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pricing and packaging

Package Your Services: You are priceless

Hey y’all,

I just got off a training with my members on Pricing and Packaging your services.

We’re creating ease of enrollment and wanted to offer you some of the juicy parts. Why? Because it is the #1 thing I repeatedly see most people in service-based businesses are missing the boat on and was the 1st step toward building my professional practice into a million dollar business.

#1. Be really clear about who you serve. Most business owners start off in business trying to serve way too big of an audience.

My law practice took off big time when I narrowed my focus to serving families with young children and was able to become the go to lawyer in my community by educating families with young children in a way no other lawyers were doing at that time. I later expanded to serving business owners with young children at home, when I began offering legal services for business.

Up until I narrowed my focus, I struggled to get clients in the door and when I did, they often had to think about whether to hire me or were shopping around. Once I narrowed my focus and designed my service to meet their needs, I became unshoppable.

 

#2. Drop the free initial consultation and instead create a first meeting that provides tremendous value, has a name, and a specific purpose or outcome.

No one really values a free initial consultation and it’s most often seen as a sales meeting in which people really just want to know how much you charge so they can shop you.

When you shift away from the free initial consult and instead create a meeting that has a name, a purpose, and a value, your ideal clients want it, value it and whether they hire you or not, will tell all their friends and family about you.

Plus, you’re delivering value right from the start and when this meeting is done well and you prepare your prospects for it well, they aren’t focused on price, they are focused on the outcome of the meeting.

Make this meeting so awesome that you could charge for it and people would be happy to pay, but see below for how to use it in your marketing by offering it for free or discounted.

 

#3. Use your marketing to educate, educate, educate and give people an easy way to get your now named and highly valuable initial meeting for free or at a significant discount.

For example, if I served folks one-to-one, I would offer a pricing and packaging strategy session or Money Map Life and Income Planning Session at the end of this message, either at a discount or free, depending on how many new clients I wanted and where I was in my practice.

#4. Make a list of all the services you can possibly provide to your ideal clients by focusing on the problems they solve using outcome based language.

I see too many people trying to offer their services in terms of time or number of sessions (3-hours or 4 sessions) rather than in terms of the outcome provided.

Your pricing should be based on the value of the outcome you provide to the people you serve, not at all based on the number of hours or sessions it takes to get there.

#5. Base your fees (at least in the beginning) on the LEAST you can charge, rather than buying into some idea of charging what you are worth.

You are priceless.

You couldn’t possibly charge what you are worth, even if you tried. What you can do though is charge what you need so you aren’t sacrificing your life in service to your work AND once you’ve got confidence with your enrollment structure (which will happen quickly if you follow my guidance here) and your practice is full or close to full, you can increase your package fees based on the true value you are providing to the people you serve.

In order to ensure that you are not under-charging for your services while at the same time knowing the least you can charge, make sure you understand your Money Map Numbers at five levels — min to be happy, min to be of service, preferred, no limits, and now — so you know what you are working towards.

These numbers are calculated based on the life you want to have, what it will cost to have that life at your next number, the amount of time you have to earn in exchange for your services — which is less than you probably think given all the other things you need to do in your business.

If you found this helpful, check out our Money Map Life Planning Series. You can get it here.

How to Price and Package Your Services in Alignment So You Can Confidently Engage More Happy Clients and Love Your Work

I consistently see service providers ask the same question, “How should I charge for this service?”

The advice I see them get, most of the time, is the exact reason so many service providers are struggling, can’t get ahead, wonder if they are getting paid enough, work too much and overall feel stuck around their business, their income and their life.

How you get paid for what you do is probably the single biggest influencer of how much you love your work and whether you can build a sustainable income while loving your life.

When you have a process in place for how to price and package your services in alignment , rather than you just picking numbers out of thin air or pricing based on what your competitors charge, you are able to confidently engage clients easily. And, if you work for someone else, you can negotiate your pay (plus future increases) from a place of empowered clarity.

