B2B pricing Archives - Business RadioX ®

Why You’re Really Afraid to Raise Your Prices with John Ray

July 30, 2025 by John Ray

North Fulton Studio

Why You're Really Afraid to Raise Your Prices with John Ray

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Why You’re Really Afraid to Raise Your Prices with John Ray (The Price and Value Journey, Episode 141)

Are you afraid to raise prices? You’re not alone.

Raising your prices isn’t just a financial move. It’s an emotional decision that can stir up fear, doubt, and second-guessing.

In this solo episode of The Price and Value Journey, John Ray explores the five hidden fears that often hold expert-service providers back from charging what their work is truly worth. Whether it’s fear of losing a client relationship, feeling pressure to be perfect, or anxiety about the economy, these concerns are real and often unspoken.

John shares how to move past those fears by focusing on what your clients actually value. He explains why your best pricing insight comes not from what you believe about your work, but from what your clients experience and are willing to pay for.

If raising your prices gives you that knot-in-the-stomach feeling, this episode is for you.

The Price and Value Journey is presented by John Ray and produced by North Fulton Business Radio, LLC, an affiliate of the Business RadioX® podcast network.

Key Takeaways You Can Use from This Episode

Fear of raising prices is rarely about money. It’s about identity, rejection, and self-worth.
Clients evaluate value, not personal worth. A “no” is not a judgment of you.
Perfectionism is a trap. Clients value responsiveness, clarity, and honesty more than flawlessness.
Cable news and clickbait headlines can distort your perspective. Trust your clients, not the media.
You can make thoughtful exceptions for certain clients without holding your whole business back.
The most valuable insights about your worth come from client conversations and feedback.
Clients often see more value in your work than you do. Your job is to listen and own it.

Topics Discussed in this Episode

00:00 Introduction to The Price and Value Journey and a Personal Anecdote
00:39 The Real Fear Behind Raising Prices
02:09 Hidden Fear #1: You’ll Lose the Relationship
03:29 Hidden Fear #2: You’ll Have to Be Perfect
04:34 Hidden Fear #3: You’ll Be Seen as Greedy or Full of Yourself
06:27 Hidden Fear #4: The Economy Is So Uncertain
08:13 Hidden Fear #5: You Know You Have Clients That Need Help
08:06 Gaining Clarity on Your Value
10:08 Conclusion and Call to Action

About The Price and Value Journey Podcast

The Price and Value Journey is a show for expert-service professionals who want more than formulas and quick fixes. If you’re a solo or small-firm provider—consultant, coach, attorney, CPA, or fractional executive—you know the real work of building a practice goes far beyond pricing. It’s about finding clarity, showing up with confidence, and learning how to express the full value of what you do in ways that clients understand and appreciate.

Hosted by John Ray, business advisor and author of The Generosity Mindset, this podcast explores the deeper journey behind running a services business: how you think about your work, how you relate to clients, and how you sustain a business that’s not only profitable but deeply fulfilling. Yes, we talk pricing, but we also talk mindset, business development, trust, empathy, positioning, and all the intangible ingredients that make a practice thrive.

With solo episodes and conversations featuring thoughtful guests, The Price and Value Journey is a companion for professionals who are building something meaningful. Produced in partnership with North Fulton Business Radio, LLC, an affiliate of Business RadioX®, the podcast is accessible on all major podcast platforms. The complete show archive is here.

John Ray, Host of The Price and Value Journey

John Ray, Author of The Generosity Mindset and Host of The Price and Value Journey — John Ray, Author of *The Generosity Mindset* and Host of *The Price and Value Journey*

John Ray is the host of The Price and Value Journey.

John owns Ray Business Advisors, a business advisory practice. John’s services include business coaching and advisory work, as well as advising solopreneurs and small professional services firms on their pricing. John is passionate about the power of pricing for business owners, as changing pricing is the fastest way to change the profitability of a business. His clients are professionals who are selling their expertise, such as attorneys, CPAs, accountants and bookkeepers, consultants, coaches, marketing professionals, and other professional services practitioners.

In his other business, John is a podcast show host, strategist, and the owner of North Fulton Business Radio, LLC, an affiliate of Business RadioX®. John and his team work with B2B professionals to create and conduct their podcast using The Generosity Mindset® Method: building and deepening relationships in a non-salesy way that translates into revenue for their business.

John is also the host of North Fulton Business Radio. With over 880 shows and having featured over 1,300 guests, North Fulton Business Radio is the longest-running podcast in the North Fulton area, covering business in its region like no one else.

John’s book, The Generosity Mindset: A Journey to Business Success by Raising Your Confidence, Value, and Prices

John is the #1 national best-selling author of The Generosity Mindset: A Journey to Business Success by Raising Your Confidence, Value, and Prices.

