“How Much Are Your Lessons?” What to Say When a Prospect Asks About Price on the Phone

When a prospect opens with “How much are your lessons?” you do not answer it. You acknowledge nothing, ask your next scripted question, and drive to the appointment. Price is the last decision a parent makes, not the first — and any number you say out loud before they have walked in your door will be the wrong one.

That is the short version. The long version is what I want to give you here, because this single moment — twenty to forty seconds on an inbound phone call — decides more about your school’s gross revenue than almost anything else you do. I have watched schools with excellent marketing, excellent instruction, and excellent facilities stay stuck at half of what they should be doing for one reason: the person answering the phone quotes a price.

On a recent coaching call with our members, a school owner asked me about a line buried on page two of his info-call script — an old objection-handler that read, “If you’re worried about the price, our least expensive course is only one hundred dollars a month.” He had raised his new-student tuition and wanted to know what number to substitute. Dr. Greg Moody’s answer was blunt: that line has been on the script for fifteen years and nobody has ever gotten to it, because if you run the rest of the script correctly, you never do. My answer was equally blunt: delete it.

What follows is the whole system underneath that answer.

Why “How Much Are Your Lessons?” Is a Nonsense Question

Start here, because your staff will never hold the line unless they understand why they are holding it. They think they are being evasive. They are not. They are refusing to answer a question that has no answer.

Imagine calling a car dealership and asking, “How much is your car?” The salesperson would have no idea what to say. If I called and said I want a 2022 Porsche 911 Turbo S, with these specific options, this interior, this transmission — now we can have a conversation about a number. Without those specs, “how much is your car” is not a question. It’s a noise a person makes when they don’t know what else to say.

Take an even more generic service: color printing. Call a print shop and ask “how much is your color printing?” and the first thing you will hear is a string of questions back. Digital or offset? Ten thousand units or two hundred? One-sided or two? Mail merge? Coated stock? There are twenty-two things they need to know before a number exists. Nobody thinks the printer is dodging.

Now think about what happens when a parent calls five martial arts schools in your market. She will get five different answers, and not one of them is comparable to another. One school quotes a month-to-month rate with a registration fee, a testing fee, a sparring gear package and an annual membership stacked behind it. One quotes a paid-in-full number. One quotes a beginner special. One quotes an after-school program rate that includes transportation. You are being compared to the entry-level Hyundai, the loaded AMG Mercedes, and a used Jaguar, all at once, by someone who does not know which is which and has no way to find out over the phone.

So when mom calls at 2:15 on a Tuesday because her neighbor said martial arts was the best thing that ever happened to her kid, and she opens with “How much are your lessons?” — she is not price shopping. She is filling silence. She has never enrolled a child in a martial arts school before, she doesn’t know what a curriculum is, she doesn’t know what a black belt program is, she doesn’t know what questions a smart person would ask. So she asks the one question everyone knows how to ask.

Answer it and you have handed her a number with nothing attached to it. You have also handed her the ability to hang up and decide — which is the one thing you must never let her do, because there is no decision she can make on the phone that is good for either of you.

The Real Buying Sequence a Parent Runs

Here is the sequence every family actually moves through, in this order, without exception:

1. Do I want this? — Is martial arts the right activity for my child, or for me?
2. Do I like these people? — Do I trust this instructor, this staff, this environment?
3. Is this a fit? — Is this specific school right for us, or is it the wrong style, wrong age focus, wrong culture?
4. Can we afford it? — Now, and only now, does the budget conversation happen.

Notice that money is fourth. It is always fourth. Nobody in the history of your school has ever decided they wanted their child in martial arts because of the price. They decided they wanted it, they decided they liked you, they decided you were the right place, and then they figured out how to pay for it.

When you quote a price on the phone, you rip step four out of the sequence and staple it to step one. You are asking a woman who has not yet decided she wants the activity, has not met you, and has not seen your school, to evaluate a dollar figure in a vacuum. Of course she says “let me talk to my husband.” There is nothing else she can say. You gave her nothing to weigh the number against.

Every part of the ladder below exists to protect that sequence.

The Three-Ask Ladder

We have trained staff on this for decades and it always comes down to the same structure. A prospect will ask about price a maximum of three times on an info call. You have a different, pre-written response for each ask, and each one climbs one rung further while still driving toward the same destination: a scheduled appointment.

Call it the Three-Ask Ladder. Rung Zero is the foundation. Rungs One, Two and Three are the escalating responses. And there is no Rung Four — if you get there, something upstream is broken, and I will show you how to find it.

