What Do You Charge? How to Answer Without Flinching

Karen Yankovich 0:00
Okay, remember the woman from last week that we talked about? She’s a composite of a bunch of people I speak to. Woman who did the free call heard this was so helpful and said, “I’m so glad. And then watch somebody worse at the work that she does get hired because they were better at the ask. Well, let’s just say she listened. Let’s just say she did the thing. She gets on the call. It’s good. Same as before. She’s generous. She’s sharp. She’s solving real problems out loud, right? And at the end, when the other woman says this was so helpful, she doesn’t just say so glad. She remembers the bridge, and she says, “I’m so glad this is the exact work I do with clients. Want me to show you what that looks like for you? And the woman says, “Yes, yes. Tell me more. So she walks her through it. What the engagement looks like. How long? What she’d actually get. And the woman’s nodding and she’s leaning in. And then she says it right. The big question. So what does this charge? What’s your rate for this? And our girl hears herself say number, and it’s not the number she practised in the car-it’s lower. It’s noticeably lower, right? Because she talked to this woman and she knows a lot more about her than, and all this stuff she made up in her head. And then before the other woman has said a single word, before anybody has objected to anything, she hears herself add in, “But I’m flexible. Nobody asked her to be flexible. Nobody pushed. She negotiated against herself out loud in real time and lost. Now here’s what I want you to hear today because it’s going to sound a little backwards at first. That flinch didn’t start on the call. The call is where it showed up. Your rate was set before you even set it. Karen Yankovich. This is Good Girls Get Rich, and today we’re talking about the question every one of us, me for sure included, has flinched on at least once. What do you charge, and why the answer gets decided long before anyone asks? So let’s talk about that flinch because, like, let’s we talked about like its cousin last week, right? The good girl tax. Last week it showed up as the ask you never made, right? All that free help, no check at the end of dinner, right? You just free. It was a freebie. This week it’s the sneakier version. It’s a little bit sneakier. This is a good girl tax when you do ask, and then you just go ahead and discount yourself before anybody even asks you to. And I really want to be clear about who I’m talking to because this is not just a beginner problem. It’s probably not even a beginner problem. I’m talking to the woman who sat across the table from vendors for 20 years and didn’t blink, who fought for her team’s budget in rooms full of men who assumed she’d fold and she didn’t fold? The woman who’s told the CFO, “No, no, that number doesn’t work for us, more times than she can count. That same woman gets on a call about her own work and courts herself like she’s apologising, and it’s not because she can’t negotiate. She can negotiate circles around most people, and it’s not because she doesn’t know her value. I hate that phrase. Anyway, know your value. It’s like a vocabulary word, you know, that you forgot to study about. Like, it’s a thing. Here’s here’s what I think is actually happening. Some part of her, some very smart, very experienced part of her, knows the numbers she practised isn’t backed up by what this prospect has seen. She can feel it. She’s reading the room because she’s great at reading the room, and the room is telling her this woman doesn’t have enough evidence yet to say that number without wincing. So she drops the number to save everybody the wince. That’s not a confidence problem. That’s a hallway problem. And let me tell you, like, what I mean by that-that a hallway problem. I want you to imagine, like, two women. Okay, again, we’re making these women up. I’ve seen this exact story so many times that I could tell it with a dozen different names. And let’s just say they’re both fractional CMOs.

