Hi! My name is Rachel. If we’ve not met before, I’m a wedding photographer and business coach on a mission to help wedding professionals elevate the quality of clients you attract, craft a luxury client experience, by focusing on what matters and profitably automating everything else.
Today we are talking about identifying pricing dead zones and what you need to do to get out of them.
First, I’d like to talk about some of the symptoms of being in a pricing deadzone so you can identify for yourself if you might be in one. Since I’ve been doing 15 minute business audits, I’ve been noticing some common problems.
Symptom #1: You were booking just fine, then you raised your pricing into the next thousand range and…it’s crickets. For instance, if you were booking fine at $3500, but when you raised your minimum to 4K the inquiries stopped. In my market, this happens right around the 4K mark especially. I’ve also seen it happen in other markets between 2-3K.
This happens because you’ve found the edge of a pricing tier in your market. You’ve become too expensive for the top of the market you were in, but you’re still not charging enough for the bottom of the next-level high end market in your area. This can happen even if, say, your minimum is $3500 and you’re regularly booking a 4K package. When you raise your minimum into the 4K range, you can get into a deadzone.
Symptom #2: You look at your analytics and see lots of traffic coming to your site, but inquiries have dropped significantly after raising your prices. This can be a symptom of both a messaging problem and a pricing deadzone.
This happens because when you jump into a new tier, you have a new market, and your marketing needs to upgrade too. In other words…what got you here, won’t get you there. You’ve found the limit of your past pricing tier and the marketing that worked for that audience.
So now the big question, how do you get out?
What I know to be true, is that every time I’ve made the jump into a new pricing tier, I’ve needed to do two things.
#1: I needed to get even more specific, specialized, and customized. Remember, what got you here won’t get you there. The more a client pays for something, the more specialized, specific, unique, and personalized it needs to be.
This requires a deep understanding of who your soulmate client is, and what they want and need from you, paired with knowing what makes you unique, specific, and specialized, and having a great strategy for being able to communicate that to your potential clients.
Now, I know that when I’m ready to raise my pricing, I’ll need to do a marketing upgrade as well.
#2: I needed to realize that if I wanted to raise my pricing, I needed to raise them even higher than I thought to actually BE in the next pricing tier and get out of the dead zone. I needed to realize that when I wanted my minimum to be above $3500, I should jump all the way to $5K instead of deadzoning in the $4k area, which is too high for the average-middle market in my area, but too low for the high end market. Here’s where it gets interesting…
I think that a lot of the reason we get into a deadzone is our mindset. When you decide to raise your pricing, you often stop short because you’ve reached the limit that you are comfortable charging. That’s the key word there, COMFORTABLE.
Your fear gets in the way of actually going all the way. I know I’ve experienced this myself, and needed to realize that I’ve hit a ceiling with my pricing, because I’ve hit a ceiling with my mindset. I’ve reached a new level where suddenly, I have to work through feeling unworthy to charge what I want to charge. Even if you’ve worked through this before, it will come up again when you are about to enter the right market.
Instead of using comfortability as the gauge for where you should raise your prices, I think it’s a good idea to use the fear as the sign that you should be doing a bit more. It should be a little scary, it should be a little bit butt-clenching.
Instead of lowering your pricing to meet your comfort level, look at the situation with objective facts, assess what’s not working and work on bringing your mindset up to where it needs to be to accomplish what you really desire.
I really like the book WORTHY, by Nancy Levine. Her premise is that you will have a problem with your net worth if you have a problem with your self-worth. If you’re struggling with your money mindset, I highly recommend taking a read and working on this area of your life.
Now the biggest mistake I see people making when raising their pricing, is that they fail to do both of these important things together. They do just one, or neither, and end up stuck. In order to effectively raise your pricing, you need to up-level the message your brand is putting out through your marketing to be more specific, specialized, and clear to your unique soulmate clients. AND you have to work on your mindset to be in alignment with the reality that you probably didn’t go far enough, or there’s some fear that is keeping you back in the deadzone.
The students in my Empowered Weddings Masterclass are getting really practical help with all of this as we are going deep into actually understanding and implementing all of this for their business. We’re talking through how to uplevel your messaging and how to market to high end clients effectively, we’re talking about pricing, how to present yourself as a luxury business, and most importantly, we’re addressing the mindsets that are keeping us back from the success in our business we really want.
If you want some personalized help with identifying a deadzone or if you’re feeling stuck with how you can attract high-end soulmate clients to your business, I offer free 15 minute business audits. These audits are not sales calls, they are literally there to help you get clarity on all this, and to help you take that first step forward. If you want to have a free 15 minute audit with me, follow this link and book yours today: https://racheljordaneducation.com/audit/
Blessings!
