Two minutes into the consult, before you’ve asked them a single thing, they say it. “So, do you take Aetna?” Or “What do you charge per session?” And many of you answer.
You answer because they asked. Because it feels rude not to. Because you want to be helpful and transparent and the honest thing is to just tell them. So you state your fee, or you say no on the insurance, and the call ends thirty seconds later with “okay, thanks, I’ll think about it.”
They never call back.
Objection Handling
The price question is not a price question. The insurance question is not an insurance question. It’s a person who is scared, who has been carrying something heavy for months or years, who finally picked up the phone, and who is reaching for the easiest off-ramp the call offers them. Numbers are an off-ramp. Numbers let them hang up without ever having to look at why they called.
Your job on the consult is not to be the helpful FAQ page. Your job is to clarify whether you can actually help this person, and to help them make a decision that will change their life. Those are the two things. Everything else on the call is in service of those two things.
The price objection and the insurance objection are the same objection underneath. The person has not yet been convinced that the value of doing this work is worth more than the number they’re about to hear. And they cannot be convinced of that until they have spent ten minutes connected to the actual cost of staying where they are. The cost of one more year in the toxic relationship. The cost of the dead-end job.
That cost is what makes your fee feel reasonable. The fee feels expensive only when it’s compared to nothing.
You need to take the lead
Taking the lead means you do not let the call get hijacked by the question they wanted to ask first. You redirect, gently and confidently, back to the only thing that matters in the first ten minutes: discovery.
When the price or insurance question comes early, say:
“Hey, I definitely want to talk to you about that. Would you mind helping me understand a little bit more about what led you to reach out?”
That sentence honors their question (you said you’ll get to it). It puts you back in command of the call (you are now asking the next question). It returns the conversation to the only territory where the rest of the call can actually go anywhere useful (their reason for reaching out in the first place).
Then you stay there. You ask about the present. You ask about what they have already tried. You ask about what their life looks like if nothing changes. You let them connect to the weight of it, in their own words, while you listen.
By the time you eventually do state your fee, you are not stating it into a vacuum. You are stating it into a conversation where the person has just spent ten minutes describing what their problem is costing them. That number lands very differently.
The mechanics.
Notice the early ask. Recognize it for what it is: an off-ramp. Acknowledge the question without answering it. (“I definitely want to talk to you about that.”) Redirect to discovery in the very next sentence. (“Would you mind helping me understand a little bit more about what led you to reach out?”) Then stay in discovery until the picture is clear, in their words, of where they are and what it is costing them.
Try it on the next consult that opens with a price or insurance question. Use that exact redirect, word for word if you want. Then come back here and tell us what shifted.
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