Karen Yankovich 3:47
Both have 20 plus years in experience, similar backgrounds, similar industries. Honestly, similar results for clients. And if you put their resumes side by side, you’d have a hard time picking. And the first one gets found through a podcast appearance. Great, that’s a borrowed stage, right? She did the right thing. A prospect hears her, likes her, books a call. Call goes well. The prospect asks what she charges, and she says 6000 a month, and she gets pushback. Hmm, that’s more than we were thinking, and then she ends up at five. The second woman offers basically the same thing. She quotes 15,000 a month, and the prospect says, “Okay, when can we start? Same work, same experience, more than double the number, and less resistance. And every time I tell the story, somebody says, “Well, second one was just more confident. And I get why you’d think that, because it is important. Confidence is important, but no, I watch this happen from the inside, and confidence is the result here, not the cause. The second woman can save 15,000 without even flinching because she knows she knows the prospect isn’t going to flinch either. And the reason the prospect isn’t going to flinch has nothing to do with what happened on the call. It’s what happened in the hallway. So here’s the picture I want you to hold for the rest of this episode. Nobody shows up. A call with you cold, nobody. Okay, if they’ve booked a call with you, they are ready to invest. Okay, period. The end. No prospect ever gets to a room where you’re going to talk money. Okay, without walking down the hallway first, and that hallway is everything you saw, everything she saw about you on the way in. Maybe she heard you on a podcast, and then I promise you, she does this because I do this, you do this. She looks you up, right? She clicks your LinkedIn, she reads your headline, she scrolls your about section, she looks at what you’ve posted about, and more importantly, who’s commenting on it? Are you having conversations? What are you saying in those conversations, right? She’s looking at a profile that has has juice, has actual activity on it, right? And maybe she notices that somebody she respects left you a recommendation. Maybe she notices that nobody has left you a recommendation. That whole walk down the hallway takes about 10 minutes, and by the end of it, before you’ve said a word, she has a number in her head, and she may not know she has the number in her head, but trust me, she has a number in her head. So when you say your number on the call, you’re not setting a price. You’re finding out whether your number matches the one the hallway already put in her head. So the 6000 woman had a good podcast appearance, and then the hallway, like she had a hallway that said nothing, right? Maybe a LinkedIn profile that read like a resume, job titles, dates, a headline that was basically her last title with you know consultant stuck on the end of it, right? Nobody’s talking about her. Nobody’s having conversations with her. At least not that she can say nothing. Nothing said this person is the one you call for this. The $15,000 investment woman’s hallway said something completely different, and it wasn’t flashy. It was just full, right? So let’s talk about your hallway. What’s on the walls of your hallway? There are three things that I look at, and I want to go through them quickly because you probably already know most of this. Maybe you just haven’t connected it to your rate before, okay? And the biggest one is your profile, and I call this your magnet, right? When she lands there, does it tell her the one thing only you do, right? Only you do this, or does it tell her where you used to work? Because a resume tells her who you used to be, right? A magnet tells her what you do for her, and those two things get priced very differently. A resume gets compared. A magnet doesn’t have anything to be compared against. Category of one, and then there’s proof that someone else already put you on the stage, right?

Karen Yankovich 7:25
The podcast she heard you on it counts, but it counts a lot more when it’s not the only one, right? When she scrolls and seen you were on this show and spoke at that event and wrote this piece, now it’s not. I heard a woman on a podcast. Now it’s oh, everybody has this woman on. We talked about this back in episode 390. The person who books you is almost never the person who booked you, right? Same thing here. The person who pays you is paying for what you saw other people trust you with, right? And you don’t have to put all of your podcasts in. You don’t have to list them all in your featured section. There’s so many ways. If you go to Spotify and put my name in, there’s a Spotify playlist of like. I mean, I think you could listen to me for two straight days of podcast episodes I’ve been on. That’s credibility, right? That shows all of those people had trust in me, right? And that’s what I want my prospects to have. And the last one, and this is the one so many women skip every single time, is visible respect from your peers, recommendations, comments from people she recognises somebody senior in her industry saying this is the person in public where everybody can see it, right? You can’t say that about yourself, right? Because it doesn’t work. But when someone else says it in your hallway, does more for your number than anything you will ever say on the call. And by the way, if she can’t find you at all, if that means the hallway is dark, and that we talked about in episode 388, you need to fix that, right? And none of this is about bragging. None of it is about being loud. It’s just about making sure the walk-in tells the truth about how good you really are, because right now, for a