How to Articulate the Value of Your Work

“Every time I describe my coaching to potential clients, it comes out like word salad.”

Had a conversation with a nutritionist who told me this a bit back.

Her problem? She’s good at many things, can solve many problems, and has a wide variety of things she can help people with that don’t fit into a neat little box.

She’s not alone.

You’re great at what you do. Intuitively, you understand that your work is valuable.

But you don’t know exactly how valuable it is (pricing).

Nor do you know how to capture it in a way that others not just understand, but in a way that compels them to want to hire you.

You know if you got a client in the door, you’d do great work for them. So the problem isn’t your skills, your delivery, or your method.

It’s how you talk about them.

The translation problem occurs when your audience, your leads, and your potential clients on strategy calls kind of sort of get what you do.

Because the messaging isn’t clear, they don’t fully get it.

This leads to . . .

People visiting the services page on your site and clicking away.

Hearing “I need to think about it,” on strategy calls, only for them to ghost you and never hear from them again.

Writing articles that don’t turn into clients and customers.

It can lead to feelings of guilt when you’re charging thousands of dollars because you’re not even sure it’s worth the money.

You’ll hesitate to promote yourself because you don’t have confidence in what you’re offering.

You can end up discounting, working with clients who don’t value you, and getting burnt out because you sense that you’re worth more but at the same time can’t justify it.

My goal today? Help you solve the translation problem so you can:

• Confidently charge what you’re worth

• Attract energizing clients who value your work

• Promote your work with excitement instead of guilt and shame

• Reach your income goals faster because you’re priced appropriately

• Become known as the go-to person in your space because your value is clear

Let’s start with the one thing to understand if you want people to not just value your work, but pay for it.

We are down to 2 spots for the August growth squad, where we’ll help a small handful of experts add an extra $5,000-$10,000 per month over the next 8 months by building a business model that requires zero paid subscribers.

The next step? Book a 15-minute $10K roadmap game plan call below.

We’ll brainstorm your next 3 moves to hit $10,000/mo, and I’ll tell you whether or not I think you can hit the mark in the timeframe.

If I can’t, you’ll walk away with a game plan, and I’ll point you in the right direction. If I can, I’ll explain the next steps in detail.

Book your $10K roadmap call here

(Don’t book the call if you have zero clue what you’d sell, have zero experience, or have zero audience or network to reach out to. This is not for complete beginners.)

People buy the increased likelihood of outcomes. The more concrete and specific the outcome, the better.

Health coaching is a product: reducing chronic inflammation is an outcome. Getting rid of Hashimoto's without prescription drugs is a specific and concrete outcome.

Career coaching is a product: landing a job is an outcome. Landing $150K data analyst job in 6 months or less is a concrete and specific outcome.

Productivity coaching is a product: freeing up time to work on your business instead of in it is an outcome. Free up 15 hours a week to work on your business instead of in it is a concrete and specific outcome.

The promised outcome doesn’t need to be hyper-specific or have numbers associated with it, but the more concrete you can make it, the better.

You’re a coach or an expert, so you’re in love with your frameworks, your strategy, your methods.

Those are important because mechanisms — the way people get the result — matter.

But, above all else, your future client is thinking, “Can this person help me get what I want?”

Think of yourself like a doctor. You might know the root cause, but your future client can only see their symptoms.

People aren’t as concerned about your 19-step methodology as they are about the symptoms that are showing up in their life.

They think in terms of

• Getting rid of a problem: bloating, perfectionism, getting ghosted after job interviews, social anxiety, unprocessed trauma, brain fog, employees leaving.

• Alleviating a fear: marriage imploding, running out of severance, never writing that book, having to go back to their corporate job after failing at business

• Achieving a short-term desire: Landing a remote job, being able to speak up at a meeting or performance review, waking up pain-free, writing 30 days straight, losing 10 lbs, raising their prices.

• Accomplishing a long-term dream: Writing that book, building a six-figure business, finding a spouse, achieving their life purpose, traveling the world as a public speaker

Write down a handful of answers for each in your potential clients’ words when it comes to your own business, and you’ll start understanding what your clients actually value.

Now that you understand people value outcomes, it’s time to help you understand the value of the outcomes you produce.

Do you ever feel a little bit guilty about the idea of charging thousands of dollars for your offer?

Like, you’re extracting cash from people who already have tight budgets to begin with?

Or maybe you don’t have guilt about charging what you’re worth at all, but you don’t understand specifically how to think about price or how to get it across to the people you’re talking to?

In either case, there are a handful of frameworks you can consider to understand how valuable your work actually is.

I’ve worked with about a dozen career coaches who have helped their clients land jobs that pay anywhere from $150,000 to as much as $300,000.

Charging $3,000-$5,000 to help them land these jobs is mathematically anywhere from a 30Xto 100X return. If you have cold math on your side, you should feel zero guilt.

For financial ROI, you can think in multiples. You should be able to deliver a 5-10X return on what you’re charging if it’s a business-related offer. Change it to 25X to 50X for career coaching, working backward from salary.

But what if your value isn’t a concrete ROI number you can easily point at?

People value things with money that aren’t about money:

• Relationship problems and desires

• Alleviation of negative emotions like stress and anxiety and positive emotions like peace and contentment

• Legacy, status, and looking good in front of their peers

• Accomplishing a soul-aligned purpose

• Time, which is one of the few things people truly value more than money

A past client of mine runs a psychology practice school where she charged high-net-worth founders and execs to alleviate stress and practice mindfulness.

