178 | The inner work needed to sell high-ticket offers, featuring business coach Becky Keen

 

Why charging premium prices is a feeling you have to feel (with Becky Keen)

I've known Becky Keen for about eight years. We started our businesses around the same time, and since then we've watched each other grow, worked together, peered together and mentored each other. We're both moms to teenagers, both living in the sandwich of life, and both obsessed with helping women build premium businesses.

Bec is a business mentor for powerhouse coaches who are scaling beyond one-to-one. She helps them develop bold messaging, build premium group programs and become the go-to leader in their space. She blends hardcore business and marketing strategy with deep identity and mindset work, and her clients command top-tier pricing.

What a lot of people don't know is that Bec had an entire life in business before she ever became an online coach. And that's where our conversation started.

She was selling high-ticket from day one

Before coaching, Bec was a navigation officer who sailed around the world. From there she moved into operations management for a company running ships out to oil rigs, where she was one of the only women in senior management.

It was another woman in HR, the only other female in management, who told her: "You will never be happy here. You are an entrepreneur."

So Bec quit, consulted back to the same company, and eventually ran two businesses. She sold safety management systems to oil and gas companies for $20K, $50K and $100K. She co-founded an industry-leading app that won best new business in Atlantic Canada in 2016.

And she was never afraid to charge high-ticket. As she told me, if she was going to put her little kids in part-time care, the work had to pay her very well. Because she'd only been surrounded by men, she hadn't been exposed to women who were nervous about selling premium offers. When she started working with women, she was genuinely surprised: "Wait, what? You're afraid to sell what this offer's actually worth?"

But even with all that success, she was crashing out. Chronic bronchitis. Missing her kids. Running two companies and wondering how she'd landed right back in the same situation she'd left. That's when she hired a spiritual life coach, found her way back home to herself, and eventually started coaching women. Her niche found her, as she puts it, when her clients kept showing up with business ideas and side hustles, and Bec said, "Ooh, I can help you make a lot of money."

Your energy sells before your copy does

Because I'm a messaging nerd, I had to ask: what was it about that coach's messaging that made Bec hire her?

Her answer surprised me. It wasn't the messaging at all.

Bec visited the coach's website something like 50 times and never booked. It wasn't until they met in person that she saw it: a sparkle in her eye. "She looked alive in a way that I didn't," Bec said. "Whatever she has, I will pay for it. I don't care what it's called, but I need it."

(Bec later helped that same coach rework her messaging, because she would've hired her way faster if the website had spoken to what she actually wanted.)

The lesson here is a big one. You can have crappy messaging, but if you have a sparkly, alive, convicted personality, you can sell your stuff. And the reverse is true too. You can have the best copy and the most amazing offer in the world, but if you don't have the belief and conviction behind it, it'll fall flat.

Bec shared a perfect example from a recent trip to Sephora. She went in for her usual eyebrow pencil, and a staff member practically grabbed her hand and dragged her to a different product. She was so excited and so convicted that Bec let her try it, and now she's obsessed. That's the energy you need behind your offers.

Premium offers are the fastest path to six figures

So why does Bec want more women to build premium businesses? Because it's the fastest way to hit six or multi-six figures.

When you sell high-ticket, you're not going after volume. You might need 20 clients to have a multi-six-figure year. If you're selling a $100 thing, or even a $500 or $1,000 thing, you need that many more clients and your messaging has to work that much harder.

And here's the part I love most. Bec works with women who are brilliant at what they do. They should be charging high-ticket. Often we don't need to pad the offer at all. We tweak the messaging, maybe tweak the offer a little, and then it's an internal shift to believe, "Oh yeah, I can charge 10 or 20K for that same package," because you are that good.

I still go through my own head games on sales calls. Saying the price and shutting up. Not being a yes woman. Holding my ground when someone asks for more. So I wanted to know what's really going on underneath.

The blocks that keep brilliant women charging $1K

Bec named the most common identity blocks she sees:

Who do I think I am? That too-big-for-my-britches energy that tells you it's not your place to charge that much.

What will people think? People pleasing is wired into us. If I say $10K, what if I make that person uncomfortable? What if she thinks I'm audacious? Bec's response: "Exactly. That's an asset. Be audacious." And when you charge what your offer is worth, you give other women permission to do the same.

What if I'm not enough? What if they don't get results? What if they don't like it? A lot of women downplay their price because they're afraid of what might happen on the delivery side.

What if I feel some kind of way I don't want to feel? This is the crux of it. Disappointed. Judged. Rejected. Bad. For Bec, it's the fear of feeling bad, of someone thinking she did something wrong.

Every woman has a core feeling she's avoiding. So it's not just a mindset block. It's a feeling in your body that, up until now, you've been unwilling to feel.