lot of you, your hallway is underselling you, and then you walk into the room and undersell yourself to match it. Okay, so all right, so here we go. So now you fix the hallway, and let me tell you, it’s not a weekend project. I know we’re going to get to what to do. Okay, but you still have to say the number. So let me give you the actual words. Here’s the sentence. It has two parts, and then it has the most important piece of this, and that’s silence. Part one: say the number plainly. You need to say this like you know how to say. Please pass the salt. Stare in a mirror. Say it over and over. Do whatever you need to do. You have to say it like you say. Please pass the salt. My engagement starts at 15,000 a month, or whatever yours is. Not I usually charge around, or not. I’m thinking something like or not. It kind of depends. Just the number in your voice, the same voice you were talking to her in the entire conversation, the same voice you would use when to say, “Please pass the salt. The same voice you would answer her in if she asked you what time it is. Okay. And then part two, talk about what it includes. That includes the strategy, the weekly leadership meeting, and oversight of your agency. Short, concrete, two or three things tops. And then, like I said, the most important part of all of this: you stop talking. This silence is going to feel like it lasts a year, it won’t. It’s gonna be three or four seconds, maybe five, right? If you have to, you know, count them in your head if you have to, but don’t fill it. Don’t say but. Don’t say I’m flexible. Don’t say but. We can talk about it. The silence is her doing the math, and she’s allowed to do math, right? You would do math, right? You know, it is. This is the hardest thing for so many women. I get that. I get that. I have taken. I mean, I feel like decades, but hours and hours and hours of sales training calls, and it all comes down to this one piece of these calls, right? It’s important. It’s important.

Karen Yankovich 10:54
If I’m going to get my goal of helping there, having there be more wealthy women in the world, and you want to be one of those wealthy women? You got to learn this. You got to learn this, and understand sometimes there is really truly a budget issue. It’s totally legit, right? So here’s the rule: if you need to be flexible, move the scope, not just the price, right? Well, listen. I could do a smaller version, right? Strategy and a monthly check-in without the agency oversight. I can do that for eight. It’s a real offer. It’s honest. It’s a different thing at a different number. Okay, what you never say is I could probably do it for less because then that tells you the first number was made up, and then every number after that is also made up, and that’s the tax again. Just wearing a nicer outfit. And listen, I recently was out shopping for deck furniture, and I went into this store and I found this set that I really I sat on this couch and it was like the most comfortable couch I ever sat on my life for outdoor furniture. I didn’t really really love the furniture, but I sat on the couch and I was like, “This is so comfortable. This is what I care about. How comfortable it is. It’s really nice. I need a lot of. I have a big deck and I haven’t really put any furniture on it yet, so I I needed I needed the whole seating area. I needed the table and the chairs. I have a big family. I wanted a big table, big chairs, and she was like, “It’s $10,000, and I was like, “Okay, that’s more money than I want to spend on this. I was not, and I said to her at the time, “I really wanted it to come in under 10, and you’re coming in at 10. I’m not making this decision today, and by the time I left there, I think it was at like maybe $8,000. And I was like, “All right, I’m just gonna let me, you know, I’ll call you back. By the time I got home, there was a message on my voicemail saying my boss said I could do it for five. I was so pissed because I’m like you, almost took $5,000 out of my wallet that you didn’t need. I was so mad. Okay, I wasn’t happy that she got it down from 10,000 to 5000. I was mad, right? Because she’s taking advantage of me. You don’t want to be that person, right? You don’t want to be that person. Sometimes there’s an honest, you know. Listen, it’s $8,000. I don’t even know if I love this set that much. Let me think about it. Right? It was. It was a legit. I was probably going to buy it. To be honest, I I couldn’t do it. I physically couldn’t give these people my money. And you know, here’s the other thing. Sometimes they just say, “Well, that’s I just think that’s too expensive. And some people will say that, right? And that’s not your hallway failing. Right? That’s your filter working. The prospect who needed your number to be lower was never going to be the client who valued your work. You know this. You’ve had that client, right? The one who negotiated you down and then questioned every freaking invoice, right? The one who got a discount and still treated you like you were overcharging. You don’t want that client at any price, right? And you definitely don’t want her at a discount, so when she says something like “That’s more than we were thinking, please don’t scramble. Just say something like “That’s fair. It’s not the right fit for every company. If it’s helpful, here’s what a smaller scope would look like. Or honestly, sometimes it’s just “That’s fair. I’m glad we talked, and mean it and mean it because you’re not going to win every call. We know this, right? You’re trying to win the right ones at the right number, and here’s the thing: like when you have a tonne of budget for a client, it isn’t because you’re overcharging. It’s because you get you get the ability to over deliver.

