We’re used to nailing down the price of our offer, but when it comes to the value? Most course creators find it to be a little bit more…confusing.
As tempting as it may be to hit the delete button and remove the monetary value from all your sales presentations and emails, not providing an anchor point for your customers could be a HUGE missed opportunity.
The value of your offer gives potential customers a better insight and more context into your program, allowing them to make a more informed decision.
Unfortunately, there is no magic formula for setting the value of your program. But there are practical ways to approach it, as well as key strategies to ace the messaging around the value of your offer.
Pricing is Not an Exact Science
There’s no doubt that attaching a price to the value of your offer can be a little bit ethereal and hard to nail down.
But the concept of pricing our courses to begin with is not an exact science anyway.
When we’re coming up with the prices of our courses and programs, a lot of it comes down to choosing a number that we are comfortable selling at, which increases as we build experience and more people use our programs.
Overlooking value-based pricing just because the concept of pricing our value is not an exact science would be foolish–based on that argument, we would never have a price for our course in the first place!
The reason that price feels slightly less nebulous than value is because we *have* to do it. To buy a product, it needs a price. Whereas with value, as we’ve established, it’s not absolutely necessary, but it’s certainly very smart to include–it might just take a little more work to dig in and figure out what your offer is truly worth.
The Concept of Value
Fundamentally, the things that we sell have to be worth so much more than the price that we charge for them. It has to feel like a deal for someone in order for them to make that purchase.
This is why it’s so important to show people all of the ways that our program will benefit them, quantify that as much as we can, and then have the price much lower than that.
When it comes to value, the actual real world value of our programs is often so much more than people would ever truly believe.
Take our Circuit Sales System program, for example. We sell a program that could very easily (and already does!) transform someone’s business from a six-figure business to a seven-figure business.
That’s already $1 million in one year, and if you stay in business 20 or 30 years, that means our course is worth at least $20 – $30 million. But if we were to say our course was worth $30 million in our messaging? People would say we’d lost our minds. We have to put the value in numbers our audience understands.
This is not just the case for things that will earn you money–in all of our industries, our potential buyers have been spending money on things to try to solve the problem that they haven’t yet solved. So when they do finally solve the problem, they don’t have to spend all of that money anymore and that is a saving.
Real World Pricing Context
As you’re selling your program, you’re going to be digging into the benefits for the consumer, the positive ways their lives will transform, and the negative emotions they won’t have to experience anymore.
While it is beneficial for you to talk about the emotional benefits, putting a number to the value is crucial. Some people need to see the numbers broken down for them and know that if they buy this experience, they’re going to be saving time, money, and energy in all of the ways you’ve listed.
No matter what industry you’re in, there are financial ramifications for your audience not solving the problem that you help them solve. So when you show them those financial ramifications, it makes it much more justifiable for them to purchase your program.
We always recommend that you break down the value of your program so that you show the value of the individual elements of your program, including any bonuses. Then you can show the total price for the value of the program as a whole.
The Price Anchoring Effect
The reason it’s so important to assign a value–which you generally want to be around 10x the cost of your program–is because if we tried to tell them the actual value of the program, it would be unbelievable (as we showed you before with our Circuit Sales System example).
A lot of our Circuit Sales System students offer some level of coaching or monthly coaching calls, and maybe a student only Facebook group—having access to ongoing lifetime support like this is frankly invaluable.
That does make it harder to nail down the value of your program but having a higher price anchor helps to give context to the actual cost of your program and makes it feel valuable.
When you list everything out in your program, talk about the value of each element, and say your program is worth $14,000, potential buyers will have this figure in their heads. But that’s not what they’re going to pay. The investment they’re actually making is going to be just a tenth of that (roughly speaking) but because they had $14,000 anchored in their head, it makes $1,400 seem a lot more reasonable.
If you don’t have an anchor, you will end up with someone going through all of your marketing materials and trying to guess at what their anchor is. And their context is not your context. Remember that you have all the context of the entire industry.
As soon as we’re interested in something, we start guessing in our heads at what the price may be. But because our context is limited to our own lives and experiences, we are going to be guessing something that’s probably a lot lower. When we have that real context, it makes it easier to understand why the price is actually a deal, and why it’s valuable.
The goal of price anchoring is not to show a fake price and then a “sale” price and say ‘oh, look at this amazing deal’. The point of price anchoring and showing the value is to really help people understand that this purchase is worth it.
Value First
Giving your audience the value first before you present any price is crucial. If you show them a price before you’ve broken out the value, and before they’ve truly understood the worth of your program, then you’ve likely lost them.
As we just explained, they will already have something in their mind, so when they see your price and it doesn’t line up with what they thought, they’re not going to buy.
Whereas if you guide them through the value first and break down all of these things that they need to know before they see that price, then you’re not going to lose those folks.
We’re not in our clients’ heads and we can’t possibly know what expectation they’re going in with. So it’s on us to help them set that expectation by giving them the value.
Nailing Down the Value
When you sit down to spend some time considering the value of your offer, there are two key points you’ll want to consider:
- What is the potential ROI of your offer? Consider the ROI for someone even within the first few months or first year of having access to your offer.
- What is the value based on all the time, energy, and expertise you put into creating your offer?
Listening to what your customers are saying can also give you additional context for what your value really is. For example, a customer for one of our courses shared that he 100-xed the value of the course—within just the first few months! Most people are undervaluing, not overvaluing, so keep an eye out for the impact your program is truly making on people’s lives.
We can’t deny this one: value-based pricing is not easy. But just because it’s not easy doesn’t mean that you should throw out elements of the pricing structure that give people more context into your program.
And that’s exactly what adding in the value does. You’re not doing it to trick people or to be nefarious in any way. You’re simply giving them a number to help them understand more solidly what the potential could be.
Watch More
While there’s no magical formula for setting the value of your program, Nicki and Kate offer practical ways to approach it in this Energize Your Online Business podcast episode. Listen in now to discover how providing the value of your program gives people a better insight and more context into your offer, allowing them to make a more informed decision.
And in this Laser Coaching session, Nicki gives advice to CSS student Carolyn about how to effectively craft the messaging around the value of your offer (especially when selling to other business owners).
Your Turn!
Have you nailed down the monetary value of your course or program? Let us know in the comments below!