(If you haven’t read the first part, click here.)

People Tell Lies. Episode 2.

Recently, I posted about how people tell lies to you when they’re negotiating price. They tell lies about how cheap the other guys are hoping that you’ll match the price and how that’s a lie because if the other guy was that great, they would have bought from him. And what I’m really thinking about here is this downward pressure on your price that you feel all the time.

It’s also true that people lie to you when they didn’t give you the job anyway when they’re not trying to push you down on price and I want to explore that today.

I’m Jon, I’m from Small Fish Business Coaching and I help trades business owners grow and scale. And I help you make more money in your business, and a big part of that is helping you manage your margins and protect your margins. Part of protecting your margins, of course, is saving money.

But another part of protecting your margins is charging more in the first place and that’s really what I want you to do.

The pressure to reduce your rates

I put a lot of my energy into helping my clients charge a bit more, but not stupidly more. I’m not asking people to charge unreasonable rates but I am asking you to charge what’s fair and what you’re worth, and not to bow to the pressure that you shouldn’t bow to, because the pressure is everywhere, isn’t it?

Recommended Reading: Identifying The Signs That Your Customers Are Lying

The pressure is everywhere and if you bow to the pressure and you reduce your rates, and you run your business on skinny shitty margins, you can basically run around not having much fun, being stressed and anxious and have a not very sustainable, not very successful, not very fun, and not very rewarding business

And that’s bullsh**t.  We don’t want that. You might as well get a job. Go get a job if that’s the case.

Rather:

• Charge more
• Be worth more
• Justify more

 What am I talking about?

I’m talking about what people say when you didn’t get the job. When you ring them up to follow up a quote and they say, “Oh, I’m really sorry, the other guy’s just beat you just by a little bit. Sorry about that”.

What they really mean is: You didn’t get it. It’s something else. They tell a social white lie to cover up the awkwardness and the social embarrassment of telling you that you lost for a different reason. That’s harder for them that you lost because they didn’t like you.

We lost because they:

• Like the other guys better
• Have no money and they can’t afford the solution you put forward
• Were overstretching themselves
• Were just kicking tires and trying to suss it out anyway
• Weren’t really on the market genuinely for the project
• Really we’re just arsing about and they didn’t care that they were wasting your time and taking your professional time to do a quote
• Just wanted to know how much the thing would cost
• Were just play-acting or fantasizing

People do all this sh**t. Or even the last one, which is particularly galling, they were just price checking the guy that they really wanted to give it to already. They already knew they wanted to give it to him before they even spoke to you. You were just a price checker. They’re much more likely reasons than “the other guy just beat you or even beat you by quite a lot”.

So this is what I want you to do: Do not pay any attention to this sh**t and do not allow yourself to feel price pressure. People say that sh**t because it’s not true.

I spend a lot of my time trying to help my clients increase their prices and squeeze their prices up a bit, so you can make enough money and you can have a sustainable and worthwhile business.

And part of that means not allowing this bullsh**t to make you afraid to charge what you’re worth.

What should you do instead?

You should do what I always say.

• You should set your price according to:
  • What the market will bear
  • What other people are charging
  • How good your services compared to those other people.

If you’re at the good end and if you’re providing a great service, you should be charging a bit more than the average people.

• You should be able to articulate.
  • You should look at your sales process and your sales documentation and set what you say in your marketing
  • You should be able to articulate why you’re good so that people are listening to you, and talk about what’s great, not just looking at the price
• You should be doing all this important work rather than trying to be cheaper to win jobs because being cheaper to win jobs is a race to the bottom which you don’t want to win.

Yes, I can help. I’m a business coach. I spend a lot of my energy helping people increase their margins and make more money.

So if you’d like that kind of help, put coaching and your phone number in the comments or get in touch with me somehow.

And if you don’t want to do that, charge a bit more anyway and resist the pressure.

See you later.