Stop pushing through and start feeling it

When I asked Bec how to push through those feelings, she gently corrected me. Pushing through is the default. We say, "I'm gonna raise my price and muscle my way through it." But what we resist, we root down even deeper in our bodies.

Here's how she works with it:

Awareness. Notice the thoughts and patterns that come up when you think about raising your prices or putting yourself out there. You probably already know the feeling you're avoiding. You don't have to dig for it.

Acceptance. Bec calls this metabolizing the feeling. It happens somatically, not in your brain. Is the sensation dense? Watery? Contracted? Is it in your throat? You breathe into it and soften, and that lets it shift. Acceptance doesn't mean you're locked into this pattern forever. It means you accept it's been your pattern, so you can evolve past it.

Ask yourself better questions. Who would I be without that thought? What action would I take without it? What feeling am I avoiding? Would it be okay if I felt that feeling, just for 30 seconds?

Bec says her clients often get tingly and uncomfortable, and then realize, "Oh wow, I didn't die." Our bodies can process feelings the same way they process breakfast, if we don't lock them down.

As she put it, it's really about increasing your capacity to be uncomfortable with being uncomfortable. That is entrepreneurship.

I'll admit I was physically getting sweaty while she described this. Sitting with the feeling of disappointing someone is a big one for me. But I can see how showing your body and brain that you survived the discomfort is what moves you into the next level.

When the block clears, the strategy takes care of itself

In Bec's world, the inner work and the outer strategy have to go together. She meets clients wherever they come in.

Some want help with a new offer. They build it, put a price tag on it, and then say, "I can't charge that. Who's gonna buy that?" So they do the inner work.

Others come in asking for messaging help and quickly realize they have deep identity blocks. And often, one session is all it takes. When a client sees what's been holding her back, she says, "I know what I need to do. I couldn't do it 'cause I was frozen with this block." The block is gone, and she's unleashed.

Today, information is everywhere. Especially if you've been in business for a while, you know the steps. If you're not taking them, there's something to unpack below the surface.

You don't need perfect hair to sell high-ticket

One of the biggest misunderstandings about premium offers is that you have to look a certain way. The Louis Vuitton bag. The fancy photo shoot. The perfect Instagram feed. Flying private and staying in luxury villas. One of Bec's clients even said, "But my hair."

The other big one is "I have to be further along." And these are women with decades of experience who've stood in boardrooms.

My high-ticket self wants to put solar panels on the roof, make big donations to human rights organizations and do some amazing travel. So how do you quiet the voice telling you what a premium business is supposed to look like?

Bec's answer: question everything. Something like 95% of our thoughts aren't original. Someone else put them there. If someone positions themselves as luxury, maybe that matters to their audience. You get to ask what matters to yours.

Bec once hired someone to help elevate her brand, and the feedback was that her Instagram was too curated and put together. None of it was messy. So she gave herself full permission to be messy.

Now she loves the parts of herself she used to find embarrassing. She loves camping off grid at her family cabin where there's no washroom and they drink from the lake. She also loves expensive hotel suites and flying first class. She'd fly first class to go hiking and not shower for 10 days. And her audience is the same: messy moms with kids at home who'd also love a stay at the Fairmont Gold.

After years of bending over backwards in corporate, being someone she's not became painful for her. So it's non-negotiable now. You gotta be you. That's what keeps you alive, and that's what calls in your ideal clients.

I've seen this in my own business too. The more I lean into my values and share them out loud, the more people are drawn to me. I hear, "I like your vibe. I wish I found you last year." It's an ongoing balance between the need to fit in and the need to be you, but it's worth it.

A few fun things about Bec

In our rapid-fire round, I learned that Bec's favourite childhood movie is The Inn of the Sixth Happiness with Ingrid Bergman. Her favourite musician is Eddie Vedder. She's a memoir girly (Wild, The Glass Castle and anything by Dani Shapiro) and is writing her own. She makes a mean chocolate mousse, she's been following and learning from Kelly Diels, and she started lifting weights a year ago after swearing she'd never go to a gym.

If money were no object, she'd be an almost full-time writer traveling the world, hosting four small in-person retreats a year. And when her husband retires in five years, they plan to go somewhere different every winter.

Connect with Bec

Bec's new 10-day audio experience, Unshakeable (https://beckykeen.com/unshakeable), is designed to help you do the inner identity work needed to sell premium offers. It's the perfect next step after this episode.

You can also join her free Telegram channel, Unleash Your Premium Era (https://beckykeen.com/unleash-your-premium-era), for audio trainings that help you charge higher-ticket, feel unapologetic about what you do and sell like a powerhouse. I've been in there, and it's really good.

And come say hi to Bec on Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/beck_keen/). She's on stories a couple of times a day and loves a good DM.

 

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177 | I stopped podcasting. Here’s why and what’s next.