How to triple your prices

Transcript

In less than 12 months I have tripled some of my prices in my business and I am busier than ever. That sounds insane right? Because my prices weren’t exactly cheap to begin with! So today I want to explain to you how I’ve done it and how you can do the same in your business.

Now this is mainly for service based businesses, but some of the principles could be applied to product based businesses as well. As always, I’ll be super specific and practical about exactly how you can do the same in your business.

You’re listening to the Clare Wood podcast, where we talk all things business, finance, marketing, and mindset for entrepreneurs, sharing practical tips, and actionable advice to help you take your business to the next level. Introducing your host: me! I’m Clare Wood, I’m a numbers geek, a travel lover, and a reality tv addict, and I’m here to empower you to create an extraordinary business and an amazing life, because I believe you don’t have to choose between the two. Now let’s dive right in to today’s episode.

Before we get into today’s episode, I just wanted to say a massive thank you to all of you for listening, I can’t tell you how grateful I am, and I know your time is really precious, so thank you for spending it listening to me! Now, there are a few ways you can help me get this podcast heard by more people. One of them is to write me a review on Apple Podcast, and the other is to hit subscribe. And the great thing about that is you get notified when the next episode’s are released.

As my way of saying thank you to everyone who has left me a review, each week I want to do a few shout-outs to businesses that have left me a review.  So the reviews I want to read out today are actually from clients of mine which is super nice. The first one is from Caroline from The Flower District. Now she was a client of mine, she runs this beautiful floristry business based in Melbourne, make sure you check out her Instagram @theflowerdistrict. Her review says, “Clare gives tangible strategies that you can take into your small business and actually execute”. Thank you so much Caroline.

And the next review is from the girls at OhMyDigital. Again, I worked with these girls who run a digital agency and run a range of digital marketing solutions and they are queens of social media and lovely human beings, so again, pop on over on Instagram at @ohmydigital, and their review says “Clare always has the best stories and advice in real life, and this podcast is no different.” Thanks Ladies. Once again, if you do leave me a review, please make sure you pop your business name in it, so I can read it out on the podcast and say thank you.

Why the relationship between supply v demand is important

So let’s jump into the episode. In terms of tripling your prices, you could just jump in, triple your prices to your existing market overnight with no warning, but guess what, you will probably screw your business. I didn’t randomly decide to triple my prices, this was done over time, and so today, I want to take you through the process and show you how.

To explain the basics behind it, I‘m going to start with a little economics lesson. Maybe you guys are like “I did not sign up for this” haha. Basically there’s this principle called supply versus demand. So the law of demand says that there is an inverse relationship between price and quantity. So what this means is that as prices increase, less people will buy something and when prices decrease the more people will buy something, so how is this relevant you might be wondering? Well, as I’ve been to this date, offering something that I only having a limited supply of, which is my time, I wanted to increase demand for my services. So to increase demand for my services, I had to increase the perceived value of my services. The way I did this, is through branding and marketing. What happened was that, I increased the demand, I got really busy, and then to slow down the business, so I could keep up, I put my prices up. And I have increased my prices, three times so far this year, as I have gotten busier and busier.

So what I want to talk about today, is how you can elevate your client and customers perception of  your value so that you too can increase your prices. And increases in prices is a great thing, because it means you are making more money for the same amount of work. I have used this exact strategy to help many clients of mine to increase their pricing by double or triple, so I know this works.

How a marketing plan will help you increase value

Step 1. You need to create a marketing plan. How are you marketing your business? I shared this on the podcast before, but I would suggest you pick 5 ways that you will find new customers. I think 5 is a good number because anymore than that and it can be overwhelming and your message can get diluted, and any less and you don’t have enough different ways to reach potential new customers. And once you’ve identified 5 ways to find new customers, you then need to think about how to cultivate those relationships, get people to know, like and trust you so that they become paying clients of yours.

So you might be listening thinking, well this is all well and good Clare, but what exactly are you doing to increase your marketing? What exactly are YOU doing in your business? If you want to know the exact marketing strategies I use for my business, I’ve created a downloadable for you. It says exactly what marketing I undertake, how often I undertake it, and why do it. So you can get that in the show notes today, which is clarewood.com.au/podcast/episode14.

Something to be mindful of, this is just my marketing strategy. The reason why it works is because it’s finding where my dream clients are hanging out and marketing to them. So you need to tailor a marketing strategy to your own business, to where your dream clients are hanging out. Just something to bear in mind.

So once you have your marketing plan. The next step is to execute the plan. And consistently. Now this has been the biggest game changer for me with my marketing efforts, from my earlier years of business to the last year or so, is that I’m now very consistent with my marketing. I used to be quite sporadic with my marketing activity, things like social media and newsletters, I would just do it when I had a chance, and sometimes it was a long time between drinks, but now I’ve got to a point where I’m very consistent. Here’s the thing, here’s the reason why you need to be so consistent with your marketing. Everyone these days is so distracted, so you have to always keep hammering your marketing message home. What I want you to do is to think about, your own purchasing behaviour and I know myself, I know how many times I’ve gone to look at something online, and my kids call out to me, or perhaps I’ve gone to sign up to a program or download an e-book and then I get an urgent email, or a notification on Instagram, you know, you get pulled in a different direction, so if you think of your own behaviours, you have to think that that’s how your customers are getting distracted as well, so you have to be consistently appearing again and again so you are front of mind.

If you struggle with consistency, I have few ideas for you for how you can do this, because trust me, like I said, this is something I had to overcome myself.

