It’s not a good feeling when you’re attracting a bargain-betty to your business who picks apart every piece of your pricing scheme and belittles your hard work. Before you start rethinking your entire pricing scheme and if your services are worth the money you’re asking for, remember that Tiffany’s sells paperclips for $1500 a piece. Before you ask, yes, people actually buy them. You have to know, deep in your core, that you deserve more than cheap clients.
Many event creatives waste time consulting with cheap clients who cannot or will not hire them no matter what they offer. Truthfully, it can be frustrating, and it’s definitely a nuisance. But there are some things you can do to eliminate those who will never become clients without having to spend any time with them because your time is valuable and it’s about time that you act like it. Try to implement these three things in your business and watch the bargain-betties disappear!
1. Posting your Prices. Yes or No?
One of you most debated topics among service providers is whether or not you should post your prices on your website. There are pros and cons to both actually, but the biggest advantage to posting your prices is that it immediately eliminates those who cannot or will not pay full price which is what I like best. Disclaimer, this will also mean that your overall engagement with potential clients may drop, but it wont’ necessarily drop how many deals that you seal. It’s really similar to my other post about boosting your engagement rather than your reach.
When it comes to posting your prices, it doesn’t meant you have to list all of your prices for every service, but it at least gives them an idea of your level of quality. If you offer different package prices, having a price tag of $4,000 on your “basic” level makes it pretty clear that your services are premium. And guess what else? Bargain Betty will likely leave your site and head over to a cheaper competitor in their price range.
You can easily achieve this by simply stating, “design prices start at _____” which is a simple way to state you prices while still giving you flexibility.
2. Use Intake Forms.
Before you get on the phone or show up at a consultation with anyone, implement a pre-qualification first. A client intake form should tell you everything you need to know about a potential client before you pick up the phone or waste your gas. You can tell a lot about a client just by how they fill out their form. More often than not, forms that are not filled out completely or well have lazy or cheap clients on the other end of them.
Cheap clients aren’t likely to do the work required to answer even a simply questionnaire, so those who do fill out your form are better potential clients. It’s my advice that you prioritize them. If you are worried about some clients not knowing this, add in a disclaimer or directions that say to fill out the form completely with as much detail as possible. Those who don’t even bother to read the directions are probably not worth your time.
Another benefit is that you can get a better idea of their budget by including in your form a question about pricing, such as “What’s your budget for______?”. Now, I wouldn’t leave this open-ended because many have no clue what their budget is for the entire event, let alone for each section. I always provide a simple multiple choice option, so they can just pick one. My lowest price option would be $2,000, so those with smaller budgets won’t bother to even complete the form and I don’t Bargain Betty why I cannot do a full-glam wedding for $500.
3. Change Your Language.
Words are powerful and if the words you use in your marketing material are speaking to cheap clients, you’ll never attract the audience you’re looking for. Simple changes can help you to automatically attract the right audience. Think about this. If your design services cost upwards of $5000 per package, then your marketing material should probably not say “beauty on a budget”.
The best thing that you can do is narrow down your ideal audience by figuring out who your target market is creating a client avatar. A target market is who you ideally sell to as a group. It’s best to narrow this down by age, location, lifestyle, budget, etc. A client avatar takes this one step further where you narrow down who your ideal client is in one hypothetical person. If you want to learn more on how to create one, head over to this post where I show you how. Once you have it figured out, do a deep dive into who your ideal audience is and what words they are attracted to so you can better market your services. By doing this, you’ll start to get engagement and potential clients who feel you’re speaking to them and are ready and willing to pay your prices.
Overall…
In any industry, you’re going to spend some time with cheap clients and customers who will never buy from you. The key to this is to know that you are worth the price you are charging and try to minimize the time and energy you spend with cheap clients and customers who are wasting your time. You’ll still spend a little bit of time and energy on those who ultimately won’t hire you, but by making these simply edits to your website, marketing materials, and other business systems, you’ll begin to see more high-end clients and fewer of those you no longer wish to work with.
If you need assistance on getting clear on your ideal client so you can stop wasting time trying to market to everyone while booking no one, I have a coaching program geared to help you do just that! Check it out here 👉🏼 www.planning2profit.com. In the meantime, make sure to follow me on Youtube where I go live every Wednesday at 9:00PM for #poshlatenightbiz! See you tomorrow!