This is a lament I hear all the time from recent graduates from my personal styling and personal colour analysis training programs:
“But what about my pricing? I’m worried people will think I charge too much?”
There’s no such thing as too expensive, only not valuable enough.
If people aren’t buying, it’s because you’re not showing them the true value of what you are offering in language that speaks to their desires.
When a prospective client says your price is too high, they’re rarely comparing your fee to their budget. They’re comparing it to whatever price they had in their head before they spoke to you, and that number came from somewhere. Behavioural economists call this anchoring, and it’s one of the most consistently replicated effects in decision research, first documented by Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman.
Dan Ariely, George Loewenstein and Drazen Prelec took this further in a well-known study. They asked people to write down the last two digits of their Social Security number, then bid on ordinary items like wine and keyboards. People with higher two-digit numbers bid consistently more on items that had nothing to do with Social Security numbers at all. Think about how that completely random number could affect buying decisions. The first number they saw anchored everything that followed. Without an anchor, we don’t reason our way to a fair price. We reach for the nearest available number.
Packaging Your Services
Ariely also documented this with The Economist’s subscription pricing, where adding a deliberately unappealing middle option pushed most readers toward the higher-priced bundle, simply because it now looked like the obvious deal by comparison.
The bottom package may seem like it’s missing something, which means more people will choose the middle package, or the most expensive. The client has sold themself without you having to do any sales.
This is why having a range of 3 packages to offer your clients is a great way of selling more without having to do a hard sales pitch. I doubled my business within a year by offering packages. I used to have to try and upsell my clients to the next service. As soon as I brought in packages, labelled them clearly so it was obvious what was in them and the differences (and the prices and advantages of each), suddenly people were choosing my most expensive package rather than just one service at a time.
Itemise Your Packages
This is exactly why a price shown alone, with nothing to compare it against, gets the objection “that’s too much.” A price shown next to the itemised value of everything it includes tells a completely different story. If you offer bundled packages, show what each piece is worth on its own before revealing the bundled price. You’re not being clever or misleading; you’re giving your client’s brain something honest to anchor to, instead of leaving it to guess.
Do the same with your pricing. Before your next quote goes out, write down everything included and what it would cost separately. Show that first. Then show your price.
What Does Your Ideal Client Value?
Think about your ideal client and what they want. Here are some examples:
The time-poor executive has money (they are not buying on price; you don’t need to be the cheapest), but they lack time. They want you to be efficient and not waste their time. They don’t want to do a full day of shopping or for the service to last all day. In fact, if you manage to get them everything they want in 1.5 hours, they’ll be happy to finish up early and pay for the 2 hours that is your service. They want the time they spend with you to have a big impact and to give them time back for the other things that they value. In fact, when done well, they are likely to book you in season after season as they see the value you bring to them and the time you save.
The entrepreneur sees the value in investing in things that will make a difference to their bottom line and success. Again, they are not looking for the lowest price. They are looking for a service that will give them the freedom to focus on their business and support their success.
The high-achievers who want status? They are definitely not buying the cheapest; in fact, if you are too cheap, they’ll think that you’re not any good. They assume that if you’re too cheap, your service is lacking in some way. That it’s subpar.
The luxury buyer definitely isn’t buying on cheapness either. In fact, they enjoy buying things they consider luxuries.
Your busy mother who is looking for convenience? She may not have the same budget as the luxury buyer or the high-achiever, but she’ll spend money when you show her the true value of what you have to offer, and how it can give her the lifestyle she wants and the time to look after her kids in the way she wants; price stops being the same kind of objection.
Handling Price Objections
All price objections stem from underlying fears (and desires), and you need to address those fear “elephants” in the room.
Robert Cialdini’s research, shared in his book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, found the same pattern across decades of studies: people rarely resist an offer on the merits alone; they resist because of an unstated fear, and the ones who deal with that fear directly, rather than piling on more reasons to say yes, are the ones who close the sale.
You can see how pricing and positioning are such important aspects of marketing your business. That creating packages and then communicating them in a way that anchors the price and shows the value are essential to creating a successful image business.
If you want to download my Objection Handling Cheat Sheet for Personal Stylists for each of the different types of buyers we’ve been talking about so that you can communicate with them more effectively, you can grab it here. That way, you will have the language (and understand their fears), leading to more successful sales enquiries.
