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No, You Don’t Need to Publish Pricing on Your Website

By Danielle Keister |
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No, You Do Not Need to Publish Pricing on Your Website

I heard the most ridiculous thing this morning.

Yet another internet marketer was telling people that it’s a matter of respect to publish pricing on your website, that you are being “manipulative” if you don’t publish prices so that a “logical, rational, open-hearted, responsible ADULT” can decide whether it’s in their price range.

This is the kind of thing cheapskates say.

And I’ve got news for them: respect goes both ways.

In fact, what’s manipulative and dishonest is them implying that you are manipulative, dishonest, and not an open-hearted adult if you don’t publish your prices.

Playing to the lowest common denominator is a race to the bottom of the client barrel, folks.

Nothing good comes from listening to those who merely want you to make it easier for them to pit providers against each other on price so they can get something of value for as little as possible.

Let me set you straight. Not posting pricing has nothing to do with being manipulative or coercive.

It’s the fact, plain and simple, that more conversation is needed with a provider before cost can be determined.

Because here’s what “logical, rational, open-hearted” adults also know: their needs are not going to be exactly the same as the next person’s needs and, therefore, cost can vary depending on differing particulars and variables.

  • If you need your fence painted, would you want a one-size-fits all price?
  • If your fence area is much shorter than the mansion down the street whose fence is taller and covers vastly more square footage, would you expect to be charged the same amount of money?
  • And what needs are important to you when it comes to your fence?
  • Are you looking for more of a quick, slap-dash, cosmetic kind of job and aren’t much more invested in it than that?
  • Or are you looking for something that shows more obvious high quality work that involves more prep and skill, but will stand up better to the elements as well as increase curb appeal and property value?
  • Do you need a special kind of paint or color?
  • Is long-lasting, mold-resistent paint important to you (which comes at a higher cost, but requires less maintenance and repainting)?

Do you see how more in-depth one-on-one conversation with a live, actual person here is vital?

There is more probing and questioning a provider must engage in with you in order to identify the needs, values, and results that are important to you individually before they can give you an appropriate price.

I don’t think anyone can call that anything but reasonable, rational and client-centric.

And consider this… how many times when you’ve needed services have you called around and ended up choosing the person/service that you felt the most “good” about, simply based on your actual conversation and interaction with that person/business, regardless of the price and despite how much conversation was needed?

You simply came away feeling like they cared a little more about you as a person than the next provider, about what your goals were, about the quality of their work, about doing a great job for you and making sure you got the right price for your situation.

We’re talking about human to human services here, not boxes of cereal along the grocery aisle.

Professional services (which includes the professional service of administrative support) aren’t commodities on a shelf, one exactly the same as the next.

And value-based pricing, if you follow the methodology I teach, isn’t based on an hourly rate.

The ingredients required to support one client are not necessarily going to be the same ingredients the next client needs. So there isn’t a nice, neat, one-size-fits-all price you can publish.

Providing administrative support, and professional services in general, involves more details than simply buying a box of macaroni sitting on a store shelf.

Out of respect for all parties, you owe it to both the client and yourself to require some further conversation apart from the website so that you can both get certain vital information from each other, determine where and whether you can help, and see if there’s a good mutual fit so that you can then determine what their particular plan of support would cost.

That’s something that has to be done on an individual basis, not on your website.

And rational, reasonable adults — who have a vested interest in finding real solutions and getting the right help and are not merely shopping for the cheapest provider — understand this.

Instead of publishing prices, have a conversation on your website about your approach to pricing and why you don’t publish prices. Rational, reasonable adults are perfectly capable of understanding this.

In fact, it will make perfect sense to them once you bring it to their attention. They’ll actually appreciate it and feel better knowing that you have their best interests at heart, which is exactly why one wouldn’t publish pricing.

It does clients a disservice to treat them all the same (hmm, sort of like they were nothing more to you than interchangeable boxes on a shelf).

But you can’t get more meaningful insight or learn more about them without further conversation.

The happy byproduct of that conversation, incidentally, is that they also get more insight into why they would want to choose you.

And I’ll let you in on a little secret: In a sea of websites all trying to be generically the same (and whose skills and polish tend to be just as low-grade), not publishing prices (and stating the reasons why) will be a competitive advantage that makes you stand out and will attract better, more ideal clients.

