Price anchoring is a way of making particular packages or service options less or more attractive. You’ve probably seen something like this before:

Early in my coaching career (2018), I used to teach this, and then later somebody was selling me something, and they pulled this price anchoring tactic out. I’ll be honest - I was pissed.

It took me a while to figure out why I was angry that somebody used a tactic on me that I was teaching. At first, I thought I was angry because they didn't think that I would see through it…they took me for an unsophisticated rube.

As I thought about this more, the thing that really made me angry was that they were trying to manipulate me. They were directing me towards the thing that they wanted me to buy rather then, working with me to understand what would be the best thing for me to buy.

Your competitors are fighting over the same keywords. The smartest brands are building the authority that search engines, AI platforms, and customers trust everywhere.

Every relevant podcast appearance can produce branded mentions, backlinks, transcripts, citations, clips, expert content, and third-party proof that keeps compounding across search and AI discovery.

PodPitch searches millions of podcasts, finds the shows that matter to your market, develops the angle, sends personalized pitches, and follows up automatically until your experts are booked.

Growth teams are already using podcast appearances to build distributed authority that cannot be manufactured by publishing another generic SEO article.

Only 20 SEO, AEO, and GEO demo spots are available this month. Once they’re claimed, the offer disappears.

Start building searchable authority now, before your competitors own the conversations shaping your market.

Appear on 3,853,234 Podcasts

I'm not sure why I ever started teaching price anchoring because I never used it when I ran an agency. I always focused on risk anchoring.

The usual performance marketing agency model at the time was to charge for a percentage of ad spend. Many marketers pushed back against that idea because they thought agencies would just push them to spend more without potentially generating more results. So I adjusted the model to have a spectrum of risk. I offered a % of trackable revenue generated, a straight up flat fee, and a hybrid that was a mix of fee & variable compensation.

The total compensation for all performance was usually much higher than they would have paid in any other way, but that was compensation for the risk that I took. The flat fee offer was really focused on fair pricing, but the prospect took all the risk. The the options that I always felt best about were the hybrid options where there was a mix of fee and variable compensation. That way, I would get some upside if performance was terrific, and the client would be protected because their downside risk was lower because the fixed fee was lower.

My client portfolio had a mix of all of these pricing models. I didn't really care what anybody chose, but I wanted to be open about the risk in each one. I will tell you that straight performance one deals against bigger, better, faster, stronger agencies because we basically didn't get paid until we showed that we knew what we were doing. Larger prospects vastly preferred fixed fee because they had fixed budgets, and they liked to project against them. Hybrid was really popular with companies that were in that transition space from a small business to a medium-sized business. They liked the predictability of the flat monthly fee with only a small variability in compensation, and this model really worked.

But there were some real flaws in it. If we worked in a straight performance environment, and we were successful, eventually, our fee would get too high, even though as a percentage of revenue, it was exactly the same as it was on day one. On the fixed fee side, if we were successful, the client would increase media spend, add to campaign complexity, and we would end up doing more work for the same amount of money.

Wispr Flow turns your voice into clean, professional text inside any app. Emails, Slack, client updates — speak once, send without editing. 4x faster than typing.

Try Wispr Flow free

We got fired by our biggest client. They were on a straight performance deal, and we were crazy successful. In our biggest month, we billed them over $200K. Eventually, the CFO decided he didn't like looking at an agency fee as the tallest tulip in the garden, so he consolidated their marketing spend with that of their parent company, and we got fired…not because we weren't doing a great job, but rather because on a performance deal, we just cost too much.

That sucked.

After that debacle, I decided to get rid of all of the pretense around pricing and be 100% focused on our prospect needs. So our pricing changed.

After discovery, we would put together a 12-month plan based on what we would do for that business as if it were our own. The 12-month plan often included services that we didn't offer, but it was really focused on what was best for the client.

That 12-month plan would have a price on it, but I told every prospect that I would not take that money because that was based on what I thought was best for them, based on what I know today.

Then we would start pulling things out of that plan until we were both in agreement around what were the most important things to do in the next 60 to 75 days. That’s the deal we would offer - 60-75 day project that had a clear definition of success. Plus there was a contractually obligated re-scoping and re-review of next steps before the end of the project.

This sounds really stupid because I could have sold a juicy but uninformed recurring retainer, but what I discovered is this:

If we stayed focused on the idea that we would only do the right thing for the client and prove to the client that it was the right thing that had measurable, clear results, we were 100% in alignment all the time.

If we couldn't justify something as being the most important thing that we could do for the client. We didn't do it. If they pushed us to do something that they were excited about. We would give our clear opinion of its priority - if we didn't think it was the most important thing and they could not convince us otherwise, we would tell them that we would have to scope that out separately because our focus was only on doing the best thing for our clients.

Want to see how Opportunity Anchoring might work in your biz? Set up a free, zero-sales pressure call.

7 external traffic strategies. One question finally answered: what actually moved your BSR. Levanta's free playbook breaks down what works, what bleeds budget, and why most brands can't tell the difference. Grab the FREE playbook.

Our sponsorships are ads (obviously - duh). But some of the companies or services linked in our content may pay us a minimal commission if you buy something from them. Potential payment is never a factor in what we link to, and we have direct experience with every company or service where you can buy something that we mention in our content.