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#311: Why Lowering Your Prices Won’t Fix Slow Sales (And What Will)
Episode Summary
Why aren’t your farm products selling? It’s probably not your prices. In this episode, farm marketing and mindset coach Charlotte Smith shares the story of Julie, a lamb farmer who ended her farmers market season calling it “a total bomb.” Julie’s brain told her the fix was to lower her prices. Instead, she raised them significantly, and this season her lamb is flying out of the freezer.
The products she raised prices on the most sold out first. Charlotte breaks down the exact 3-step self-coaching skill that made the difference: awareness, questioning your thoughts, and choosing thinking that serves you. If slow sales have you convinced that people in your area won’t pay your prices, this episode will change how you see your business.
What You’ll Learn in This Episode
- Why “my prices are too high” feels completely true when sales are slow, and why it’s almost never a fact
- The three-step mindset skill that separates what actually happened from the story your brain tells you about it
- The one rule I follow before making any pricing or marketing decision (this alone will save you thousands)
Key Takeaways:
- The fact and the story are two different things. “I made 5 sales” is a fact. “My prices are too high” is a judgment your brain supplied. And about 99% of those automatic thoughts are fiction, not fact.
- Never make a decision from a negative-feeling thought. A pricing decision made from discouragement will always be worse than one made from confidence. Check the feeling first, then decide.
- Nothing about Julie’s product changed. Same animals, same quality, same markets. The only thing that changed was her thinking, and that mindset shift was worth a whole season of higher sales and profit.
Memorable Quotes
“Your brain is wired to find evidence for a thought, no matter how absurd it is.”
“Them not buying at the farmer’s market is not proof they won’t pay your prices. It’s only proof that there’s a skill you haven’t learned yet.”
“Every tactic that I teach you passes through your brain on the way to your business.”
FAQ
Q: Should I lower my prices if my farm products aren’t selling?
Usually no. Slow sales are rarely a pricing problem. They signal a relationship-building and marketing skill you haven’t learned yet.
Q: Why do people buy farm products?
Connection and trust, not price. Farmers sell premium products in low-income areas every day because they’ve built relationships with their dream customers.
Q: What is a thought download?
Writing down the exact sentence in your head that’s creating a negative emotion, so you can question whether it’s fact or fiction.
Q: How do I stop feeling discouraged after a slow sales day?
Ask yourself: “What am I telling myself about my sales that’s making me feel this way?” Write it down, question it, then choose a more useful thought.
Resources mentioned in this episode:
- Free class — August 17th: The Mindset Fix. I’m teaching the single most foundational coaching skill — the one all 26 skills are built on. There will be a replay. Save your seat HERE
- The Profitable Mindset Academy — starting late August/early September, open to all women everywhere (farmers and non-farmers): learn all 26 self-coaching skills with weekly coaching calls for a year. Sign up at charlottemsmith.com/class
- The Profitable Farmer — Charlotte’s coaching program (enrollment opens periodically) charlottemsmith.com/mastery
- The Profitable Mindset Podcast — subscribe for weekly farm marketing strategy
About the Host
Charlotte Smith is a farm marketing coach, podcast host, and the founder of The Profitable Farmer. She’s a 5th generation farmer, now supporting the 6th, together. Charlotte coaches approximately 300 farmers per year across the United States and 15 other countries, helping them shift from selling-out-but-broke to genuinely profitable through clear branding and customer-focused marketing.
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Today on the Profitable Mindset Podcast, I’m sharing how just one thought that you think can cost
you so much. It can cost you sales and profit, fulfillment in life,
and even your health. And today, this is about my client, Julie. I’ll use her as an example to show
you how powerful our thoughts are. She’s a lamb farmer. And a little over a year ago,
she ended her farmer’s market season. and called it a total bomb. And she felt really discouraged.
So when she was heading into the next season, she thought what she had to do was lower her prices.
She thought that’s why she wasn’t selling enough. That’s the story her brain offered her.
And a lot of us do this. It seems obvious to us. It sounds true. Like,
oh, slow sales must mean my prices are too high. I have to lower them. Instead,
right about the same time, she joined my coaching program. And through coaching and learning the
skills I teach, she realized it wasn’t a pricing issue at all. As a matter of fact,
she went through my cost worksheets. She realized what she actually needed to charge to be making a
profit. And she raised her prices significantly. And then combined with the marketing skills I
teach this season, in her words, her product is flying out of the freezer. The items she actually
raised her prices on the most were the ones that sold out first. And here’s why I’m telling you
this story. It’s not about pricing. It’s about our minds. It’s about how her brain…
automatically handed her a thought that felt completely true. Like my prices are too high.