Rung Zero — Control the Conversation Before the Question Ever Lands

Grandmaster Jeff Smith puts it in terms every martial artist understands: an info call is sparring. You have to know when to attack in between his techniques. Whoever is asking the questions controls the conversation. If your staff member is answering questions, the prospect is driving, and the call ends wherever the prospect steers it — which is almost always “thanks, I’ll think about it.”

The mechanic is simple and non-negotiable: every statement your staff makes ends in a question. Not a period. A question. “Thanks for calling — is this for yourself, or for someone else?” She answers. Before she can launch a second question of her own, you are already asking the next one. “Wonderful — how old is he? Has he trained before? What made you start looking right now?”

You are not being pushy. You are being a professional gathering the information you need in order to help. A doctor’s office does the same thing. A good travel agent does the same thing. The difference between a school that converts 85 percent of info calls to appointments and one that converts 40 percent is almost entirely whether the person on the phone ends their sentences with questions.

Get Rung Zero right and here is what happens: the price question either never comes up, or it comes up once and dies. Dr. Moody’s position on that old hundred-dollar line was that he doesn’t even try to train the deep objection-handler, because if the script is run correctly it comes into play maybe one time in a hundred. Training your team on the rare exception while the fundamentals are broken is like training a fighter for an opponent with one arm. Fix the ninety-nine.

Rung One — Ignore and Continue

The first time she asks, you do not answer, you do not acknowledge the question, and you do not say anything that sounds like a dodge. You simply proceed with the script.

“How much are your lessons?”

“Is this for yourself, or for someone else?”

“Oh, for my son.”

“Great — how old is he? Has he ever done anything like this before?”

And you are gone. You are into the conversation, she is answering, and the price question has evaporated — because it was never a real question. Ninety-plus percent of the time this is the entire objection handle. It works because she wasn’t asking; she was starting a conversation, and you started a better one.

The mistake I see constantly is staff who feel rude ignoring a direct question, so they say something like “Well, it depends, but before I get into that…” That phrasing tells her you are hiding something. Say nothing about it. Ask your next question. The tone should be warm, fast, and completely unbothered.

Rung Two — Restate What They’re Getting, Then Redirect

If it comes back a second time, you still do not quote a number. You restate the offer she is actually calling about and immediately drive to the appointment with an either/or close.

“As I mentioned, the postcard you got includes two weeks of lessons at no cost and no obligation, plus a uniform, so Billy gets a chance to come in, meet the instructors and see whether he loves it — and so you and his dad can see the school and decide whether it’s the right fit. Would Tuesday or Thursday work better for you?”

Honestly, that is already more words than I would normally use. The tighter version: “The card says two weeks free and it includes a uniform — would Tuesday or Thursday be better?” And you are off in another direction.

Grandmaster Smith handles the second ask with a single sentence: “That’s exactly why I’m asking these questions — I need to find out a little more first.” Then straight back into the script and into setting the appointment. It doesn’t sound like avoidance. It sounds like process, because it is process.

There’s a second version he uses that I like even better, because it plants the frame we want for the entire enrollment: “It’s free — two weeks, and you even get a uniform, because we want to give you a chance to see what our program is about. Then based on your instructor’s evaluation and how well he liked it, we’ll sit down and work out the right program for him.” That is not a stall. That is the truth. We do not enroll everyone. The trial exists so we can evaluate fit, and so the family can too.

Rung Three — Give an Honest Range, Then Close the Loop

One caller in twenty, thirty, or fifty pushes past both rungs. And when they do, it is almost never bargain hunting. It sounds like this: “Hold on. I don’t want to get him all excited about this if we can’t afford it.”

That is a fair concern from a decent parent and it deserves a straight answer. Here is my rule, and it has never changed in fifty years: I will never tell somebody a number that turns out to be a lie. I don’t want a family walking in the door believing they know the price and then feeling ambushed at the enrollment conference. So if I am going to give a number, I give a range — and the range is real.

Construct it like this. The low end is your annual paid-in-full price divided by twelve. The high end is your standard monthly tuition on the twelve-month Trial Enrollment. Everything a family could realistically choose lands between those two numbers.

Worked example using the numbers a well-coached school should be running: standard new-student tuition is $397 a month on a twelve-month Trial Enrollment. Your paid-in-full option for the year is $3,900, which is $325 a month. So the answer is: “It typically runs somewhere between $325 and $397 a month depending on which program makes sense and how you’d like to handle it. When Billy comes in for his couple of lessons we’ll figure out exactly what fits. Don’t worry about the budget — let’s see if he loves it first. Tuesday or Thursday?”