Karen Yankovich 14:11
Okay, like I when I work privately with clients, I want to be able to say, you know what, I want to bring my PR person in on this unexpectedly, or I want to do this, or I want like I can over deliver when I have the budget. The last place you ever, as a as a client, but let’s talk about it as a as the consultant first. The last place you ever want to be is like, holy crap, I’ve already spent all her money and I still owe her 10 hours. Like you don’t, and now like you’re in this bind, right? I remember at one point I was in a. I was working for a company where I was overseeing a construction project, and the contractors way underbid it. And we were like three quarters of the way through the project, and they ran out of money, and they had to keep delivering it. And everybody was like, “Too bad, that’s their problem. They shouldn’t have charged. They shouldn’t have charged the right price. I was like, “No, no, no, that sucks. Because now we’re gonna be have to be on to make sure we’re. Getting what we actually need-that they’re not going to cut corners, that things aren’t going to fall off the walls. Do you know what I mean? Because they’re not giving us what they need. Okay, you want-you don’t want to come into an engagement with without enough money to deliver at your best and highest level. Okay, and if it’s too much money for somebody, it’s just too much money for somebody, and that’s okay. That’s okay. So here’s your homework this week, and it’s going to take you 10 minutes, maybe 15, if you’re honest with yourself. And I want you to be honest with yourself. I want you to open an incognito window in your browser, okay? Because you want to see what a stranger sees, not what you know you see logged in as yourself, right? And throw your name in a in a Google search and see what comes up. Click through to your LinkedIn profile and now spend 10 minutes walking down your own hallway like you’re a prospect who just heard you on a podcast and is trying to decide if you’re worth what you’re about to quote. Read your headline like you’ve never met yourself. Right? Scroll your about section. Look at your last month of posts and look at who’s commenting. Check your recommendations. When’s the most recent one from? And then write down two things: the number that that hallway actually supports, not the number you want, but the number that you feel like the hallway supports, and the one thing you can fix on your profile to raise it. And then come tell me, come tell me what this is, okay? Because I am here to help you with this. I guarantee you, someone else, someone, someone else is going to want this. You can either post it on LinkedIn or, you know, there’s lots of ways to connect with me. Okay, so let’s get back to our person, our girl that’s on the call, and the woman’s and somebody says, “So, what do you charge? Here’s what I want for her next time. I wanted to walk in knowing the prospect already walked a good hallway in our visibility salon and in our Chiseal LinkedIn programme, we have tools, mindset tools, so that you know if you’re charging $10,000 for something that it is worth $100,000. Like I want you to know that whatever that number is, it’s a damn bargain. Okay, and feel that in your soul, so that when you’re having these conversations with people and you say that number, you know in your soul that it’s such a great bargain for them. And I want so when this woman gets the question and the prospect has already walked a good hallway, I want her to say that number in her regular voice, say what it includes, and then sit there comfortably while the other woman does her math, because she’ll know something she didn’t know before. She’ll know that she did the hard part. The hard part already happened. Your rate was set before you set it. Your rate was set s e t before you said s a i d it right. Your rate was set before you set it.

Karen Yankovich 17:34
So set it on purpose. And honestly, if you want to build that hallway, the profile that does the kind of work before that get you get on that call? The stages that other people put you on, the kind of visibility that makes your number sound obvious. That’s exactly what my free borrow the stage masterclass walks you through. Go to Karen Yankovich.com/masterclass. Grab yourself a seat. It’s completely free. It’s on demand. You can watch it now. It’ll get you in the groove. Get your mindset going along these lines, and I can’t wait to see your name in that in that masterclass. I’m Karen Yankovich. This is Good Girls Get Rich, and I will see you next week.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai