Confidence In Your Price Comes from Evidence
Saying the price and holding the silence sounds good in theory. It’s what you should do. But it’s so much easier to say than do. In my first article about how to get comfortable with pricing and naming your price — Say the Price, Hold the Silence — I shared why we feel the need to talk a lot the moment we name our price.
These are not small little things that are easy to change. They are often quite big things. Old stories about money and earning it and what that means. It takes a fair amount of internal work to look at those stories, decide what’s actually true, and rewire your brain to live out of the new stories instead. Not. Small. Stuff.
As you are doing that work, there is another layer of action that is often much easier and makes the deep “where did I get these money stories from” work feel less heavy, less “let me convince myself this is true” and far more “huh, this is actually quite true.”
Before you ask yourself to feel confident about your price, you need to gather two kinds of evidence: evidence from the market and evidence from your own work.
Evidence from the market:
What are other people who do what you do charging for their services?
What types of packages are they offering for those prices?
What experience do they have / do they not have?
How are they positioning their work?
How are they marketing their work?
This is not about comparison, so be mindful of where you let your mind go as you do this factual research. This is about feeling so clear when you say your price that you know what is out there and you know exactly how you are positioned relative to your competition. This clarity comes through in every conversation you have about price.
That’s the first kind of evidence: evidence from the market. You know what else is available. You know what people are charging. You know how your work sits relative to theirs. You are no longer guessing.
What do you do with the market data you’ve gathered? You can decide you are a premium offering relative to what you’ve seen in your research and you can charge more than your competitors. Good to know that you are charging more and you can provide very compelling reasons why on every sales call. You would not know this if you had not done the research.
You may realize that no one is even offering what you offer - highlight that on the call confidently because you know. You’ve done the work to know that you’re different and exactly how.
Maybe you find that every competitor you’ve looked at is really similar to you — now you know. What, if anything, gives someone a compelling reason to choose you? This may be an opportunity to refine your offering or get much clearer about the difference that already exists.
You might see that someone is charging a lot more for similar services but they don’t have the education and experience that you do. Perhaps revisit your pricing and be sure to highlight the depth of your knowledge on every call, in every piece of content, in every marketing message.
Again - this is not comparison. Don’t fall down the “comparison is the thief of joy” rabbit hole. It’s real. Don’t go there. Your job is to honestly and evenly look at what others are charging for similar work so that when you are on a call with a prospective client, you are ever so clear on how you’re different and why you are charging what you’re charging. That clarity reads as confidence on a sales call. Because you know. You are not guessing.
Research (plus exploring your money stories) helps you build a ton of confidence around your work because you now know what your prospective client is seeing. You understand what’s available to them and how you stack up. This is a vital step in the confidence process but it’s not the only one because it’s external — based on what others are doing and how you stack up. Very helpful but we need another type of evidence as well.
Market research can tell you that people routinely pay $20,000 for the work you do. That’s useful evidence. But your brain may still whisper: Fine. Other people can charge $20,000, but can I? This is where the second type of evidence comes in…
Evidence from your own work:
What do you know?
What have you done?
What do your clients seek you out for?
What is the evidence that you have helped them?
What can you credibly claim as the results of your work?
Albert Bandura’s research on self-efficacy found that our own successful experiences --what he later called mastery experiences -- are a particularly powerful source of belief in our ability to do something. *
Build a list of proof points that tells your brain this isn’t just wing and a prayer stuff. You do know what you’re doing. Look at all the clients I’ve helped. Look where I helped them go. Look what they have to say about it.
Write it all down. Make a spreadsheet. Add to it regularly. Refer to it often.
And! You need not build this evidence bank entirely from your own assessment of your work. When I’m working with clients around this, one of my favorite things to ask them is: what are the words your last three clients used when they hired you?
What were the reasons they said yes? What was happening for them when they came to you? What did they believe their problem was? What did you see that they couldn’t? What changed for them because of your work together?
I ask this for two reasons. First, the actual language they use is gold and you can use it in all of your marketing materials. Clients don’t speak in marketing speak. They don’t speak in content creation lingo with trending sounds. They speak plainly and directly about the problem they had and how they saw you being part of the solution. Use those words throughout all of your marketing and on sales calls.
Second, there is often a through-line in their language — a few words or phrases that all three said. That is the real gold and that is how you refine your offering and positioning and perhaps increase your pricing. All three of them saw it and said yes. Repeat it for others so they, too, say yes.
You now have three sources of information:
What the market says —> “This work has _____ economic value”
What your history says —> “I have evidence I can deliver this work”
What your clients say —> “This is why we chose you and what happened because we did”
That’s a pretty formidable pile of evidence to bring into every room where you say your price.
The goal isn’t to eliminate every flicker of discomfort you have about money before you ever get on a sales call. You may be working on some of your deeper money stories for a very long time.
The goal is to stop asking confidence alone to do a job that evidence can do much better. When you know the market, know your work, and know the results you get for clients… you show up differently on every sales call. Because you’re no longer trying to convince yourself in real time that the number you just said out loud to a prospective client is reasonable. You already know it is.
Say the price. Hold the silence.
There’s one more place pricing gets tangled up for us: conflating your prices with your worth as a human being.
We’ll untangle that one next.
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