Peaceful Profits Podcast Ep. 49 - The #1 Lie About Raising Prices
Synopsis:
In this no-fluff solo episode, Mike Shreeve of Peaceful Profits dismantles one of the biggest marketing myths: that raising your prices automatically attracts better clients. Instead, he explains why raising your prices is only the first step—and what you must do afterward to truly elevate the quality of your client base, your fulfillment, and your results.
Packed with sharp insight, real-world examples, and the psychology behind transformation, this episode is a must-listen for coaches, consultants, and course creators looking to build a business that’s not only more profitable—but more peaceful.
If you’ve ever wondered how pricing affects client outcomes, this is your blueprint.
Transcript:
The #1 Lie About Raising Prices
[00:00:00] There's a lie that's tossed around in marketing circles quite often, and it goes something like this. If you raise your prices, you will automatically attract better clients. Unfortunately, that just isn't true. It doesn't actually even make any sense if you think about it. Someone's ability to pay you a fee has no direct correlation with who they are as a human being.
And if I were to sit you down and say, okay, give me a list of 20. Characteristics or attributes that you would consider a great client possesses? [00:00:30] Maybe one of those 20 items would be the ability to pay me, right? The other 19 would be things like respects my time, listens to what I say has this specific problem I can solve and et cetera.
So it's a mistake to assume that just because someone can pay your price, they're going to be a good client. Yet at the same time, I'm always recommending to people that they raise their prices. Why is that? Am I contradicting myself? It turns out that when you raise your prices, it [00:01:00] is the first step towards attracting better clients.
Raising your prices in and of itself has no correlation on better clients. But it is the first step, and here's why. Number one, when you raise your prices, you give yourself the ability to access additional resources and more specifically, resources directly connected to controlling your supply and demand curve that you have within your own kind of ecosystem of running your business.
Lemme give you some examples here. [00:01:30] If I raise my prices. Per client, right? What does that mean For my business? It means I'm going to need fewer clients to reach my goals, income goals, et cetera. As a result of that, it means by definition I have more time to devote to the client, more time focused energy, et cetera, when I have more time focused energy, et cetera, to devote to those clients when I need fewer clients.
To do I can be a little bit picky. It doesn't even matter. What my marketing methods are to get clients. If I need [00:02:00] fewer of them, I can be more picky. That pickiness directly relates to what we want, which are better clients. In other words, when you are a picky service provider in the help industry, coach, consultant, freelancer, et cetera, doesn't matter what niche, fitness, health, relationships, business, whatever, when you can be more selective about who it is that you can or want to work with, you have more control over the standards.
You can slow your sales cycle down a little bit. You can get to know people a little bit [00:02:30] more. You can look for those other 19 items on your 20 item list of who makes a great client. You can ask deeper questions, et cetera. You don't have to be desperate. You don't have to take someone just because they can pay you.
But additionally, when you are able to devote more time, attention, energy, and effort to clients, you get better results. When you get better results, you can attract better clients. 'cause good clients want to work with people who have results. It also changes the way that you sell. Again, when you sell before client results, you however, there's a little bit [00:03:00] of having to use sales tactics and techniques, and there's a little bit of desperation and you really have to make the sale and et cetera.
When you start getting results for clients, your sales process is this. This simple. Recently I was working with such and such a client. They're very similar to you and where you are in your situation. Here are the results that we got, and I think I have a, I have a lot of confidence that I can help you to achieve very similar results as well.
Would you be interested? It's that simple. That's your sales, that's your marketing. You don't have to get any more advanced than that. You just keep producing results. Keep sharing those [00:03:30] results, getting them in front of as many people as possible. That attracts better clients. But you've noticed something.
We raise the price. That's step one. And what raising the price does is creates the environment for us to be able to then do all the other steps and start to attract the clients. Another thing to consider about raising your prices to include more resources for you is that when you have access to more financial resources.
You can start buying things that attract or at least set you [00:04:00] up to attract better clients. I'll give you an example. Number one, you can start buying the time of others to contribute to the results of your clients. I no longer sell any offer in any of my companies where I am the only person contributing to the results of a client.
I just don't do it anymore. It's so much better to have fellow team members, fellow smart people, contributing in a team environment to the result of my clients. As a team, we get better results. We get better results. We what? Attract better clients. [00:04:30] There's another example of financial resources. Being able to essentially buy access to better clients, and that is going back to the supply and demand curve using paid traffic.
I don't care what kind of funnel you use, it doesn't matter to me. There's all sorts of different ones. I prefer books and running books as book funnels and et cetera. But if you are paying for attention rather than manually getting that attention, you are trading money for access to thousands of people to what?
That access to the thousands of people and the attention you get to those thousands of people, [00:05:00] it means that they are coming to you instead of you going to them. That very simple shift in dynamics means again, that you get to be picky. It means that you get to be more selective. It means that instead of trying to beg someone to buy from you, you are interviewing them to see if they would be a good client.
We go back to that list of 20 things. Those other 19 things that make great clients, you get to interview them to see if you, if they possess those things, rather than just entering into a [00:05:30] relationship where promises are made, where all this stuff and expectations and et cetera. And the only thing that you are, that you're using as a tool, as a measuring stick, as a standard is whether or not they can pay you.
That doesn't make sense to me. That's not a peaceful business to me, but a peaceful business to me is that you're able to run through all 20 points on your checklist of, this is my opinion of what a great client ought to be. Are you that great client? Right now there's one other point that I wanna make in today's episode, and that is [00:06:00] when you raise your price, something else occurs.
