#131 5 Reasons To Raise Your Prices
I am not a fan of an arbitrary price increase. I learned this from my first business coach, Anna Nassery. "You don't just raise prices because it's a new year. You raise prices because you have a reason."
Ironically, I'm planning to raise prices on one of our core services in the new year. But, I do have good reasons!
Let's break down the 5 reasons you should raise your prices... you only need one to warrant that increase.
(1) You beta tested an offer and now you have great testimonials & case studies
In order to get people into your first round of your program, or to be a founding member of your membership, you slash the price. You show the price you want to charge and reduce it (usually by 40-60%) for a short period of time.
This allows you to build case studies, get great testimonials, and sell the next round at full price. But you shouldn't increase the price until you've implemented the feedback, worked out the kinks, and it truly is a better experience worth more money.
When we started our community build service I charged 20% what we're charging now, and I took a loss on the work (red rows in my project margins sheet). But it was worth it because we built amazing case studies (very quickly) to sell our next 10 projects.
(2) You've added additional resources and so your costs are higher
When your program or membership scales, you need to add more support to keep (and improve) the quality of experience. Most scaling programs add a coaching team, a mastermind or small-group experience, and they update the onboarding and overall structure.
You'll likely hire a community manager, a head of programming, or a product leader to manage the scale strategy... or you might hire a team like Affinity to do all of that for you 😉.
New members = more money... but you also need to consider your product margin with your scaling team. If you're adding more support and resources, then you can increase your price.
(3) Your offer quality has gotten better
This goes hand in hand with points 1 & 2 – if you've improved the quality of your program, and you've added more support or resources, then it's time to make the price reflect that.
If you're building a community-driven business, then you're constantly iterating and improving on your offers and processes. You always strive to make your offer better and wow your customers.
I used to do the designs for our community build projects myself (think custom icons, banners, and more), but now we have a designer on our team who does way better work than I did.
We used to operate in Slack chaos, but now we have a simple document and to-do list for our clients to make it really easy to collaborate with us.
As we've improved the processes and outcomes for our clients, we've increased our prices.
(4) No one says “no” in your sales process
I've heard this advice from a lot of business & sales coaches.
If you're getting an easy yes from every single customer, then you have room to increase your prices. You may have heard that you should be getting at least 50% "no's" in your sales process.
But this really means that you shouldn't be afraid of rejection.
The opposite could also be true... you could be getting all "no's" and it means that your prices are too high for the customer you're attracting, but too low for the customer you want.
Which leads us to our next reason...
(5) You need your positioning to match your desired customer
If you want to sell to a different customer or vertical, then that may increase your scope, or change the perceived value of what you're offering. You likely need to update your positioning in the market.
Section school used to position as "top business school education for the everyday corporate climber", and now they've completely pivoted to AI education – likely targeting enterprises to train up their teams in the most important technology shift in our lifetimes.
Let's say I wanted to sell community builds to Universities. If I pitched them a $5000 community build, they'd think it wasn't robust or sophisticated enough. They have way higher budgets for projects like this and if I want to be taken seriously, I need to meet that value expectation. It's also going to be a lot more work.
So the question here is... who are you trying to serve? And what is their perceived value – in their world of budgeting – for what you're offering? It might be 5-10x 🤯
My friend Cheyenne 3x'd the price of one of her offers and it sold WAY better at this rate, and she still received feedback that the value was way more than what she was charging.
You can also play with supply & demand like top e-commerce brands.
One of my community build competitors only takes on ~4 projects per year. To work with them, you have to pay top dollar (try 6-figures) because they only have a few coveted spots.
Are you the Louis Vuitton of your niche?
I'm raising prices for our community build projects...
You saw this coming, right?
I'm increasing our base community build project fees by 50% for our projects starting in the new year (and now you understand all the reasons why).
But I have two spots left for the rest of this year which means you could be launching your brand new, or updated community, in January which is the BEST month of the year for community growth.
If you want one of our last two spots for 2025 (and to save a lot of money), you should book a discovery call with me. Or if you loathe calls, simply reply and ask me for more information.