will be under the new pricing structure.
I wanted to give as much warning as possible, you’ve been a great customer to work with and I hope you understand our reasoning behind our increase.
If you have any questions, shoot me an email.
[Sign off]
Technically, you have taken on a marketing funnel expert. Me (: But it helps people visualise your business charging more when you expand your team.
Either, they’ll be really happy for you and continue to work with you. Or they’ll be really happy and let you know they don’t need any more projects from you.
What do you think of the pricing email? Feel free to copy and paste it to your customers and let me know what you think in the comments below.