This article introduces you to the Money Map™ system for pricing and packaging your services sustainably, and in such a way that you feel in total alignment with your fees, and as a result engage more happy clients and love your work more.

(Check out the Money Map Life Planning Series – a 4-part mini-course that helps you discover your own Money Map Number and your Entrepreneurial Archetype so you can have what you need to price and package your services in full alignment and confidently engage more happy clients (or negotiate a sweet pay raise for yourself) as a result.)

Up until now, perhaps you’ve been pricing and packaging your services by looking around at how others in your market price and package their services. I’ll call this the competition model of pricing your services. This model usually results in a race to the bottom mentality; who can charge the least? And it doesn’t lead to a life you want, by any means.

Maybe you already price your services way too low, using what I’ll call the loss leader model of pricing your services. You charge as little as possible, just so you can get by and don’t have to be on the hook for doing that good of a job. You’re struggling to get by and wondering how you can possibly do more.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, perhaps you’ve been pricing your services by looking at how you can charge as much as possible. I’ll call this the suck as much as possible out of the marketplace model of pricing your services.

This model usually results in you feeling some level of incongruency with your pricing and you engaging a far smaller number of clients than you can actually serve, getting a lot of refund requests or push back on your fees. Perhaps you are also wondering if you are actually providing value, but you’ve got a lot of “face” wrapped up in your fees and you’re so focused on building a million dollar business that you feel like you’ve got to keep doing it the way you are doing it.

None of these strategies lead to pricing and packaging of your services that feels awesome. They lead to you struggling, straining, stressing out about your income and having a lot less to invest in your creative output.

Don’t Sign Your Tax Return Just Yet

So, what’s the better way?

Start with pricing your services based on the least you can charge for you to have what Lynne Twist refers to in her best-selling book the Soul of Money as sufficiency. Sufficiency means knowing what you actually need to have the life you want and then building your income to meet that need. {Tweet It!}

“Sufficiency is precise. Enough is a place you can arrive at and dwell in. So often we think of ‘abundance’ as the point at which we’ll know we’ve really arrived, but abundance continues to be elusive if we think we’ll find it in some excessive amount of something.”

So we begin there. Sufficiency. Enough. You earning what you need to have the life you want delivering a service you believe in that’s priced just right.

A service that’s priced just right for you to have the life you want must be built on a foundation of the life you want. This, my friends, is where most people get stuck.

We are deluded about the live’s we really want. We either do not acknowledge our true desires (and what it really costs to have them) because our true desires feel too outrageous, expensive or downright impossible. Or, we chase, struggle and strive for lives we can never possibly satisfy, always wanting more, more, more, more when the truth is, it will never be enough.

So a process of pricing our services based on sufficiency must begin with the truth about what we really, really, really, REALLY want, acknowledgement of what it will actually cost to have it and the real time we have available to create it.

Most of us are gravely underestimating the time we have available to invest in earning money without sacrificing our self care and relationships. As a result, we are either far undercharging for our services, deciding that self care and relationships aren’t that necessary or wondering why the heck we can’t make our lives truly work.

And if you are charging hourly for your services, forget it. Trading your limited time for any amount of money in 6-minute (or even 60-minute) increments simply sucks your life away.

When you come into right relationship with your time, putting yourself first, your family next and your income-earning activities last, you can price your services in right alignment with what you actually need to have the life you want.

This is what I’ll call the Money Map method of pricing and packaging your services. When you build in your Entrepreneurial Archetype and Archetype Path on top of that, you’re golden.

Once you’ve built on this foundation, you increase your fees as you want to free up time and as you gain more understanding of the true value of the outcome of your services to the people you serve.

Begin the process of discovering what you need to know (your Money Map Numbers and Entrepreneurial Archetype) to price and package your services confidently using the Money Map Life Planning Series.

It’s free to get started here.

Know anyone who could use some help with pricing and packaging their services? I’d love it if you passed this post along.

Everything you truly want is hiding behind your judgment and fear. Create a life plan for your true desires at www.moneymap.tv. {Tweet It!}