It is precisely because my ideal clients are rational, reasonable, and intelligent adults that I do not post pricing on my website. They are smart enough to understand why an actual conversation is in order first.

So, I don’t publish pricing on my website because:

  1. I am not interested in working with every ham-fisted knucklehead who stumbles upon my website.
  2. My ideal clients are rational, reasonable, intelligent adults able to grasp the necessity of further conversation before pricing can be determined and discussed.
  3. Each client is a unique individual who deserves more than a generic, one-size-fits-all solution.
  4. Each client is a human being, not a dollar figure, who deserves my time and sincere interest in learning more about their particular circumstances, goals and obstacles.
  5. I care about providing each client with a custom, personalized — not generic — plan of support that will get them the results they’re looking for and is priced accordingly. That’s not something you can generically publish pricing for.
  6. I don’t sell hours or bill hourly. Because selling hours actually works against achieving the results clients want to see in the most expedient way possible.
  7. The price of one client’s administrative support plan is not necessarily going to be the same as the next client’s, if I’m truly taking their individual needs and interests into consideration and not just trying to make as much money off every one of them as I can.
  8. If someone is only looking for the cheapest provider and my not posting prices helps them move on, that is exactly my intention. It’s part of my organic process for sorting the ideal from the unideal before they contact me.
  9. I don’t offer half-baked quick fix schemes. If my not posting prices helps move them along to someone else, that helps me reserve my time for more ideal, better qualified client candidates and consultations. This is again by design, not accident. (Looking for quick fixes is a telltale sign you’re dealing with a cheapskate who will not only devalue the work, but you and everything else along with it.)
  10. It’s just not that simple.

There is much more to say about this topic in order to fully grasp all the nuances of posting or not posting prices. I encourage you to read more here about the pros and cons of posting/not posting pricing on your website. 

And if you want — if you need — to charge more than $5/hour and you don’t want to be stuck with a poorly earning practice the rest of your life, you need to learn how to price and package your support in a way that speaks to clients and what they care about (none of which requires you to publish pricing or compromise your high standards around client care and discovery), and you need to learn how to have the whole pricing conversation that goes along with that.

I have three products that will teach and show you exactly how to implement those things, step-by-step:

  1. Breaking the Ice: Complete, Step-by-Step Guide for Confidently Leading the Consultation Conversation and Converting Prospects into Well-Paying Monthly Clients Who Can’t Wait to Work with You (GDE-03)
  2. Value-Based Pricing & Packaging Guide: How to Price and Package Your Support Value & Expertise — NOT Selling Hours (GDE-39)
  3. Build a Website that WORKS (GDE-40)

If you want better clients, if you need to improve your skills when it comes to talking with clients about price, if you want to have an easier time getting clients and consultations, there simply no way around it: you must increase your knowledge, understanding, and skill in these three key areas.

How to Respond When Clients Ask “How Much Do You Charge Per Hour?”

By Danielle Keister |
12 Comments

A week ago I promised my mailing list community that I would share with them a script for responding to prospects when the first thing out of their mouth is What’s your hourly rate?

I feel you!

It can be the most irritating question in the world when it’s pretty much the first words they utter right out of the gate.

But guess what? You have a lot to do with why they are asking that in the first place.

And no, it’s not because you don’t have pricing on your website. Pricing for professional services doesn’t belong on your website.

But we’ll discuss that in a moment.

First, I want to preface things by saying that the response to that kind of question is different depending on the context.

For example, selling products is a completely different ballgame than selling professional services.

There’s a completely different context, different process, and different conversation involved for each of them respectively.

On my blog, we’re always talking about retained ongoing monthly administrative support. This is what is known as a collaborative partnering relationship.

This is not the same thing as selling products or piecemeal project work (i.e., secretarial services).

So, it’s important that you understand that the scripts I’m going to share with you are for the context of retainer clients (i.e., clients who pay a monthly fee for ongoing, monthly administrative support).

Unless you are selling a cheap commodity, clients need have context in order for your fees to make sense.

If there’s going to be any kind of mutually beneficial relationship, you can’t answer that question off the cuff. There’s a bit more to it than that.

