How to Respond when Potential Therapy Clients Say They Can't Afford Your Rate

Marketing Strategies for Therapists Video Series, Episode 4

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00:59
You want to start getting some private pay clients or maybe move more of your clients to private pay, but you're just not sure how to deal with your client or potential clients reaction to your rate.

01:19
I talk about a quote that I read in Brene Brown's book Atlas of the Heart, and it's actually from someone named Prentis Hemphill and it says, "boundaries are the distance at which I can love you and me simultaneously." And I feel like that's a really helpful quote in thinking about how to hold the line on your private pay rates when you experience any kind of pushback.

01:49
When you have clients pushback about your rate they're usually coming from one of two places, "I can't afford that," or, "I won't pay for that." I'm going to break each one of those into three segments: "Yes, I can afford it and I will pay for it," "No, I truly can't afford it," or "No, I really don't see the value in it. I'm not going to pay for it." Or, "maybe."

03:17
Now a sneaky little trick that I teach my students inside of Step by Step, inside of Marketing Your Online Practice, is the pause. So after you say your rate, sometimes, if you're like me, what you immediately want to say is, "but I can I can slide that fee, I could give you a discount, we could do a package rate," you know, I can immediately coming up with all these answers to a problem they haven't even said yet. And so I always teach folks to use the pause. The way that I teach you to put your rate into the conversation of the free consult creates a nice opportunity for a pause automatically.

04:51
"I won't pay that for therapy." What’s being said is I don't value the therapy for that money. That doesn't mean they don't value you, it doesn't mean that they don't value therapy, but it may mean that the percentage of their income that would have to go to therapy given what they're making, it's doesn't make sense to pay more for them for therapy than they're paying for their mortgage, for example, right? Like, it might just be math. Maybe they're looking for more of like a phone a friend kind of situation and they're not going to want to pay $250 a week for a phone a friend situation, they're willing to pay a copay of $20 a week, but that's it. And that's fine, we can be totally respectful about what is valuable to them. The important piece here is that we're having the conversation. And if they say, "I can't afford that," be sure in either case that it's not a coercive conversation, but it's a genuinely open, "I want to help you, I'm not just trying to fill my practice, I just want to help you figure out what's going to be best for you and I know I can't meet everybody's needs. Not with my skill set, not with my fee, not with my personality, like I not going to be the best match for everybody. I might be the first or third person you've called. So tell me all the things tell me what you're thinking about the fee, how much feels like you could reasonably pay and in a healthful way, it's not going to overly stress you out, but also is, sort of matches what you think the work is worth for your life and then let's see who we can find that's a good match for that." So we remove the ego out of the situation and we just come from a service-based place.

09:00
Let me know what you might want to hear from me next, likely about marketing, or if you're looking for online income outside of therapy, we can talk about that as well.