How To Go From Charging $100 To $10,000 Per Client

Making a leap from charging $100 to $10,000 can seem impossible to most entrepreneurs. There is a mindset and tactical shift that needs to be made in order to make the leap into charging more for your services. Most entrepreneurs are underselling themselves, so I asked strategist and business coach, Pamela Bruner, to give us her top three essential tips for making this shift.

Bruner has built a seven-figure company helping business owners go from selling $100 per single session to charging up to $10,000 for a six-month program, here’s what she tells us:

1. Offer A Result By Creating A System

Whether your service is coaching, healing, consulting, or other expert services, when you have a per-session model, you’re sharing your expertise in small increments of about an hour. One of the reasons that people grumble about paying $100/session is because they don’t understand your expertise. 

“When you’re pricing by the hour, or by the session, your prospective clients aren’t evaluating your expertise. They’re evaluating what an hour is worth to them,” explains Bruner. “This means that they aren’t focused on a result, especially when a result may take weeks or months to fully deliver. Instead, they’re considering whether THEY can receive that much value per hour. Since few employees are paid $100/hour, your clients may not believe that they can get $100 of value out of an hour, regardless of how extraordinary your expertise is.”When you create and sell a system, you’re asking the client to evaluate the question “what is it worth to have this result in my life?” 

Bruner gives us an example, “Which one of these seems more valuable: A) 3 sessions of hypnotherapy, or B) a rapid-results quit smoking program that gets you off the nicotine, fast? The second description seems much more valuable, because it is a result and outcome that many people find desirable. However, for an experienced hypnotherapist, those two offerings can be exactly the same in terms of delivery.”

When you offer a desirable result, it’s not unusual to have a signature system be priced at $3,000 to $10,000 per client. The length of time to deliver your signature system can vary, depending on the result that you’re trying to create, but might take anywhere from one day to six months or more.

2. Provide An Online Resource That Can Be Returned To Over And Over

“When you create a system, you’ll want to have a combination of information and transformation,” says Bruner. The information could be in the form of PDF handouts, audios, or videos. The transformation is usually coaching or expert consulting time. This is time spent with the client to help them understand and implement the information that they’ve received.

“Often the idea of creating a system that has informational components will cause an expert to react negatively, saying ‘my work is too organic’ or ‘I respond to the client in the moment.’ Creating a system like this does require an expert to niche down. However, there are benefits to both the expert and the client with this format,” she explains.

“First, the expert always has some information to share with clients that is the same for every client. This could be core concepts, theories of healing or coaching work, or common roadblocks to results. It’s inefficient for the expert to verbally repeat that information over and over, rather than putting it in a format that the client can absorb at her leisure. Recording or writing the information also ensures that nothing is left unsaid or unexplained. The information is beneficial to the client because it will need to be heard more than once. Few people absorb new information perfectly the first time they hear it! Allowing the client to review key concepts that are essential to getting the desired result is a huge benefit to the client,”advises Bruner.

3. When You Create A System, You Can Charge A Premium

A $100 session is a commodity. When you price that way, you’re competing with all the other similar practitioners offering $85, $100 or $125 sessions. When you have a system, you can distinguish yourself as an expert. This means that you can charge premium prices – up to $10,000 or more – for several reasons.

• Exclusivity. Your clients can only get that system from you. Although your services may be similar to others in your industry, only you have YOUR system.
• Expertise. Your system gives you a structure to illustrate your expertise in a way that can be understood by the client. This requires some marketing acumen, because the expert needs to explain the benefits of a system in client-appropriate language, rather than industry jargon. 
• Elevation. Your offering is seen as elite, and elevates you above your competition as ‘the best of the best.’ This means that your premium pricing is in alignment with your message.

“Just having a system differentiates you from the majority of other people in your industry,” says Bruner. It’s time to package up your expertise and get the word out!