There are simply things you need to find out first from the client before you can even begin to understand their needs, goals and challenges, and then devise your support plan recommendation for them.

When the first thing a prospect asks is What’s your hourly rate?, that’s a clear sign that:

  1. they have not bothered to read your website (and, thus, are not a good prospect), or
  2. your website has not properly educated them, and failed to provide them with the right information in the right way (which is more commonly the case).

When you don’t provide your site visitors and prospects with thorough information, you don’t give them any other criteria with which to evaluate the value.

They will always resort to the pricing question when that’s the case.

This is something you can correct:

  1. Stop parroting the same tired, boring, homogeneous (and ineffective) party line that EVERYONE else in the industry is reciting chapter, line and verse. You’ve GOT to stop this people, seriously! This is your business, not a high school clique where you’re only allowed to belong if you conform with the crowd. Blending in is NOT what you need to do in business; you need to STAND APART from the crowd, come up with your own message and speak in your OWN voice).
  2. Adding more thorough content and information. Because you don’t want them asking How much? You want them saying, I’m intrigued. I can see you understand the business and profession I’m in and the kind of challenges and issues I face in moving forward. I’d like to schedule a consultation to find out more about how you can help me achieve X, overcome X or solve X.

In the context of your business, as an Administrative Consultant who works with clients in an ongoing support relationship, your goal is to find retainer clients.

What you need to do in that case is gear all of your information toward that goal, educating clients about what you’re in business to, how you help them, how it works, how you work together, etc.

Think of your website as a form of mini or pre-consultation itself. Have it answer all the questions a potential client could conceivably ask you or want to know.

The more information you provide, the better you prequalify your prospects (because the ones who are not a fit will weed themselves out) and the more likely your ideal prospects will take the next step (i.e., scheduling a consultation).

You want to provide a nearly exhaustive amount of information on your website — everything except pricing.

There are many reasons why pricing on your website works against you as a professional service provider:

  1. You are not a cheap commodity that can only be quantified by price. When you portray yourself as nothing more than something on a shelf that they can get at one of a thousand other places (the only differentiating factor being your rates), you actually create the very price-shopping mentality you seek to avoid. You want clients who are truly interested in the value of the work in helping them move forward, achieve their goals, overcome challenges and grow their business. By insisting on that standard and holding yourself and what you do in that esteem, you weed out the cheapskates and those only looking for quick fixes. If you make people who can’t pay, don’t want to pay, or who are impatient with your process your clients, you will be the engineer of your own business unhappiness, unprofitability and unsustainability.
  2. You cut your nose to spite your face. Some people argue that posting prices helps get rid of the price shoppers who waste their time. But when you do that, that’s the thing nearly every visitor to your site zeros in on to the exclusion of everything else that’s more important — including all the information that conveys your value. There are far better ways to prequalify clients, my friends!
  3. You throw the baby out with the bath water. Here again, when you try to get the price-shoppers to weed themselves out, you’re also scaring off all kinds of other perfectly suitable client candidates who may simply misunderstand what things would really cost and mistakenly think they can’t afford this kind of support relationship. They need context, but they’ll never get that far if you scare them off before that can happen.
  4. It’s not the time and place. Ongoing administrative support is a bigger relationship. It requires more of an investment and commitment from the client, and, therefore, requires a bigger conversation. Prospects need context in order to make sense of your fees and that only happens in consultation, not on your website.

So this is what you’re going to say when the first thing out of a prospects mouth is What’s your hourly rate?:

I can’t answer that question off the cuff because my goal is to ensure you get the best support you can afford. Your business needs, the challenges you face and your underlying goals and dreams are unique. We need to meet first in a consultation where I can gather more information and learn more about those things before I can create a support plan just for you and tell you what it would cost.

There is a way to provide a frame of reference for potential clients that doesn’t promote price-shopping. You do that by simply letting them know the minimum monthly investment they would need to make in order to work together. So what you would add onto the comment above would be this:

What I can tell you is that the minimum monthly investment any client would need to make in order to have my ongoing monthly support is $X per month.

And on your website, instead of listing fees, you would instead talk about your pricing methodology and its benefits, how and why you bill as you do, and include that statement about the minimum monthly investment they would need to make.

