Pricing is an area of confusion and concern for almost every new executive coach. It’s hard to know what to charge for engagements.
Should you charge less for a non-profit? Should you charge more if it’s an enterprise company? Should you charge less because you’re still a relatively new coach? Should you charge more because you’re credentialed? Should you charge less because you’re just trying to get clients as a brand-new coach? Should you charge more if you’re going to coach in-person versus virtually?
Pricing for coaching services can seem daunting and overly complicated due to the number of contributing variables. Nevertheless, establishing a clear pricing framework is essential. This framework must align with your specific market, target clientele, and experience level, not just to ensure you make a living, but to successfully grow and expand your coaching practice.
Some Starting Points
AI platforms can offer useful guidance if you’re new to the coaching industry and need to find out about pricing parameters in your market. Ask AI to provide pricing for coaching services given your market, your experience level, and the type of clients you’re targeting (enterprises, smaller businesses, non-profits, etc.). What you’ll likely discover are not necessarily exact prices but guidelines for what’s reasonable to charge given the client, your experience and credentials. This information can be a good starting point.
The Center for Executive Coaching (CEC) offers a popular class on pricing within their online curriculum with guidelines backed by actual engagements. This valuable information that puts coaches at ease is only available to paying members. The International Coaching Federation does not publish pricing guides. This is probably due to the fact that there are many types of coaches who are members and they are based around the world. It would be far too complicated for them to providing such guidelines for this diverse membership.
Networking with other active coaches in your area can be an effective way to find out about local rates for engagement. Attend events where you can interact with peers and, while conversing, discreetly bring up the pricing question. You may find that some people will openly share with you how they price their coaching services, even specifying their current fees and rates.
You could also start your own mastermind group where you and other coaches help each other, not just with pricing your services, but also how to package and propose your services, how you present yourself on your website, how you use social media, etc. There’s so much to gain by networking with other coaches and forming mastermind groups, and pricing intelligence is one of them. Consider joining the local chapter of the ICF or connect with local coaches on LinkedIn to form the mastermind group.
Your Pricing Should Make You Uncomfortable
Yes, you read that correctly: your pricing should make you uncomfortable. By this we mean you should probably charge more than you think is appropriate. Newer coaches will often undersell themselves because they’re a bit unsure of their value. They compare themselves with veteran coaches with advanced credentials and figure that they must charge less than that.
While this is true to an extent, if you charge too much below standard market rates you send a message that you’re not all that qualified or capable of delivering genuine value to your clients. You may be better off quoting somewhat more than you first determine and see how that plays with potential clients. If they balk, don’t lower your rates. Instead you might suggest a shorter engagement that may better fit their budget or to meet half as often for the same period of time. You may also find that some clients don’t resist at all since they may have already anticipated such pricing, having done their own homework.
Another piece of advice pertaining to pricing is to consider raising your prices regularly, either bi-annually or annually. Raising your prices at fixed time intervals frees you from having to think about rate adjustments too much. You start at a given price with the knowledge that it’s going up from there at a predetermined time. As you continue to get better, your prices go up. Simple.
Refining your Pricing
Once you have a clearer idea of what you can and should be charging for your services, you can refine your bids by considering these criteria:
1) The level of leader you’ll be coaching. Is it the CEO, another C-Suite executive, or a manager at a lower level? The higher up the ladder, the more impactful and valuable your coaching becomes to the coachee, and that coaching should cost more.
2) The value and significance of the problem(s) you’ll be addressing in the coaching. A big problem (e.g. “What am I doing that’s driving away our top employees?”) warrants a higher fee. If the organization has a large change initiative and it’s off the rails, and they’re hoping that coaching the leadership team could help them to get it back on track, that would be of enormous value. The more significant the outcomes you’ll help bring about, the more you can and should be charging.
3) The type of organization. A large established enterprise usually has resources to pay more for coaching than a smaller startup. Many (but not all) non-profits also operate on tighter budgets and may even be looking for pro-bono coaching.
4) Are they already buying executive coaching? If you’re joining the external team of coaches for a company that’s been buying coaching services for years, you should seek to price yourself in line with typical rates.
Types of Engagements
It’s important to remember that coaching is not a pay-by-the-hour activity. We’re not an hourly service – we’re an engagement service – so we price by the engagement and in accordance with the value we provide. The last thing you want to do is say: “this is my price for coaching per hour.” Remember you’re not an attorney or a CPA; you’re a coach who prices according to value and length of engagement.
Most coaches don’t price by retainer either. It’s a very challenging equation for a coach to determine how to set the pricing for a retainer, especially for a newer coach. You likely don’t have enough experience working with an organization through a retainer agreement to possibly know what that number should be, so it’s best to avoid this arrangement unless your prospective client is insisting on it. In that case, get a clear sense of how much coaching they anticipate using in a given month and determine a number that makes you feel really good about the engagement even if they max out the hours allotted.
An effective strategy is figuring your pricing based on a bundle of services delivered over a specific timeframe. For example, you may create an executive coaching package that includes coaching, check-ins with senior management, assessments and testing, feedback gathering, and other resources all bundled into one neat price. Doing this makes it easy for the client to say yes.
Should You List Pricing on Your Website?
Your website is your main portal to the world, the forum where you present and explain your business in detail. But along with your experience, list of services, and bio, should your website also list your prices?
Generally, the answer is no. If you don’t put your pricing on your website, you’re free to change your pricing with every new prospective client at any time you like. Your pricing becomes flexible to best match the type of engagement. Listing prices on your website essentially locks you into certain pricing parameters, levels that you may quickly outgrow as your skills and clientele increase.
However, there are situations where putting prices on your website could be a really good idea. For example, when you are primarily serving clients directly and not companies, it could speed up the buying process to have pricing readily available.
We produced an informative video with more thoughts about putting pricing on your website. Click this link to view it on our YouTube channel, and subscribe while you’re there.
In Summary
Pricing your executive coaching services involves some research and careful consideration of several key factors.
If you follow our prime piece of advice that your pricing should make you uncomfortable, you should expect to lose some of your engagements based on price. However, those engagements that you do close will compensate you appropriately for the value you provide and the positive impact you make on your coachee and their organization. When you’re an established and effective coach you’ll find this problem is no longer an issue for you’ll be confident and comfortable with the rates you quote without hesitation.
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We’re ready to help you grow into the kind of effective and high-value coach you aspire to be. Contact us today to discuss our coach training programs and other services we provide to help you as a new or aspiring executive coach gain real support that may enable your long-term success in this exciting and rewarding profession.
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Featured photo is from ©Andrea Piacquadio via Pexels.