It’s why no one’s buying. And I know a lot of you can relate to that. And if she had believed it,
she just spent yet another season overworking constantly like we do for no money or no more
discouragement than ever before until we go out of business actually. But most of us do assume that
pricing is the problem or that pricing is why people buy or not buy. It does seem reasonable.
It’s what everyone else is thinking too. But the thought is wrong. And I know this from coaching
thousands of farmers over the last 13 years on mindset. All of us have some thought running that
sounds true. It feels obvious, but it’s costing us sales and it will cost us the farm if we keep
going. Today, I’m going to break it down so that you can coach yourself on why price isn’t why
people buy. I’m going to share with you the mindset coaching skill that fixes it because this might
be the most valuable skill you build in your business. And just know…
I teach these mindset skills because it is the key to our success, period.
I know it sounds kind of cliche, but it’s true. Mindset management, the coaching skills I teach,
are how we build successful, fulfilling lives, period. It’s not the marketing tactics,
tricks, strategies, or the latest this or that. It’s not a fancy website. You will not be
successful even if you have all that stuff. If your mindset isn’t in order,
offering you useful and productive thoughts because you learned how to manage your mind instead of
just defaulting to what is natural, which is negative thinking that keeps you stuck.
So let’s slow down. And I want to share with you the actual mechanics. This skill is going to help
you a ton, especially if you too think pricing is why people buy or don’t buy.
No, it’s not. Pricing has very little to do with why people buy. So there’s just three simple
steps. Step one is awareness, awareness of what you’re thinking. Most of us go through life totally
unaware of our thoughts. I think they say we average about 60 to 70,000 thoughts a day.
Most of us are totally unaware of what that is. So step one, you’ve got to be aware.
So how it works is something disappointing will happen. Right? Like maybe you have a slow market
day or maybe you make a post or send an email because you’re trying to sell quarters of beef or
chickens or Thanksgiving turkeys or floral subscriptions or DIY wedding buckets,
whatever it might be. You get fewer sales than you hoped.
Okay? This is probably going to happen at some point. This part is real. The number of things you
sold or didn’t sell. is a fact. Like I sold zero. I sent an email and I sold zero DIY floral
buckets. Or I sent an email and I sold 10 DIY floral buckets.
All right. That’s the only fact. Here’s where it gets sneaky. Your brain is wired to immediately
give you an explanation or a judgment or a criticism for that fact. Your brain is going to say,
oh, you sold zero. Or you sold two because your prices are high. They’re too high.
People won’t pay that around here. But that explanation your brain offers up is not a fact.
Or they’re going to say people don’t want what you offer. What you offer is not good enough. This
is what your brain’s going to do to you, but none of it is factual. It sounds like a fact though.
And our brains do this constantly. But just know. On average, I think studies show about 99% of
the thoughts we think are fiction. They’re guesses. They are not factual. So this is what happened
to Julie. Her brain said, ugh, nobody bought. Your prices are too high.
I’ve got to lower them. She was ready to act on it. She thought the only solution was to drop her
prices. The fact that she made, let’s just throw out a number, five sales that day instead of the
30 she wanted. Well, the story she told herself, the one her brain automatically supplied was that
she had to lower her prices, but she had no real evidence of that. It was just a judgment her brain
offered up. Your brain is wired to find evidence for a thought, no matter how absurd.
It is. It’s not wired to just find the facts and then look at them with reason.
When something disappointing happens, our brain reaches for a critical reason why.
And the reason is almost always negative because that’s how we’re wired. That’s our biology. It’s
built into us. Like your brain will say, ah, you didn’t make any sales because it’s your prices.
It’s your ability. You’re not very good. You’re not good enough. Your product isn’t good enough.
It’s your customers. Nobody around here wants that. Nobody reads email. No one has any money.
These are things I hear all the time, but they’re discouraging and negative because of our wiring,
not because they’re true, because they aren’t. None of those things are true. I have farmers in my
program, many, many, many, there’s… farmers go through my program a year. Many of them are
selling the highest priced products in the poorest counties and making a living. Because when you
learn the marketing skills I teach and your mindset is aligned, you will build a profitable farm.
But your mind is not. set up to do that naturally. You have to manage it. Okay.
So that’s why step one is awareness. You got to know, I feel discouraged. Here’s how you do it.
If you feel discouraged, if you feel a negative emotion, you got to ask yourself, why? What am I
telling myself about my sales that’s making me feel so bad?