They paid thousands because, although they had all the money in the world, they lacked peace. Their lack of presence affected their relationships, as they couldn’t enjoy their time because they were always focused on the future.

Last, a lot of people don’t consider the literal financial ROI hiding underneath something they think is intangible.

If you’re a nutritionist, an FDNP, or a health coach, you might prevent a catastrophic hospital bill.

If you’re coaching married couples, you’re saving thousands in legal fees and the need to divide up assets by helping people save their marriage.

If you’re a peak performance coach who helps 7-figure founders free up 20 hours per week, you’ll free up time for them to focus on increasing the profits in the business.

The bottom line: most coaching offers are worth $3,000-$10,000+ if you have the right type of client, solve the right kind of problem, and deliver the right kind of outcome.

As long as value exceeds price, you can charge as much money as you want guilt-free.

Now that you understand your value, let’s talk about how to articulate it.

Think of the clients you’ve worked with who were happy to pay, easy to get results for, and energized you to work with.

• What problems did they come to you with? How did THEY describe their situation?

• What specific moments in their life prompted them to come find you?

• What outcome happened as a result of you working together?

• What’s the before-and-after picture of working with you?

Sometimes the answer is right in front of your face. Imagine you’re writing your next Substack post to your dream client. Speaking of . . .

For this, we use the four-factor analysis, where you write down answers for these four categories:

• Fears

• Frustrations

• Hopes

• Aspirations

Your writing strategy becomes writing articles that explain why their problem is happening, or why their desire is unfulfilled, what to do to fix it, and how to make it happen.

Sniped a headline here again for an example from Victor, who I think is one of the best headline writers on Substack.

Pop quiz: what are the frustrations here?

• Weight gain

• Puffiness

• Specific weight gain and puffiness

• Hormone imbalance

And then he ends the headline with (how to fix it), alluding to the outcome.

Daily practice: Go to the leaderboards of top writers and study their headlines to see how they’re almost always speaking to one of the four factors.

I taught this writing process to over 1,000+ students.

Pick an item from the 4FA, turn it into an outcome, turn the outcome into a headline. Over time, this will build a catalog that maps to your dream clients’ needs.

One of my favorite examples of offer crafting? A video where I saw a young girl craft a babysitting offer.

It started basic: I’ll babysit your kids.

Then she enhanced it:

• I’ll tutor your kids through their homework

• I’ll pick up the house and put things away

• I’ll cook healthy organic meal recipes your kids love to heat

So the promised outcome went from: Your kids will still be alive when you return home to you’ll come back from date night to a peaceful and clean home, plus your kids are smarter and healthier.

There’s a full offer training at the bottom of this post behind the paywall if you want to take a gander, but in short, you just want to start thinking about how you can add features that drive outcomes so your offer is more valuable.

Instead of telling your future clients that you’ll give them ‘1-on-1 coaching calls,’ describe the process of working with you using the hell-to-heaven bridge.

With clients, I show them how to structure their programs into 3 pillars. Each pillar goes from the problem (hell) to the outcome (heaven). Again, just go back to those problems and outcomes expressed by past clients and the list you wrote down and start thinking of the bridge.

So instead of saying “You’ll get 1-on-1 coaching calls for your health strategy intensive,” you’d say.

You’ll go from:

• Body inflammation to inflammation-free (or dramatically reduced)

• Brain fog to clear and focused work sessions

• Bloated and puffy to lean and sculpted

Jazz up the way you talk about your features. One of my clients is a career pivot coach.

Her onboarding comes with a questionnaire to help her clients find their strengths, but instead of saying “you’ll have to fill out a form,” she says “we’ll help you find your zone of genius so you can easily land jobs because you’re more qualified than your competitors.” She calls it the Zone of Genius assessment.

Pro-tips:

• Tie all of your features to the outcomes your clients want

• Give them names to make them sound proprietary

• Describe them in terms of what they’ll do for your clients to make the outcome easier to accomplish, faster, and with less stress and friction

Your program is a lot more compelling than you think when you find the right words to describe it.

You don’t need to get smarter. You don’t need more certifications. You don’t need more experience to justify the value of working with you. You’re already more than valuable enough.

Like I’ve shown you here, the key to raising your prices, signing dream clients, feeling confident in your marketing, and reaching your income goals has nothing to do with pumping yourself up. It doesn’t require bravado or bro marketing.

It requires understanding. When you take the time to understand your value with logic and rationality, the guilt goes away because both you and your clients can clearly see just how worth the money working with you is.

You spent years getting great at what you do.

Spend the next 12 months getting great at talking about what you do, and your business will look wildly different than it does right now.

We are down to 2 spots for the August growth squad, where we’ll help a small handful of experts add an extra $5,000-$10,000 per month over the next 8 months by building a business model that requires zero paid subscribers.

The next step? Book a 15-minute $10K roadmap game plan call below.

We’ll brainstorm your next 3 moves to hit $10,000/mo, and I’ll tell you whether or not I think you can hit the mark in the timeframe.

If I can’t, you’ll walk away with a game plan, and I’ll point you in the right direction. If I can, I’ll explain the next steps in detail.

Book your $10K roadmap call here

(Don’t book the call if you have zero clue what you’d sell, have zero experience, or have zero audience or network to reach out to. This is not for complete beginners.)