Having the Pricing Conversation With Existing Clients
Raising fees with clients you've known for years takes more than a new number on the card machine.
Raising fees with clients you've known for years takes more than a new number on the card machine.
Your prices are out of date Somewhere on your site sits a PDF nobody's touched since last March, undercutting you without a word of complaint. This note is about closing the distance between what you charge and what your website says you charge, and having the conversation properly, in person, before a client finds the old figures first.
Somewhere on your website sits a price list from last spring, sunning itself, unbothered.
A client finds it in about four seconds. She's not being sneaky. She's tidy, and now she's quoting your own paperwork back at you like a solicitor's letter.
You end up negotiating against yourself, which is a strange position for the person who set the price in the first place.
Wellness marketing guides: practical guidance on this topic:
Resonant issues: challenges nearby to this:
Check the file exists. Check the date on it. Then take it down before it takes you down.
A letter feels too formal, so most practices do the hush-hush version instead.
The card machine changes overnight and nobody's told a thing.
It's the pricing equivalent of moving the bins and hoping nobody notices the new route to the shed.
Try the other way this week. Tell three long-standing clients face to face, before the numbers do the telling for you, and watch how differently it lands.
One will nod. One will ask a question. One will remember exactly what you charged in 2019, down to the penny.
Fifty-eight per cent of UK physiotherapy practices run on the associate model, which sounds tidy until you notice only twenty-one per cent work across more than one site.
So the associate who raised your rates last month, without so much as a whisper, is this month raising them again somewhere else entirely, under their own name, with their own clients nodding along.
Your pricing conversation isn't happening in a sealed room. It's happening in several rooms at once, and you don't own most of them.
The associate model spreads your pricing decisions further than your address book.
Here's the odd bit, the part nobody puts in the newsletter.
Clients rarely leave over the new figure itself.
They leave over the silence before it, the three weeks of nothing, then a receipt that says more than you did.
A silence is a message too. It just happens to be the wrong one.
A hairdresser I know calls this her "ghost invoice" problem, the bill arrives and does all the talking she avoided doing herself.
Fill the silence yourself, with your own voice, before the invoice fills it for you.
A hairdresser once told me she puts her prices up every January and tells nobody, then spends February wondering why the loyal ones vanish by March.
She assumed the sign in the window was doing the talking. It wasn't.
Nobody reads a sign in a salon they've trusted for a decade. They read the stylist's face.
Your regulars aren't studying your Instagram story about the change. They're reading your face the next time they walk through your door.
Front of mind: some of our thinking on this topic:
Practise the face. It matters more than the caption.
You can build the whole conversation yourself, the script, the timing, the follow-up email.
Plenty of practices do this with real care and a decent cup of tea at hand.
Others hand the wording to a copywriter standing outside the room entirely.
Saying "we're worth more" about your own clinic, out loud, alone in an office, is a strange sort of sentence to write to yourself.
Neither route is the lesser one. Getting the wording right matters more than who typed it first.
Go and check your own website for the word "affordable" sitting anywhere near your name.
It sits oddly next to a fee increase, like a sale sign left up in the window long after the sale's finished and the stock's back to full price.
Nobody trusts a shop still shouting about a discount from October.
Take the word down before you take the price up. Let the fee and the language agree with each other for once.
Word of mouth got you most of these clients. The website played a small part, the banner a smaller one, and the newsletter nobody opens played none at all.
So the price rise ought to reach clients the same way they reached you, through a conversation, not a notice pinned to a board.
Test this week. Tell your next five loyal bookings in person, before they see it anywhere else.
Notice who asks a question and who just nods. The nodders are the ones worth watching.
A price rise delivered by conversation lands differently than one discovered by accident.
Get the pricing conversation right with the clients who built your practice in the first place. resolve this properly
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