That’s how you gain. awareness and you write that sentence down. If we’re on a coaching call, I
will ask you that. And it just pops out of your mouth. People don’t even hardly have to think about
it. When I say, oh, why are you feeling discouraged? The explanation comes right out and you just
write it down. This is really important. I call it a thought download. You will learn how to do
that skill in the Profitable Mindset Academy. That’s the first step in becoming aware.
Ask yourself, why? Why am I feeling discouraged? And write down that thought.
It’s going to be something like, oh, I’m feeling discouraged because nobody bought. My prices are
too high. People around here won’t pay for it. I’m bothering people if I ask for their email.
Whatever it is. Write it down. That’s how you gain awareness. Write down the thought that’s making
you feel the negative emotion separate from the plain fact of what happened.
Step two is to question that thought. Now you look at that thought on the sheet of paper and say,
is that thought a fact or a fiction? Like people around here can’t afford it.
Nah, that’s fiction. Again, people decide how to spend their money and there are people in every
community. in our society who will spend money on farm fresh products,
period, no matter how poor or high end your community is.
All right. So that thought is fiction that people around here won’t pay that. And just know that
you’ve got other questions you can ask is why, how do I know this is a fact?
Is this a fact? Is it a fact that people won’t pay this around here, your brain might say,
yeah. And you could say, well, how do I know it’s a fact? These are all lists of coaching questions
that you learn in the Profitable Mindset Academy. You get a list of, I don’t know, 50 or more
coaching questions that you ask yourself. And what that does is it loosens your brain’s grip on
telling you it’s true when it’s not. So is what I’m telling myself a fact?
People around here can’t afford it. How do I know that’s a fact? Well, It’s just a guess. Maybe
it’s not a fact. What’s my evidence? Is it true? What am I basing that on? So just remember that
it’s not a pricing issue. It’s not a fact that people around you won’t pay.
It’s that there’s a relationship and a skill to be built. You may not be aware of that yet.
So don’t listen to your brain when it says people won’t pay that because it lets you off the hook
to learn the marketing skill. For Julie, she questioned it and she realized nobody had ever
complained she was too expensive. So about that time was when she joined my program and started
learning the marketing skills. One other thing I tell my clients, and you’ll want to make sure,
this is just in my personal life and my professional life. You never want to make a decision.
from a negative feeling thought. So you don’t want to make a decision about pricing from feeling
discouraged. It’ll always be a not useful decision.
A decision made from a negative feeling thought will always be less productive,
less useful than a decision made from a good feeling thought. Here’s the difference. Feelings that
feel good are things like you feel confident, you feel focused, capable,
That’s how you want to feel when you’re making a decision. If you feel discouraged or anxiety or
scared or stressed or overwhelmed or confused, worried, guilty, obligated,
if you make any of those negative feelings or other negative emotions, anything, do not make
pricing decisions or marketing decisions or any decisions from that place.
If you check a thought, and it’s actually backed by real data, and it is a factual thought,
that’s great. But most of the time when my clients go looking for evidence, there isn’t any.
There’s just this negative feeling, and it led to a negative action of,
oh, I feel discouraged, therefore I have to drop my prices. So become aware first. Second,
question it. Is it fact? Fact, you’ll probably figure out quickly that it’s just your brain
offering you a suggestion, suggested guess, and it’s keeping you stuck. Then step three is once
you’ve questioned that thought and you become aware that, oh, I think that thought is not anything
I have clear evidence for. It probably is fiction. Now you get to choose a thought that serves you.
Since you… don’t actually know that negative thought is true, it’s just as easy to think
something different that’s useful. Like instead of, oh, nobody bought my products today.
Today was so slow. Even though there were lots of people here and they were buying from the other
vendors, nobody bought from me. Therefore, my prices are too high. Since you’re thinking that and
it’s not useful, you will need to practice a useful thought such as, my dream customers are here.
They’re looking for this quality. They’re happy to pay for it. They are excited to meet me.
That is a thought you can choose and it feels so much better, which means it’s going to lead you to
take better action and lead you to connect with people. You might think, well, There’s no proof for
people being out there who are willing to pay for my products. But I want to say there’s also no
proof for the opposite. There’s no proof that, oh, people in our area won’t pay our prices.
Them not buying at the farmer’s market is not proof they won’t pay your prices. It’s only proof
that there’s a skill you’ve got to learn that you haven’t learned yet, the relationship building
skill. So you write your marketing in a way that connects them to you. All right. So it’s just as
easy to think the thought that serves you, like my dream customers are here waiting for me to
connect with them. The first thought, prices are too high. That thought is going to make you
shrink. It’s going to make you lower your prices. It’s going to make you apologize and feel
terrible. But the second thought, people are looking for me. They want this. They’re willing to pay
for the quality of our products. That will make you show up feeling confident or determined or in
service. And when you make decisions from those feelings, you raise your prices, you talk about
your products confidently, and you will make far more sales. Isn’t it crazy how this works?
