The Enrollment Conversation That Changed Something (Part 2)

Part 1 followed a practitioner through the enrollment conversation in which he held his newly raised rate — and noticed, at the moment of the prospect’s yes, that he’d nearly offered a discount to someone in the middle of agreeing. This piece explores what happened in the conversations that didn’t go as smoothly.

The Conversation That Didn’t Work

Not every enrollment conversation produced a clean yes. Three months into the new rate, he had a conversation that he found himself thinking about for days.

The prospect was a life coach who had reached out after seeing his content. The introductory call had gone well — she was articulate, clear on what she wanted, and seemed like a strong fit. When he named his rate, there was a pause.

“That’s more than I’d budgeted for this kind of support.”

His stomach tightened. He waited, which took effort.

“What’s included in the three months?” she asked.

He described the engagement. She asked a couple of clarifying questions. Then: “Can you do $650 instead of $850?”

He said he’d appreciate a day to think about it. She said of course, and they ended the call.

He called his accountability partner immediately. The partner asked what he was thinking about doing.

“I’m leaning toward offering $750. Meet in the middle. She seems like a good fit and I don’t want to lose her.”

His partner asked: “If you offer $750, what does that do to the experiment?”

A pause. “It ends it. I’ll never know if she would have paid $850.”

“What do you think she’d say if you called back and said you don’t have flexibility on the rate?”

“I don’t know. Maybe she’d decline. Maybe she’d find the money.”

“Is $750 a number that feels appropriate for this engagement?”

He sat with this. “$850 feels appropriate. $750 feels like I gave something away to avoid the discomfort of the conversation.”

The Callback

He called the prospect back the next day.

“I’ve thought about it. My rate for this engagement is $850. That’s what I’m holding. If it doesn’t work for your budget, I understand — and I’d be happy to be a resource in other ways down the road.”

She said she’d need to think about it.

She followed up two days later. “I’ve found the budget. When can we start?”

He sent his partner a message: “She came back. At $850. Two days later.”

His partner responded: “Write down exactly what she said.”

He wrote: “She said she found the budget and asked when we could start. Enrolled at $850 after initially asking for $650. Two days between the counter-offer and the callback. No relational cost — the call was warm, she seemed pleased. Wrote: ‘Client returned at full rate after counter-offer. I nearly discounted to avoid the conversation. Would have left $100 on the table and taught myself that I should preemptively discount.’”

What the Difficult Conversation Showed

The conversations that produced clean yeses were evidence that appropriate claiming didn’t reliably produce rejection. But the conversation with the prospect who pushed back was, in some ways, more important evidence.

She had pushed back. He had held. She had come back.

This contradicted one of the template’s most specific predictions: “if I hold when someone pushes back, they’ll leave and I’ll lose the client and they’ll think I’m rigid and transactional.”

The actual outcome: she pushed back, he held with warmth, she came back two days later having found the budget.

Not all hold-and-wait conversations go this way. Some prospects genuinely don’t have the budget, and they don’t come back. This is fine — the experiment is not “hold and everyone will always come back.” The experiment is “hold and observe the actual relational outcome, whatever it is, and let that outcome update the prediction.”

When a prospect leaves after holding, the outcome isn’t “the template was right.” It’s: “this client genuinely didn’t have the budget, and the relationship didn’t end badly, and no relational catastrophe occurred.”

The Conversation He Almost Didn’t Have

Several months into the experiments, a long-term client — someone he’d been working with for eighteen months — came to a renewal conversation.

She was paying his old rate. He had not yet had the rate conversation with her.

The renewal came up naturally in a session. She mentioned she was planning to continue. He had committed to his partner that he would have the rate conversation at this renewal.

He said: “I want to mention that my rates have increased since we started. Going forward, this engagement would be at my current rate of $850.”

She said: “That’s fair. I’ve gotten so much from our work. Are you staying at that for a while, or should I expect it to increase again?”

He said he couldn’t be certain, but it had been stable for several months.

She renewed at $850.

He called his partner. “She asked if the rate was going to increase again. Like she was planning for it. Like it was a normal business question.”

“And?”

“And I realized I’d been imagining that a rate conversation with a long-term client would feel like a relational rupture. It felt like a business conversation.”

The Nature of Evidence Accumulation

The practitioner had been keeping his evidence log for five months by this point. He had entries ranging from clean yeses to push-backs to one non-enrollment that had been warm and had led to a referral the following month.

He reviewed the log with his partner. The partner asked what pattern he saw.

“The relational catastrophe I was bracing for — someone being angry, someone feeling deceived, someone telling people I’d become mercenary — hasn’t happened. Not once.”

“What has happened when conversations have been difficult?”

“Someone asked for a lower rate. I held. She came back. Someone said they needed to think about it. They enrolled the next week. A long-term client asked if the rate was going to increase again. She renewed at the new rate.”

“So the difficult conversations produced…”

“Data. Not catastrophe. Just data about what they could or couldn’t do.”

This reframe — difficult conversations as data rather than danger — was the central shift in how he experienced enrollment conversations over those five months. Not because he’d convinced himself of it intellectually. Because he’d run enough conversations to have direct evidence for it.

The Abundance GPS Skool community is built to support this kind of evidence accumulation — with peer accountability, a community that normalizes appropriate claiming, and consistent support for staying in the experiments when the alarm is still running. Come take a look.