Why Your Pricing Isn't a Number, It's a Story

Picture the scene - Heathrow Terminal 3, and flight VS091 has just been called for boarding...

The girls are buzzing. A fortnight at Disney booked ages ago, the daughter is already in mouse ears and Mum is checking the boarding passes for the tenth time . . .

And he can't move.

He's standing twenty feet from the gate and his legs have stopped working.

The fear of flying he's lived with for years has just won. Again.

The family will go without him or the holiday gets cancelled. Either way, everybody loses.

I actually know this guy.

He told me later, in his own words, "I'd have paid ten grand to anyone who could have fixed it."

Not for the technique, not for the sessions - for the outcome of boarding that plane with his family, and not falling apart as they flew off without him.

Ten grand. For a problem most coaches would price at a few hundred quid.

The truth is that most coaches are pricing the wrong thing.

I read a piece by Seth Godin this week that put words to something I've been saying on discovery calls for years. He wrote:

"When someone says 'that's too expensive,' what they mean is that the story you've told them so far doesn't match the price you're charging. You probably don't need a lower price, but you might need to earn a better story."

That's it. That's the whole game.

Your price isn't too high. Your story isn't big enough yet.

Hold on, before anyone gets the wrong idea

I can already hear it. "So you're saying if someone is desperate enough, charge them whatever you like?"

No. That's not the argument.

The argument is the opposite. The reason a coach can charge £10K to fix a fear of flying isn't because the client is desperate. It's because the coach has spent fifteen years, six figures of training, and thousands of client hours getting good enough to actually solve it in a few sessions.

The price reflects the years of work that went into being able to deliver the outcome. Not the panic of the person buying.

Charging fairly for hard-won expertise is integrity. Squeezing someone because you've spotted their pain point is manipulation.

So when I say price the outcome, I mean it the way a surgeon means it. The fee is for the twenty years of training that lets the operation take ninety minutes. Not for the ninety minutes.

Three things coaches get wrong about pricing

1. They price the deliverable, not the outcome

"Six coaching calls over twelve weeks" is a deliverable.

Nobody buys six calls. They buy what happens because of those six calls.

The guy at Heathrow wasn't buying therapy sessions. He was buying the look on his daughter's face when he walked onto that plane with her. That's the outcome. That's what the years of expertise are for.

When you write your sales page in deliverable language (calls, modules, templates, downloads) you're forcing the buyer to do the maths themselves. Most of them won't bother. They'll bounce.

Write it in outcome language and the price stops being the conversation.

2. They drop the price instead of building the story

A prospect says it's too expensive. The coach panics and offers a payment plan, a discount, a stripped-back version. The story doesn't change and the price comes down. And the sale happens, maybe.

Now you've just taught that buyer your price was negotiable from the start. You've also taught yourself your real price doesn't work. Neither of those is true. The story just hadn't done its job yet.

You had two options. Drop the price, or build the story. One of those is a race to the bottom.

The problem with racing to the bottom is you might win.

3. They confuse cheap with accessible

Cheap brings you the wrong clients. The ones who came for the lowest price will leave for the next lowest price. You know this. You've likely watched it happen.

Accessible is different. Accessible means a clear payment plan, a free intro call, a properly-built funnel that walks them through your story before they ever see the number. Accessible is a system job. Cheap is a positioning job, and usually a bad one.

It's the same in Kajabi

Here's where this gets practical. Kajabi will let you charge anything. Nine quid or nine grand, the platform doesn't care. It will happily let you build you a pricing page, a payment plan, an order bump, an upsell.

What it won't do is tell you whether your story has earned the price on the page.

That bit is on you. The video on the sales page, the case studies in the right order, the email sequence that takes someone from cold to ready, the way the offer is framed. That's the story doing the work so the price doesn't have to defend itself alone.

When the story is strong, the price feels obvious. When the story is weak, even a fair price feels expensive.

Cheap is a position. Valuable is a story. Pick one and commit.

So what now

Look at your top offer. Read the sales page out loud.

Are you selling the calls, or are you selling the moment at the gate? Are you defending a number, or have you earned it?