How to Get Clients to Choose Your Highest Priced Service

Let me guess: you’ve gone through many stages of packaging up your offerings and services in an effort to make more money from your freelance business.

You may have started with no packages, and just doing custom quotes (then realised you were wasting so much time with custom quotes for people looking only for a bargain)

Then you maybe read about the power of tiered pricing and thought it would be a good idea to bring in people with different budgets.

So you created multiple packages at different price points hoping at least some would see the value in the highest price option.

Or maybe you still do custom quotes but you have “starting at” prices at different levels for different ranges of offerings.

BUT YOU’RE ONLY ATTRACTING CLIENTS THAT WANT THE CHEAPEST OPTION.

I’ve been there.

The first time I wanted to raise my prices, I was scared.

It’s scary, right?

So instead of just raising them, I created higher priced offerings and tried to make them sound much more appealing than the cheapest option.

You know what happened?

Majority of my clients still chose the lowest price offering. Sound familiar?

And I was stuck cranking out work for the same low price, not able to significantly increase my income without working myself into overwhelm.

Here’s the first part of the problem: If you have a low-priced option, you will attract people that are looking for lower prices.

So the solution is simple: Get rid of your lower-priced option.

Delete it (or put it back into page drafts if that feels too final).
Stop promoting it.
Don’t make it visible anywhere on your website.

I know, it’s scary.

You’re holding on to that low-priced offering for dear life, afraid that you’ll miss out on the business of the people that can’t afford your pricier options.

You’re putting all your time, energy and worry into figuring out how to better market your premium services and how to get in front of the clients that are willing to pay more.

But that brings up the second part of the problem: 

MOST PEOPLE DON’T KNOW EXACTLY WHAT THEY WANT AND NEED.

So even if they are willing to pay a lot more, when they see you have a cheaper option, not knowing exactly what they need, and given the prompt to rationalize spending less by seeing a cheaper option— they choose the cheapest option!

Even though you’ve tried to make it less appealing.

Even though you’ve spent hours on your premium offering trying to make it irresistible.

It’s there.
So they choose it.

When I went the 3-option route for web design, here’s what it looked like:

$1000 custom starter website, minimal add-ons, everything you need to start
$2000 custom website with a few more bells & whistles
$3000 everything you need to have the perfect custom website

The result: I sold a ton of $1000 websites.

Of course, I tried to distinguish these with lots of minute details like how many pages I would create and format, how many extra plugins I’d install, etc.

But clients don’t really understand those details. They want the end result. If the cheapest option looks like it can get them the result, they’ll choose it.

So with the above options, I had to keep taking on more and more clients to increase my income, which led me inevitably to burnt-out.

Then one day, I simply decided to remove the lower 2 options and see what would happen.

No, the clients didn’t stop knocking on my door (I had built up a steady marketing process and referral business to keep them coming).

And they didn’t run away once they only saw one option.

They wanted to work with me and the $3000 website was the only way to do so.

I instantly started increasing my income while being able to take on less clients at a time, freeing me up to work on my passion projects and create some passive income products.

DO YOU HAVE MULTIPLE OFFERINGS FOR THE SAME SIMILAR SERVICE?

If so, and you’re struggling to get more people to go for the premium option, try taking away the others.

Just try it.
Experiment.

You can always offer them again. (or even better, offer them for limited-time seasonal specials to create some extra interest during slow times)

Then if you decide you miss helping out those who really can’t afford it, create something new for them.

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