If you are a professional services provider, your goal is to do transformative work for clients you love working with and get paid commensurate with the value you deliver to them. While negative mindsets can inhibit your growth, adopting a different mindset, The Generosity Mindset®, can replace those self-limiting beliefs. The Generosity Mindset enables you to diagnose and communicate the value you deliver to clients and, in turn, more effectively price to receive a portion of that value.

Whether you’re a consultant, coach, marketing or branding professional, business advisor, attorney, CPA, or work in virtually any other professional services discipline, your content and technical expertise are not proprietary. What’s unique, though, is your experience and how you synthesize and deliver your knowledge. What’s special is your demeanor or the way you deal with your best-fit clients. What’s invaluable is how you deliver outstanding value by guiding people through massive changes in their personal lives and in their businesses that bring them to a place they never thought possible.

Your combination of these elements is unique in your industry. There lies your value, but it’s not the value you see. It’s the value your best-fit customers see in you.

If pricing your value feels uncomfortable or unfamiliar to you, this book will teach you why putting a price on the value your clients perceive and identify serves both them and you, and you’ll learn the factors involved in getting your price right.

The book is available at all major physical and online book retailers worldwide. Follow this link for further details.

Connect with John Ray:

Website | LinkedIn | Twitter

Business RadioX®: LinkedIn | Twitter | Facebook | Instagram

Hourly Billing Gone Wrong

January 24, 2022 by John Ray

North Fulton Studio

Hourly Billing Gone Wrong

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Hourly Billing Gone Wrong

Flaws in hourly billing don’t always cheat the client; they often cheat the professional sending out the bill. A story on hourly billing gone wrong from Simon Sinek’s book, The Infinite Game. The Price and Value Journey is presented by John Ray and produced by the North Fulton studio of Business RadioX®.

TRANSCRIPT

John Ray: [00:00:00] I’m John Ray on The Price and Value Journey. Here’s a story of hourly billing gone wrong from a book I strongly recommend, The Infinite Game by Simon Sinek.

John Ray: [00:00:12] Sinek writes, “I used to work for a large advertising agency. After my first year at the company, leadership decided to implement time sheets. Unlike a law firm where a lawyer may be billing their clients for the actual number of hours of work, this was a way for the company to keep track of – well, actually, no one really had any idea of the utility of the timesheets. It was just something we were told to do. I managed to get away with not filling out mine for months. If they were tracking how I spent my time, I saw no point in telling the company I worked 100 percent on the one client to which I was assigned.”

John Ray: [00:00:53] “Of course, I got into trouble for not turning in my timesheets. And so, from then on, at the end of every month, I sat down with all my timesheets and filled them out in one go, in at 9:30 a.m., out at 5:30 p.m. In reality, I often came in earlier and left later. But who cares? I recall taking my timesheets to my boss for his signature. He looked them over and commented sarcastically, ‘You’re certainly a very consistent worker, aren’t you?’ And then, he signed them.”

John Ray: [00:01:25] “I have to believe that the timesheets were implemented because something went wrong in accounting. Perhaps a client was over billed for work done and demanded that the agency prove that the senior people who were promised to spend time on their account actually were the ones who spent time on the account or something like that.”

John Ray: [00:01:48] Interesting story from Simon Sinek. The question is, was the problem really in the accounting department? No. Because the problem arose because of a billing method which invites inaccuracies, abuse, and worse. Note that Sinek says his timesheets were fiction because he under billed, not over billed. The flaws in hourly billing don’t always cheat the client. They often cheat the professional sending out the bill.

John Ray: [00:02:21] This is one reason I tell professional services providers that if they are billing by the hour, by definition, they are underpricing their services. You might ask, though, how does under billing with a time based billing method shortchange the client? The problem is simple. When the client gets that bill, they don’t necessarily know that all the hours aren’t billed. An invoice based on time invites questions like, Did this work really take that much time? Why does this person think they’re so special they get to charge this much per hour?

John Ray: [00:02:56] And then, even after being told hours have been shaved off the bill, the client says, “Hmm. Can I trust that the previous bills I paid were right? What about the future ones? Will they try to make it back on me?” All these questions are misdirected. None of them address the most central point, “Did I, as the client, receive more value than what I paid in fees?”

John Ray: [00:03:24] Sometimes clients may start questioning a services provider who’s actually providing great value because the bill focuses attention on inputs which have nothing to do with value received. Hourly billing is nuts because it cheats both the client and the service provider, often, simultaneously.

John Ray: [00:03:48] I’m John Ray on The Price and Value Journey. If you’d like to know more, go to johnray.co or send me an email, john@johnray.co.