How to make marketing consistent and fun

My first tip to stay consistent is to hire someone else to keep you accountable. For example, a couch  a social media manager, anyone outside of yourself, that will keep you on track. For some reason, we are more likely to do things when we have someone else to be accountable to. And I guess this is why business coaching is so effective right? There is definitely something about having a deadline and having accountability. Did anyone listening, go to university, because if you did, I don’t know about you guys, but I always did about 80% of my assignment the night before it was due. It’s a bit the same sometimes, when you have someone keeping you accountable right? The social media manager is like, where is that post, where is that picture. You might do it at the last minute, but at least you get it done. So tip number 1 is, hire someone outside to keep you on track.

Tip number 2. Make it fun. The way I got started consistently posting on Instagram Stories was because someone challenged me to do one story every day. And it was that challenge, that made it a bit more fun. So come up with a way to make consistently delivering, a bit more interesting for you. Maybe even have a competition with someone else. Like I said with consistency it is super important to when it comes to marketing to keep hammering that message home. The thing with marketing, if you have the right strategy and you constantly keep delivering you kind of can’t go wrong. If something isn’t working, if you’ve been doing all the things, and doing it consistently, then perhaps the strategy isn’t quite right. Because if you are doing this properly, it will always work.  

Overcoming fears with putting yourself out there

Now something that might be coming up for you when we are talking about all of this marketing, all of this putting yourself out there, is you might be wondering, what if people think I’m up-myself, with all this marketing? Well, this was a massive block of mine too, in my early days of business. But what I do when I want to up-level, is look at others who are doing well. And when I looked to other people in my industry, they were doing heaps of promotion and heaps of self-promotion and I thought, if it works for them, maybe I should give it a try. An example is Jenna Kutcher. And if you listen to episode 3 of this podcast I spoke about how, she noticed on Instagram, the posts that got the most engagement were pictures of herself. And thought why am I putting all these quote tiles and other stocky images in here, I’m just going to post pictures of myself, so that’s what she did. And she gained a heap of new followers in the process. So I decided to do the same, and if you have a listen to episode 3, you’ll hear the process I went through to increase my engagement on my Instagram. And I did the same. I post nearly all are pictures of myself. But it’s had a massive effect on the engagement on my Instagram account.

So what I challenge you, around your struggles with putting yourself out there and sharing your wins and talking yourself up, and sharing the results you’ve achieved for clients, is that you need to think less about what others think, and think about more where you are heading. Because if you have big goals, you need to do things differently.

Dealing with money blocks

This leads me to my next point, something else that might come up for you, through this process of increasing your prices is what I call money blocks. Now these are negative thoughts around money, that might be coming up for you. So you might be thinking “oh, I can’t charge that much” or “I’m not worth that much”, if this is something you find that is coming up for you, this is totally normal. But I’m telling you, no matter what industry you work in, there are people at the top charging an arm and a leg for exactly what you do. But remember there is a delicate balance of supply and demand. So if you are charging an ultra-premium, crazy price at the top of the market, there obviously aren’t going to be as many customers there. So not everyone needs to charge crazy high prices. What that sweet spot is, will be different for everyone. Because at the top end of the market you might find, there’s not the volume of work you are looking for. Or perhaps they aren’t the kind of people you want to be working with. So that place will be different for everyone, but the point I’m trying to make is that, in any industry there is definitely people charging very high prices. So that’s the first thing to think about.

If money blocks are coming up for you, then you need to work on your money mindset. This is going to be a whole other podcast episode, because there is just so much to it, so I’ll need to do an episode around it soon. But if you want to know where to get started, if the thought of putting your prices up just doesn’t sit right with you, or if it’s bringing up fear or the thought of “no one will possibly pay that” and you want to do some work on your money mindset, my suggestion would be to immerse yourself in it. Read some books about money mindset. I personally love the book ‘Lucky Bitch’ by Denise Duffield-Thomas and I think that’s a great place to start. You can listen to manifestation podcasts and the other thing I would suggest is to invest some time every day in doing some manifestation meditations, if you just Google it, they’ll come up on YouTube. Invest some time each day in visualisations and focus on manifesting and building that confidence and awareness around money. When you start to believe that you can earn more money, then you allow yourself to open up to that possibility.

So to recap today’s episode, there was the law about the relationship between pricing and demand. If you increase the demand for your services, you can increase the price, which will slow down demand, then you can continue to increase the demand for your service, then you can continue to increase the prices you can charge.

To increase your demand, you need to up-level your marketing and your branding. And to do that, you need to create a marketing plan. Once you’ve got your marketing plan, you’ve got to be consistently delivering on that plan. And if you want to check out the exact marketing strategy I use on my business, you can grab it in the show notes for today’s episode, which is clarewood.com.au/podcast/episode14.

And the last thing is, you need to work through any money blocks that might come up when you are increasing your prices, so spend some time working on that money mindset.

In less than 12months, I have tripled my prices and helped many of my clients do the same using this exact formula, so I know it works!

I hope you’ve enjoyed this episode and I’d love to hear the results you achieve when you implement this process. One of the best ways to increase your sales number in your business is by increasing your prices, especially if you can keep the volume the same. I hope you have a wonderful week, and I look forward to chatting with you all next week.

Thank you so much for joining me today, if you enjoyed this episode, please make sure you subscribe to receive future episodes, and I’d be so grateful for a review on apple podcast! If you’d like a copy of the show notes or any of the links mentioned today, please jump over to clarewood.com.au/podcast and remember that Clare is spelled CLARE, have a wonderful week and look forward to chatting to you again soon!