So I've already spoken about this, that getting results today allows you to get better clients tomorrow because you just change the nature of how you're selling, what you're marketing. You get to be less hype and you just get to tell the truth. And you can make lots and lots of money in this business, in the help business, just telling the truth, saying This is what we do.
Here's who we've done it for. Here's an example, here's another example. Here's another example. Are you interested? Come work with us. That's a great way to do business in this industry. But there's something that I [00:06:30] learned many years ago that I wanna share with you today, and I hope it's as impactful to you as it was to me.
It's this simple. The less someone pays, the harder it is for them to get a result. I wanna say that one more time. The less someone pays, the harder it is for them to get a result. And the reason for that is surprisingly simple. If you. Charge me a hundred dollars for a personal fitness plan. I'm gonna take that fitness plan [00:07:00] and I'm gonna be so excited.
I trust you. I believe that, I'm giving you this a hundred dollars because I believe that this fitness plan is gonna help me to get this thing that I've wanted for a very long time. Which is, whatever, six pack abs or something. I am gonna start on this journey, right? And journey may be a cheesy word and it's overused or whatever, but that's really what it is.
A journey of transformation. In order for me to go from where I am now to where I want to be, which is what we do in the help business, we take people from where they are today to where they want to be into the future. I'm gonna have to change. If I don't [00:07:30] have six pack abs today, it's because there are things I'm not doing.
There are choices I'm making, there's habits I'm I have. I need to change those choices and habits and beliefs and et cetera in order to do the things necessary to be able to get six packs or what, whatever. It's six packs, become an apple farmer, whatever it is, whatever the outcome is, I'm gonna have to change.
Change is very difficult. We have built in excuse making machines in our brains embedded every single person does. And the problem is, when I have only spent a hundred dollars [00:08:00] on this fitness plan, all I have to do is come up with a $100 excuse as to why I don't have to follow this plan anymore. Another way to think about it is that as soon as the pain of change.
Is equivalent to a hundred dollars. I'll let the money go. So let's say for example, the person teaching how to get six pack abs recommends intermittent fasting. And let's say that this coming [00:08:30] weekend I have a big birthday party and my friends have planned an all day eating affair because that's, they knew me as somebody who liked to eat a lot, and so they got a breakfast and a lunch and a dinner and a dessert, and then we're gonna go out to a bar and then we're gonna da.
The second that my mind says, you know what, it's not worth a hundred dollars to not have fun on my birthday. I've lost, right? I'm not gonna follow the plan. The transformation is not going to occur because it was too [00:09:00] cheap of a hurdle. It was easy for me to let that money go because it was little. The investment didn't hurt enough to not get the result.
Raising your prices is actually a very good strategy. For making it so that the clients who do buy from you have too much to lose, to not get the [00:09:30] result they're hoping to get. If I go buy a 3000, 5,000, $10,000 fitness package, you can bet that birthday party, it ain't gonna happen because I am not willing to write off.
$5,000, $10,000. It's too big of a sacrifice that I made, a commitment that I made to myself to get the result that I want to get. [00:10:00] So again, we go back to the very beginning of this audio where I said the big lies that raising your prices automatically means you get better clients. That is a lie. What isn't a lie is that step one of getting better clients is raising your prices.
And then there are a whole bunch of other things that you can do because of that, which will allow you to attract better clients, get better results. So we come now to this very last point, which is the less [00:10:30] someone pays, the more difficult it is for them to get a result, because it's very easy to just slough things off, right?
So here's the big kicker. The sort of the big idea that I wanna share with you here, when you raise those prices and you make it expensive for someone to. Really fall to their base human nature, right? We don't let people talk themselves out of getting results. We don't let people do the things that they are naturally inclined to do because by definition, [00:11:00] that natural inclination is why they have the problem in the first place, right?
It's the choices and the beliefs and the behaviors that they're engaging in their default mode, which is why they have the problems, why they came to you in the first place. We go back to this idea that if you understand. That is the case, right? If you understand this piece of psychology that I'm sharing with you, then what you must do is design an offer which supports that piece of psychology [00:11:30] and very few offers in the help industry.
Take into account that dynamic. One, I don't think people have really thought about it all that much, and two, it's. It takes so much more than just a set of lectures to be able to support and overcome and assist and help people in managing that dynamic. So yes, raise your prices, but there is a whole slew of things that must occur to support that price increase in order for you to [00:12:00] get the results that you are looking for, which start with the results that your clients are looking for.
If you would like any help with. Designing, launching, selling, scaling, designing Again, improving raising prices on any of your offers. Please go to peacefulprofits.com/call. Have a chat with one of our team members. As I mentioned in this entire episode, it's not going [00:12:30] to be a high pressure call because we are well in control of our supply and demand curve.
We'll simply find out where you're at. Are you the kind of person we can help? And if you are, we have all sorts of options at varying price points to help you. Go and help other people. 'cause at the end of the day, there's a reason we call this the help industry. We are here to create transformations in the lives of our clients.
If we understand the nuances of how strategic pricing can help us to do better [00:13:00] work, and we apply that into our business, the natural byproduct of these levers when applied, will result in. What we call a Peaceful Profits business, which is not only profitable, but enjoyable, fun, low stress, consistent, sustainable and most importantly, impactful to run.
So we hope that we get to speak with you. I hope that you enjoyed this episode, and we'll see you in the next one.