Remember, the goal is to get them in consultation and talk to you further, not your website, so that you can provide needed context for your fees.

When prospects ask the rate question, the other thing they’re trying to determine is whether or not they can afford it.

Letting them know the minimum monthly amount helps them do that in a way that gets them to look at fees from a more value-based perspective and encourages the opportunity for further discussion.

My wish for you would be to get away from billing by the hour (selling hours) entirely because it cheats you and cheats the client by putting your interests at odds with each other.

It’s a very archaic, UN-beneficial way of charging for your value — for you and the client — and actually discourages prospects from seeing your value.

Your goals for getting paid for the value of your time and expertise should be in sync with the kind of goals and results the client is looking for from the work and how that work achieves their objectives and helps move them forward in their goals and the pursuits they’re aiming for.

You don’t want that question boiling down to how fast you can kill yourself doing the work so that the client doesn’t have to pay as much. That will be the death of you and your business.

When you employ my value-based pricing methodology, here’s what you get to add to all of the above:

I don’t charge by the hour and here’s why:  hourly billing cheats you because it puts our interests at odds with each other. Billing by the hour, I obviously make more money the longer things take, and you, naturally, prefer things to take the least amount of time possible so that you don’t have to pay so much. That’s a horrible dynamic for us to work together in! And so I don’t. The work that’s going to truly get you results, move you forward and keep your business humming along smoothly can’t be dependent upon a clock. And when you work with me, it doesn’t. I want to achieve real results and progress for you. That can’t happen by selling you hours. Your needs, goals and challenges aren’t cookie cutter and so I don’t offer cookie cutter solutions. Instead, what I do after we meet in our consultation is come up with a support plan recommendation. From there we can hone it until it’s just the right fit. And you will pay one simple monthly fee for that support. That’s it. No worry about hours running out. No overages. It’s easy to budget for and all our focus will be on the work and accomplishing your objectives, not on the clock.

There’s much more to learn and understand when it comes to pricing and how to talk about fees with clients. I’ve packaged all that up for you in my Value-Based Pricing and Packaging Toolkit, which I encourage you to check out. (Be sure to read the testimonials and success stories.)

Dear Danielle: Should I Post Pricing on My Website?

By Danielle Keister |
4 Comments

Dear Danielle:

Quick question. Is it good business practice to place your price list and hourly fees on your website? –Talanda Ferguson

It’s always the “quick” questions that are anything but, lol. Whether or not to post pricing on your professional service-based business website is a frequent topic of conversation and debate. It takes a bit more in-depth learning and education to understand why it’s not really a good idea when it comes to professional services.

I write about this topic frequently so I’m going to point you in the direction of a couple of my previous posts that will help you better understand the pros and cons and the reasons I advocate against posting rates:

Price Is NOT the Bottom-Line
Screening the Tire Kickers

Andy Beale, a well-known marketing consultant and blogger at Marketing Pilgrim, also wrote an excellent article on this topic. His article is directed toward the marketing industry, but the advice is relevant to any kind of professional service and consulting business, including Administrative Consulting:

Why Marketing Agencies Shouldn’t Publish Their Fees

I also want to mention that I’m not an advocate for hourly pricing. I didn’t invent the methodology, but I did introduce our industry to the concept of value-based pricing, and I originated the process for how to employ that methodology with ongoing support, which is what I really recommend you look into. You can visit my Value-Based Pricing Toolkit product page to view a video and learn more about why selling hours is actually killing your business.

Let me know if this helps. And do post your comments and questions so we can keep the discussion going. I’m particularly interested in hearing the reasons and concerns any of you have about why you think you need to post your fees. I may be able to shed some light and give you some info to see things from a different perspective that ultimately will help you earn better and gain better clients.

Screening the Tire Kickers

By Danielle Keister |
1 Comment

Getting back to the topic of this post, which talks about the wisdom of putting your rates on your professional service site, I want to address a common sentiment.

One of the biggest complaints I hear from those in our industry and other independent professionals is having tire-kickers and price-shoppers waste their time. That’s usually the rationale they have for posting their fees.

They figure if they post their rates, the ones who can’t or don’t want to pay will go away and not waste their time.