About The Price and Value Journey

The title of this show describes the journey all professional services providers are on: building a services practice by seeking to convince the world of the value we offer, helping clients achieve the outcomes they desire, and trying to do all that at pricing which reflects the value we deliver.

If you feel like you’re working too hard for too little money in your solo or small firm practice, this show is for you. Even if you’re reasonably happy with your practice, you’ll hear ways to improve both your bottom line as well as the mindset you bring to your business.

The show is produced by the North Fulton studio of Business RadioX® and can be found on all the major podcast apps. The complete show archive is here.

John Ray, Host of The Price and Value Journey

John Ray The Price and Value Journey — **John Ray, Host of “The Price and Value Journey”**

John Ray is the host of The Price and Value Journey.

John owns Ray Business Advisors, a business advisory practice. John’s services include advising solopreneur and small professional services firms on their pricing. John is passionate about the power of pricing for business owners, as changing pricing is the fastest way to change the profitability of a business. His clients are professionals who are selling their “grey matter,” such as attorneys, CPAs, accountants and bookkeepers, consultants, marketing professionals, and other professional services practitioners.

In his other business, John a Studio Owner, Producer, and Show Host with Business RadioX®, and works with business owners who want to do their own podcast. As a veteran B2B services provider, John’s special sauce is coaching B2B professionals to use a podcast to build relationships in a non-salesy way which translate into revenue.

John is the host of North Fulton Business Radio, Minneapolis-St. Paul Business Radio, Nashville Business Radio, Alpharetta Tech Talk, and Business Leaders Radio. house shows which feature a wide range of business leaders and companies. John has hosted and/or produced over 1,100 podcast episodes.

Connect with John Ray:

Website | LinkedIn | Twitter

Business RadioX®: LinkedIn | Twitter | Facebook | Instagram

Mark Stiving, Impact Pricing

July 7, 2020 by John Ray

North Fulton Business Radio

Mark Stiving, Impact Pricing

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Mark Stiving, Impact Pricing (North Fulton Business Radio, Episode 253)

Mark Stiving, Impact Pricing, joins host John Ray to discuss his lifelong fascination with pricing, using what he calls “the value table,” placing a value on intangibles, and much more. If pricing is your problem (and Mark says for just about every company, it is), then this show is for you. “North Fulton Business Radio” is produced virtually by the North Fulton studio of Business RadioX® in Alpharetta.

Mark Stiving, Chief Pricing Educator, Impact Pricing

Mark Stiving has a Ph.D. in Pricing, wrote a book on pricing, taught pricing at Ohio State, led pricing initiatives at two major semiconductor companies, has blogged on pricing since 2010, has a podcast on pricing, and currently teaches and mentors on pricing. You could say Mark knows pricing.

Mark is an educator at heart and a pricing enthusiast by education and experience. While teaching pricing, he realized the key problem is companies don’t understand value, what it is and how much they deliver to their customers.

For over 25 years he has studied, led and coached businesses through the lens of pricing, a radically different approach from other business experts. He knows that every person inside your company affects the price a buyer is willing to pay. The prices you achieve ultimately indicate how well the entirety of your company operates.

Mark has driven company-wide pricing initiatives worth hundreds of millions of dollars in incremental profit. He started and sold three companies, improving his championship pricing skills in each one.

Mark’s passion is teaching the power of pricing. He evangelizes pricing at major conferences and has conducted over 400 days of corporate training around the globe. Mark’s Price class maintains a net promoter score (NPS) of 81, higher than Apple’s.

Mark also writes about pricing. His book, Impact Pricing: Your Blueprint for Driving Profits, is a highly readable and practical manual (4.9 stars on Amazon).

Mark will change the way you and your team think about pricing and business as a whole.

Point of Contact for Mark Stiving

Company website

Champions of Value (Online Community)

Impact Pricing podcast

Questions/Topics Discussed in this Show

How Mark got started in pricing
The purpose of Mark’s firm: education on value and pricing
pricing and value for B2B vs. B2C companies
Value table: Problem, Solution, Result, Value
How to place a dollar value on intangible value (using LinkedIn Sales Navigator as an example)
Why companies should be talking about problems and results vs. solutions
“Value capture gap”
Characteristics of a company which has a pricing problem
Customer segmentation and price segmentation
What is a value conversation?
Most companies are not equipped to have a value conversation
Value based pricing
Pricing in a pandemic
Creating a “culture of value” in a company
Subscription pricing

North Fulton Business Radio” is produced virtually from the North Fulton studio of Business RadioX® in Alpharetta. You can find the full archive of shows by following this link. The show is available on all the major podcast apps, including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google, iHeart Radio, Stitcher, TuneIn, and others.

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