She Apologized for Her Price Before Anyone Asked

I was on a coaching call not long ago with a woman who runs a LinkedIn marketing agency. She'd worked with some serious clients - including one of the biggest banks in South Africa. Grew their social media presence by 10,000 followers, took their post engagement from 10 comments per post to hundreds. Real results. Real work. For real companies.

About twenty minutes into the call, I asked what she typically charged.

She said $600 a month.

I actually laughed. Not to be mean - but because the number was so disconnected from the value she'd just described that the contrast was almost absurd. And when I laughed, she didn't push back or ask why. Instead, she apologized. She started explaining that she was based in South Africa, that clients expected it to be cheaper because she wasn't in the US, that she didn't directly generate revenue for her clients so she couldn't justify higher rates. The whole thing.

Nobody had said a word about money yet. Nobody had complained about her price. Nobody had rejected her. She just... pre-negotiated against herself. Unprompted.

That's the thing I want to talk about today, because I've seen it hundreds of times and it quietly kills more businesses than bad cold emails ever will.

The Negotiation That Happens Before the Negotiation

There are two pricing conversations in every deal.

The first one is the one that happens in your own head - weeks, sometimes months before a prospect ever asks. You're building your cold email and you start writing the price and something in you flinches. You round down. You soften the language. You build in an escape hatch: "rates are flexible," "we can discuss depending on scope," "pricing depends on your budget." You haven't sent the email yet. The prospect doesn't even know you exist. But you've already lost on price.

The second conversation is the one with the actual prospect. And if you've already lost the first one, you'll lose the second one too - because you'll walk into it defensive, apologetic, and ready to cave before they say a single word.

This person was losing the first conversation consistently. Her cold emails were weak on results. Her follow-ups didn't mention what she'd actually accomplished. And when I looked at the copy she shared, there was nothing in there that said: I built a social media presence for one of Africa's biggest financial institutions and here's what I did. Instead it was vague, apologetic, and set up to justify a low number that nobody had asked for.

What the Value Actually Was

Let me show you what I mean with a quick exercise I did on that call.

She mentioned that she herself had generated around 10 to 12 million views on LinkedIn without even replying to comments. She had a following. She had real leverage. So I said: imagine you're pitching me. I'm running a SaaS company. I've got 13,000 LinkedIn followers right now. You tell me you can double that - take me from 13K to 26K. What's that worth to me?

Think about the shout-outs alone. The inbound DMs. The credibility that comes with a larger LinkedIn audience when I'm closing enterprise deals. That's not a $600/month service. That's not even a $2,000/month service in a lot of cases.

Then layer in the bank work. She built social proof and engagement infrastructure for one of the biggest financial institutions in South Africa - a bank that operates across 21 countries on the African continent. That engagement growth she delivered? Banks measure that in brand equity terms that translate to customer acquisition costs they'd otherwise pay through paid ads. There's real money behind that result. She just wasn't framing it that way.

The minute you connect your service to a financial outcome - even an indirect one - everything changes. "I grew your followers by 10,000" is fine. "I helped your bank generate the kind of community engagement that drives inbound customer acquisition, replacing what you'd otherwise pay to acquire through ads" is something else entirely.

Her actual pricing range, she told me, was $600 to $2,000 a month. I told her to put a 2 in front of the $600 and start there. $2,600 minimum. See what happens. Because when someone has done what she's done, $600 isn't humble - it's misinformed.

Geography Is Not a Discount

Here's what was really driving that $600 number: she believed her location made her services worth less.

She mentioned it multiple times. Clients from the UK had reached out. Good conversations. Then the awkward moment when pricing came up. The implied expectation - sometimes stated, sometimes just felt - that because she was based in Africa, her work should cost less.

And she had internalized that. Let it become part of her own pricing logic.

I pushed back on this pretty directly: for a bank, $600 a month is a liability. A bank that's managing billions in assets, employing thousands of people, operating across an entire continent - if you walk in at $600, the marketing director on the other side of that table doesn't think "great deal." They think "what's wrong with this." Price signals quality. Especially in enterprise sales.

The fact that you're based in South Africa doesn't make your work worth less if your results are legitimate. The bank doesn't care where you live. They care what you can deliver. And she had proof she could deliver.

This comes up constantly in my coaching. Founders from outside the US, Canada, or Western Europe assume they have to discount to compete. In some commoditized service categories maybe that's true. But for high-skill, results-driven work - LinkedIn brand-building, email strategy, paid media - your location is irrelevant to the value. It might even be an asset if you've got lower overhead and can therefore offer better margins, not lower prices.

The discount doesn't come from where you live. It comes from whether you believe in what you're selling.

The Follow-Up Email Problem

When she shared the cold email and follow-up copy she'd been using, the pricing issue made a lot more sense.

The follow-up didn't mention a single result. It was essentially: hey, following up, I do social media for banks, let me know if you want to connect. No follower growth numbers. No engagement metrics. No mention of the major financial institution she'd worked with. Just a soft re-introduction with nothing to anchor a price to.