The problem with that thinking is that without providing context for your fees that only a consultation conversation can provide, you will lose perfectly good clients large and small who then make wrong assumptions around what they think the cost will be.

There are lots of ways you can screen the price-shoppers and prequalify prospective clients without posting fees.

For one, simply having the standard that you have a consultation process and require consultations to be scheduled will eliminate looky-loos who aren’t serious about hiring a real professional.

This also helps you manage client expectations from the get-go. It shows prospects that you have a system behind the solutions you provide, and allows you to set the quality and pace of the relationship, if there is one to be established.

You can also use a contact form to help pre-screen prospects. For example, you can offer checkboxes for prospective clients to select that indicate their interest level (e.g., “I’m in the research phase” and “I’m in ready to partner with an administrative expert NOW”). Depending on which box they check, knowing the level or character of their interest will help you determine what starting point to take in your initial contact with each.

One indicates someone who is ready and actively seeking someone to work with, and therefore someone you may want to give priority access to your consultation time and attention. The other indicates someone who is more or less curious and possibly price-shopping. With those prospects, you may want to direct them to further information or other resources on your website rather than spending time in a consultation.

So don’t think you have to list your prices and put all your cards on the table (and thereby miss out on the opportunity to provide context) just to eliminate the tire-kickers. Because what you’ll really be doing is throwing the baby out with the bath water.

Price Is NOT the Bottom-Line

By Danielle Keister |
2 Comments

Jakob Nielsen recently published his annual Top Ten Mistakes in Web Design for 2007. Most of his advice is spot on… until we get to #10 (Not Answering Users’ Questions).

Nielsen avers that “the worst example of not answering users’ questions is to avoid listing the price of products and services.”

Nielsen may be a web site usability expert, but he’s not an expert on marketing and negotiating professional services.

Over the past several months, I’ve been talking to many, many business experts, and this is one of the questions I always have for them since it’s such a point of conversation and debate in every professional service-based business. Nearly every single expert essentially says the same thing:

Posting professional rates on your website is the quickest way to lose business.

Says Rob Frankel, branding expert, author of The Revenge of Brand X and frequent guest commentator on CNBC, CNN and NBC Nightly News, “Posting prices works for low value stuff, commoditized products–not professional services. Clients need to be educated about what you do in order to really understand the value.”

Frankel further states, “If you show prospects your pricing without any education, you’ll lose far more business, actually drive prospects away. And the ones you DO get will be price-driven, always looking for the cheapest way out. They do not make for good clients because they’re focused on cheap, not what you produce. You have to focus your clients on what’s important. If you don’t, they’ll make it up as they go along, and then everything is out of control.”

Clients simply aren’t going to get that information until they talk with us, no matter how we frame it on our websites. Once a rate is on the page, that’s the thing they zero in on to the exclusion of everything else. And you both lose out on an opportunity in the process.

I conducted a little experiment on this, too.

I typically average 3-4 consult requests a month for ongoing administrative support with no pricing listed anywhere on my site.

Once I’ve had the opportunity to talk with clients in a consultation, I pretty much have my pick of the ones I want. But during the month that I posted a pricing page, I saw all my site traffic immediately going to that one page, and got not one single consult request.

I also noted that my site visitors were spending dramatically less time on my site overall. Every bit of other information about the value and benefits and solutions was ignored.

Once I took that page down, I literally overnight saw a huge increase in not only page views, but in the amount of time visitors were spending on them. You could actually see that they were reading all of the information presented. And the phone started ringing again.

And trust me, there’s no guilt or whispered discussion about the investment–once I’ve learned what I need to know and gone over the important things clients need to know, I’m very direct about what it’s going to cost to work with me. But they need the context of our consultation conversation in order for that cost to make sense. And I can’t even begin to tell them anything about cost until I have gained an understanding about what their needs, goals and challenges are through our consultation conversation.

It should never be your intention with your website to elicit calls about price. Your website’s purpose is to establish rapport, educate about the value and how and what results are achieved, and compel prospects to want to learn more about the solutions you offer from you–a real live person–in a consultation.

It’s not the job of a website to “close the deal.” Negotiation happens between PEOPLE–not between websites and strangers.

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