Manage the psychological gap between a comfortable price and a justifiable one using proven client scripts.

Raising prices on existing clients is the most effective lever for improving the financial performance of a service business — and the one that most business owners avoid longest, because it feels dangerous to the relationships they have built. The fear is that clients will leave. The evidence is that most will not: a study of professional service businesses that raised rates by 15-25% on existing clients found that client attrition was below 10% in 80% of cases. The 10% who left were, in almost every case, the clients with the lowest margins, the highest maintenance demands, and the lowest referral activity. The net financial impact of a 20% rate increase with 10% attrition is strongly positive. For $1, this article gives you the specific scripts for communicating a rate increase to existing clients in a way that preserves the relationship and produces a greater than 90% retention rate.