Should You Raise Your Coaching or Consulting Prices? Read This First
If you're a coach or consultant trying to increase your revenue, you've probably heard this advice:
Raise your prices.
Charge more.
Stop underpricing yourself.
Work with fewer clients and make more money.
Sometimes raising your prices is absolutely the right business decision.
But when I work with coaches and consultants, I don't automatically look at inconsistent revenue and conclude:
“You need to charge more.”
I want to know something first...
Why aren't people buying at the price you have now?
Because changing your price before understanding what's happening around the purchase can leave you with the exact same revenue problem and a different number on your sales page.
Should You Raise Your Coaching or Consulting Prices?
The short answer is: raise your prices when the business supports a higher price, not simply because you want to make more money.
Your expertise may have deepened.
Your results may have improved.
Your offer may have evolved.
Demand may have increased.
Your capacity may have changed.
Your current pricing may no longer support a profitable delivery models.
Those are all reasons to evaluate what you're charging.
But there is another possibility that coaches and consultants often overlook:
Your price may not be the problem at all.
You may have a positioning problem.
And raising your prices won't fix it.
A Higher Price Doesn't Create More Value in the Buyer's Mind
Let's separate two things.
Price is what you're asking someone to pay.
Positioning influences how the buyer understands what they're being asked to pay for.
Who is this for?
What problem does it solve?
Why does this particular expertise matter?
Why is this different from the other options available?
Why should I solve this problem now?
Those questions influence the buying decision long before someone reaches your checkout page.
You can decide tomorrow that your $500 service now costs $1,000.
But if potential clients didn't understand why they needed it at $500, doubling the price doesn't suddenly create that understanding.
And lowering it isn't necessarily the answer either.
A $1,000 offer that isn't positioned clearly doesn't automatically become easier to understand because you reduced it to $500.
Changing the number doesn't fix the business underneath the number.
I Saw This With a Coach Charging $200 Per Session
One of my clients, who I'll call Jessica, was a mindset coach who had been in business for approximately two years.
She wasn't starting from scratch.
She had expertise.
She had experience.
She had worked with clients and produced results.
And people were interested in working with her.
But her revenue wasn't reflecting the quality of the expertise she had built.
Potential clients would inquire about her services and disappear.
Her monthly income was inconsistent.
Her messaging sounded similar to what buyers were already hearing from other mindset coaches.
And she was primarily monetizing her expertise through individual $200 coaching sessions.
It would have been easy to look at the business and say:
“Jessica needs to charge more.”
But I didn't think $200 was the first thing we needed to fix.
The $200 Price Wasn't the Strategy
Jessica's expertise needed stronger positioning around it.
Her messaging wasn't creating enough distinction around who needed her work and why her expertise mattered specifically to that buyer.
Her offer structure also kept the emphasis on purchasing an individual coaching session rather than the larger problem her expertise could address.
That's particularly important for coaches and consultants because we're not simply selling hours.
We're monetizing intellectual property.
Your knowledge.
Your experience.
Your methodology.
Your perspective.
Your ability to recognize something your client can't see.
Your ability to advise someone toward a better decision or outcome.
Your potential client needs to understand the relevance of that expertise to their problem.
A higher price can't communicate that for you.
From $200 Sessions to a $5,000 Offer
Once we addressed the positioning surrounding Jessica's expertise, we could make different strategic decisions about how that expertise was packaged and sold.
Eventually, we moved away from monetizing her knowledge $200 at a time and positioned a more comprehensive offer at $5,000.
Within three weeks, Jessica signed her first $5,000 client.
That's the part of the story that sounds exciting.
But it's also the part I don't want you copying.
The lesson isn't:
“Turn your $200 offer into a $5,000 offer.”
I haven't seen your business.
I don't know your buyer.
I don't know your offer.
I don't know your sales process.
I don't know what your market is already telling you.
Jessica's strategy was built for Jessica's business.
The principle you can take from it is this:
The higher price wasn't the strategy. The higher price became possible because we made better strategic decisions about the business underneath it.
That's very different from simply deciding to charge more.
More Revenue Doesn't Automatically Require Higher Prices
This is another distinction I want coaches and consultants to understand.
If you want to increase your monthly revenue, raising your prices is one possible lever.
It isn't the only one.
Your business may need more qualified buyers.
Your existing audience may need a clearer offer.
Your positioning may need greater distinction.
Your path from marketing to purchasing may have unnecessary friction.
You may have people expressing interest without a clear next step toward payment.
You may even have an offer that's perfectly capable of producing more revenue at its current price.
This is why I don't like prescribing a revenue strategy before diagnosing the revenue problem.
Different problems require different decisions.
Before You Raise Your Prices, Look at What Happens Before Payment
Here's the question I'd rather have you answer first:
What happens between someone becoming interested in your business and actually paying you?
Think about the pathway.
Someone discovers your business.
They become interested in what you know.
They encounter an offer.
They evaluate whether that offer is right for them.
They decide whether the investment makes sense.
Then they either pay or they don't.
Your price sits inside that pathway.
It isn't the entire pathway.
So if you're getting attention, inquiries, clicks, conversations, or interest without enough of those people becoming paying clients, don't automatically assume changing your price will solve it.
Understand where the disconnect is first.
Otherwise, you can spend the next month changing prices, rebuilding offers, creating content, or trying to generate more traffic while the actual revenue problem remains untouched.
Your Price Should Be a Strategic Decision
I'm not against raising your prices.
I'm against treating pricing like a motivational exercise.
“Charge your worth” sounds good on social media.
But your worth is not the price of your coaching package or consulting engagement.
Your price is part of your business model.
It should make sense for the offer, the buyer, the value, the delivery, the market, your capacity, and the business you're trying to build.
Sometimes the right strategic decision will be to raise it.
Sometimes it won't.
The goal isn't to have the highest price. The goal is to build a profitable business where the right buyers understand the value of what you're selling and have a clear path to paying you for it.
That's a much bigger conversation than price.
Before You Change the Price, Understand Your Path to Payment
If you already have an offer, you're marketing your business, and people are showing interest but that interest isn't consistently turning into revenue, this is exactly what I want you looking at.
I created The Path to Payment for coaches and consultants who already have something to sell but need to understand what is happening between interest and payment.
It's a 2-hour audio training designed to get you looking at the pathway your potential buyers are currently taking through your business and where that pathway may be creating unnecessary friction.
This isn't another training telling you to create more.
It's about understanding what you've already built.
Because before you change another price, create another offer, or spend another month trying to attract more people:
Make sure the people who are already interested have a clear path to becoming paying clients.
Bianca Shellie - Robinson, MBA, PMP
Business Strategy Consultant and Corporate Business Trainer
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