How to be more confident and specifically how to be more confident with your price.

Confidence is important. Your customers buy your confidence in a very real sense. Primarily,  they buy your confidence that you can do the job and give them what they want and the confidence that gives them that they’re going to get what they want.

However, as a tradie,  it’s very difficult to feel confident. You build confidence in your trade skills over years of learning and getting better and practicing, and being taught and mentored by someone who’s already got experience during your apprenticeship.

But not so much with business, with sales, or with your pricing, you don’t really learn that unless you’re lucky and when you start out on your own.

So then you’re back to square one when it comes to confidence, you  don’t feel confident in your business skills when you’re starting out or your sales ability or your skills as a business person.

I’m going to focus this video on price confidence because otherwise, it’s a long video.

I’m going to talk about how to help yourself feel more confident about your price – the feeling you put your quote in and your customer or you’re not yet customer says something like ‘you’re expensive’ or ‘you’re more expensive than somebody else down the road’ and your confidence dries up a bit doesn’t it. You don’t necessarily know if he’s right or she’s right but you generally aren’t feeling strong and a few things could be going on. They could be lying because it’s very common – people lie all the time. They think it’s reasonable and okay to lie to tradespeople about having got other quotes, so they could be lying.

You could be too expensive -they might be right. You might be too expensive because your rates are high and you’re overcharging. You could be too expensive because you were allowed too much time or too much material whatever. You could be expensive because you included too much in your quote and the other competing quote doesn’t do as much work and doesn’t include as much in scope.

The other guy could have f*ck something up, you could have f*ck something up, so there’s a number of things that could be happening when someone says you’re too expensive.

So how do you increase your confidence, at least your confidence that your price and your quote is good and fair for the job? I’m going to stick with good and fair. You can’t be more confident that he isn’t lying unless you know that your price is reasonable and then he’s probably lying, all the other guys f*ck up so you narrow the possibilities down.

I’ve written a guide which you can ask for if you say confidence guide but I’m going to walk you through step by step now. If you want to see it written or you want to refer to it again, ask us for the guide.

1.  Know your worth

I want you to think about how you’ll feel if you find yourself in this situation and your response internally isn’t sh*t. ‘I haven’t got this wrong but nope my price is right’. Think again because that’s what we’re aiming for here when someone says you’re too expensive. We’re aiming for a fair reasonable, something else is going on.

In our group coaching call the other day, one of my clients dropped this enjoyable little bomb. He said ‘I had a nice win. I put my quote in and the client said “the other quote came at this price” so I said you should go with them, that’s a very good price. He called the next day to say they’d be going with me, there was no other guy.’ His confidence that his price was right and fair helped him respond like that.

So one way to build confidence in your pricing is like building confidence in your technical trade skills is to build years and years of experience in your niche, in what you do of course. And the way to build that much more quickly is of course to do some work.

So first know your worth – are you any good or is the work of your business any good? You know if you’re a good trades person and you know if your business puts good work out there and looks after your customers and communicates well.

Get yourself clear on how good you are and why, and what it is about what you do that’s good. Not all trade businesses are good, they’re not all the same and they’re not all good in the same ways either. We call this doing your marketing groundwork. In our program, it’s about getting clear and being able to articulate specifically why you’re good.

‘We do good work’ says nothing.

2. Know your costs

If you understand your costs and your profits are on top and fair, or your margins are on top are fair, if you’re not being greedy and that your pricing rates are fair, you can be more confident.

3. Compare

Compare your rates and your margins to other businesses doing your trade. Go and compare notes with people – have conversations and a beer or a coffee, ‘I’ll show you yours if you show me mine’. Share and ask them and compare your quality and the standard of work your business does to the standard of work theirs does because if you do a better job, you should be a bit more expensive, shouldn’t you?

4. Price outputs, not inputs

Don’t get caught up in hours of labour and margins and your input costs. People are buying an end result, sell that and price that, and quote an end result. Let them compare end results rather than rates or margins. If they ask, explain yourself of course but you’re not charging for the hours, you’re charging for the thing they get. It’s a mental shift you need to make.

5. Be clear about what you’re pricing

Be clear what that end result is exactly what they get for their money. I’m talking about the scope – everything that’s included and everything that’s excluded so they understand the value that goes along with your price and so if somebody else is cheaper, they can check if they’re getting the same thing.

So all these five done together will leave you supremely confident when you present your quotes and pretty much invincible when somebody tries to tell you that you’re too expensive.