But it’s true. I see it over and over again with my clients. And that’s what Julie did. She chose
the thought, my customers want this high quality lamb and they’re willing to pay for it.
She raised her prices. She learned to market. She watched her product fly out of the freezer.
She proved to herself she could raise her prices and finally pay herself. And she did that because
she shifted her mindset first. And that’s the whole skill. Become aware of the thought.
Question its validity. Choose and test a more useful thought.
I know that seems so simple. The hard part is that it does take focus and practice to implement.
It’s why we have our coaching calls every single week. You’re going to learn one of these skills.
There’s about, I think, 26 of them. So you’ll learn one skill a week and you’ll get one coaching
call every week to drive it home, to make it just so you can just embody it.
So it becomes very natural to you to think useful thoughts instead of unproductive thoughts.
You will know a thought is more useful when it produces a useful emotion.
like I said, confidence instead of anxiety, driven instead of stress,
capable instead of feeling not good enough. Now notice this, nothing about Julie’s product changed
between her discouraging season and her best season ever. It was the same animals,
the same quality, same markets. The only thing that changed was that she learned to notice her
thinking. She learned to manage her mindset. She learned to question it. And she learned to choose
thinking that served her. That’s what let her raise her prices. That’s how much a single sentence
is worth in your head. A whole season of higher sales and profit. A single sentence she got through
mindset coaching made her thousands and thousands of dollars. It’s a difference between scraping
by, going out of business, or finally paying yourself a salary. I can teach email marketing and
pricing strategy all day long, but every tactic that I teach you passes through your brain on the
way to your business. So your brain has to be managed. If I teach you a skill, but it is shrouded
in your brain of thinking no one around here will pay that, it won’t work. And that’s why the
mindset coaching comes first. It’s built in. And these skills work, whether you’re farming or not.
Just know that. And also, for instance, the best sales email in the world, it could be written so
well, but it’ll never get sent by a farmer who believes I’m bothering people. Or the confident
price won’t make it onto the price tag if you feel guilty. So just know that every thought you have
comes first before every action you take. Your thoughts create your emotions.
This is biological. This is science. Your emotions drive your actions. Your actions create your
results. Managing your thoughts is no longer an extra nice thing.
It’s the first most mandatory skill we need to learn as human beings that nobody teaches us.
We should be learning these skills in school, but we don’t. But luckily, here we are.
You can learn it now. So here’s what I want you to do. If this is resonating, if you suspect your
thoughts are holding you back, Mine sure were. I’ll never forget the day I became aware.
I got this knowledge that my thoughts create my feelings, driving my actions, which create my
results. Nobody else, nobody else is making me, making my life unfulfilling.
I was in complete control of that. It was such amazing,
life-changing news. It changed everything for me. It saved my life literally physically.
More on that story later. This is exactly why I built the Profitable Mindset Academy.
And that’s a new program starts in late August or early September. So many people have asked me if
I would teach them the coaching skills I use to coach other people. And people who are non-farmers
too. So Profitable Mindset Academy is open to all women, all ages, everywhere,
no matter what you do. You will learn to become your own coach. The dozens of self-coaching skills
that help you make more money also fix and improve every relationship you have.
They help you stop procrastinating. They help if you have a really bad past that you’re not proud
of, you feel terrible about, about your past, you will learn the skill of transforming that into a
story that is useful for you. And we’re not gaslighting ourselves.
We’re learning to find gold in every area of our life. And every area of your life gets touched by
these skills. So I will be teaching for free the single most foundational one. And that free
training is on August 17th. It’s in the Mindset Fix, it’s called. You could sign up for that at
charlottemsmith.com forward slash. Class, C-L-A-S-S. So that’s where you’re going to learn the
most foundational skill that is at the bottom of all of them. And then I’ll share with you about
the Profitable Mindset Academy where you learn all 26 coaching skills. I teach them all and then we
coach on them every week for a year. Your life is going to change in ways you never imagined
possible. You’re going to hear from more of my clients on that who’ve done that. They can’t believe
the life they have now after learning coaching skills versus before they learn the coaching skills.
So you too can feel better, have more success and fulfillment, better health,
better bank account, everything. That’s what mindset management does. It seems miraculous to all of
us who are doing it. Okay, that’s it for this week. I will see you in next week’s episode where we
will keep diving into these foundational skills and I’ll share how the farmers in my program are
using them. All right, take care and I will see you then.