Cold email lives and dies on specificity. If your follow-up doesn't say anything more compelling than your first email, you haven't given the prospect a new reason to respond. And if you never tell them what you've actually accomplished, they have no framework for valuing what you're selling.

The rewrite I walked her through was simple: name the specific client (or a close description of them), state the specific result, connect it to something the new prospect cares about. One of Africa's largest banks. Grew platform following by 10,000. Increased post engagement from 10 comments to hundreds. That's it. That's the entire hook. Now you have a conversation worth having.

If you want templates to build this kind of specificity into your sequences, the top 5 cold email scripts I use are a good starting point - especially the case study format, which is exactly what this situation called for.

The LinkedIn Advantage She Was Sitting On

There was another asset she wasn't using at all: her own LinkedIn presence.

She had a following. She was generating content. And she wasn't pitching off of it.

I told her: every four or five posts, do a direct offer post. Tell people what you do. Put a call to action. If you're helping clients build LinkedIn audiences and you yourself have a meaningful LinkedIn presence, that's your best proof of concept. That's the thing nobody else selling LinkedIn services can offer in quite the same way - it's your own platform, in public, doing exactly what you're promising to do for your clients.

She could also export her first-degree LinkedIn connections and run a direct outreach sequence to them - warmer, more conversational, lower barrier. Something like: "Hey, I help founders grow their LinkedIn following and I've had good results - want feedback on your profile?" That starts conversations without needing a full cold outreach infrastructure.

For colder traffic on LinkedIn or via email, you need a proper lead list. For banking contacts and financial services decision-makers specifically, tools like ScraperCity's B2B database can pull targeted contacts at the right seniority level, which saves you from spray-and-pray and lets you focus on the 100 prospects who are most likely to convert. Build a list of 100, send the improved email, track open rate and reply rate, and then iterate. That's the actual process.

Why This Matters Beyond Pricing

I want to zoom out for a second because this post isn't really about pricing tactics. It's about something more fundamental.

Most service providers who struggle with sales aren't failing because of bad scripts or the wrong tool or incorrect sending volume. They're failing because they don't fully believe they're worth what they're charging - and that belief leaks out everywhere. It's in the vague case study that doesn't name the result. It's in the follow-up email that apologizes for following up. It's in the call where you mention your price and then immediately start listing reasons the client might not want to pay it.

Prospects are reading these signals constantly. They may not be able to articulate it, but they feel it. And when a seller feels apologetic, the buyer gets nervous. Not because the price is wrong, but because the seller doesn't seem to believe their own pitch.

The fix isn't a confidence hack or a mindset exercise. It's evidence. Collect the specific results you've generated. Write them down. Know the numbers. When you can say "I grew a major bank's social media engagement from 10 comments per post to hundreds" - that's not a claim, that's a fact. And facts don't need an apology.

The Cold Email Reality Check

She'd sent about 80 cold emails total. Got zero responses. And had given up.

80 emails is not a test. It's a warmup. With no tracking on opens or replies, she didn't even know if people were seeing the emails - which means she couldn't isolate whether the problem was deliverability, subject line, the offer, or the follow-up sequence. She was flying blind and then concluding the whole approach didn't work.

You need to be measuring open rate, reply rate, and meeting book rate on every campaign. If your open rate is under 30%, the problem is deliverability or subject lines. If your open rate is fine but replies are near zero, the problem is the offer or the email copy. If you're getting replies but no meetings, the problem is how you're handling the response. Each of those is a different fix. But you can't diagnose any of it without tracking.

The next step I gave her was exactly this: build a list of 100 banking decision-makers, use the restructured email that leads with the Standard Bank result, track everything, and then improve from there. One hundred emails, properly tracked, will tell you more than a thousand sent blind.

If you want the full framework for building and measuring that kind of sequence, I put together a best lead strategy guide that breaks down how I think about list quality, email structure, and conversion at each stage.

What to Do If This Is You

If you read this and recognized yourself - you're softening your price before anyone asks, you're building escape hatches into your pitch, you're discounting based on factors the prospect hasn't even raised - here's what I'd tell you the same thing I told her.

First: write down your three best results with real numbers. Not "helped a bank grow their social media." Write: grew follower count by 10,000, increased per-post engagement by 10x, over three months. Specific. Measurable. Real. Put those in every email, every proposal, every conversation.

Second: set a price floor and hold it. Pick the number you think is right, add a buffer, and don't go below it in the first meeting. The awkward silence after you say a price is not a negotiation. It's a pause. Let it breathe. The first person to speak after the price is announced is the one who loses.

Third: stop treating your geography, your experience level, or your background as a built-in discount. Those are stories you're telling yourself. A marketing director at a major financial institution doesn't care where you went to school or which city you're in. They care what you've done and what you're going to do for them. If you've got the results, show them. That's the entire pitch.

She had all of it. The results. The case study. The work ethic. She just needed someone to tell her to stop apologizing for it.

If you're building out your outreach right now and want to sharpen both your cold email approach and your positioning, the discovery call framework I use is a good complement to this - it helps you control the conversation once you actually get someone on the phone, so you're not reverting to apology mode in a live setting either.

The price conversation starts in your head. Win it there first.