Notice four things about that answer. It is honest. It is a range, not a point, so she cannot “decide” on it. It ends by explicitly deferring the money conversation to the appointment. And it closes with the appointment question, because the only acceptable outcome of an info call is a scheduled first lesson.

If somebody gets genuinely pushy, you can be equally direct without ever getting defensive: “Ms. Jones, there’s no obligation at all. Come in and try the class. If you love it, terrific. If you don’t, that’s fine too — and if we’re not in your budget, I’m happy to point you toward someone who might be.” Said warmly, that ends the pressure instantly. It also signals that you are not desperate, which is worth more than any script line.

There Is No Rung Four

If your team is regularly getting to a fourth ask — bogged into fee-by-fee comparisons, defending your rate against the school down the street, explaining why you don’t have a $99 special — the problem is not the objection. The problem is Rung Zero. They are answering instead of asking, and the prospect has taken control of the call.

This is why I told that member to delete the hundred-dollar line rather than update it. A cheap number sitting on page two of a script is a trapdoor. Under pressure, a nineteen-year-old program director will find it, because it’s the easiest thing on the page. Take it off the page. If a low-cost feeder offer genuinely exists in your marketing — a four-week introductory course, a summer camp — that belongs in the specific campaign script for that offer, not in the general info-call script where it will get used as an escape hatch.

And never get drawn into a fee-by-fee comparison with a competitor. You are not comparable. Refusing that comparison is not arrogance; it’s accuracy.

What One Blown Info Call Actually Costs

School owners nod along to all of this and then don’t fix it, because it feels like a small thing. Let me put real numbers on it.

Say you spend $2,000 a month on marketing and it produces 20 inbound info calls. That is $100 a call before anyone picks up the phone.

• Untrained phone handling — quotes a price, answers questions instead of asking them. Call-to-appointment rate around 40 percent: 8 appointments. Show rate 60 percent: 4.8 intros. Enrollment rate 60 percent: 2.9 new students.
• The Three-Ask Ladder, drilled — call-to-appointment 85 percent: 17 appointments. Show rate 75 percent, because you also confirm properly and schedule fast: 12.75 intros. Enrollment rate 65 percent: 8.3 new students.

Same marketing spend. Same ads. Same instructors. Same building. The difference is 5.4 enrollments a month.

Look at what that does to your cost per enrollment. In the first scenario, $2,000 divided by 2.9 students is $694 per enrollment — a number that will bankrupt you. In the second, $2,000 divided by 8.3 is $241 per enrollment, which sits right in the $150 to $300 range a healthy school should be paying to acquire a student. Nothing changed except the twenty seconds after “how much are your lessons.”

Now run it forward. 5.4 extra enrollments a month is roughly 65 additional students a year. At $397 a month on a twelve-month Trial Enrollment, each one represents about $4,764 in first-year tuition. That’s over $300,000 of first-year value walking out the door annually because of a script. And if you’re running attrition below 2 percent a month like a well-coached school should, a meaningful share of those students train for three years or more — 36 months at $397 is roughly $14,300 in lifetime tuition per student, before renewals, before pro shop, before events.

A million-dollar school is $83,333 a month. Fixing the phone alone doesn’t get you there. But it is very often the difference between a school that grinds at low six figures and one that has enough students in the building for everything else to work.

There is a second, quieter cost. When your staff quotes $100 or $149 on the phone, they have anchored the family. Even if you never charge it, that number is now the reference point in mom’s head, and your $397 enrollment conference feels like a bait-and-switch. This is exactly how schools slide into the industry-average commodity trap of $140 to $185 a month — not by deciding to be cheap, but by letting the phone decide for them. More on holding a premium position is in our pricing resources; the phone is where pricing gets won or lost first.

The Language Audit: Words That Sink the Ladder

On that same coaching call I interrupted a perfectly good answer over one phrase: “we have different payment plans.” I am sensitive about this, and I want you to be too.

“Payment plan” is car-lot language. So is “sign up.” So is “down payment.” So is “special.” Every one of those words tells the family they are in a transaction with a salesperson, which is precisely the frame you have spent the whole call avoiding. You are a professional school evaluating whether a child is a fit for a black belt program. Talk like it.

• “Sign up” becomes “enroll.” Students enroll in programs. Customers sign up for gym memberships.
• “Payment plan” becomes “tuition options” or “the way most families handle the tuition.”
• “Down payment” becomes “enrollment investment” or simply the first month plus gear.
• “Contract” becomes “enrollment agreement” or “Trial Enrollment.”
• “Price” becomes “tuition.” Schools have tuition. Products have prices.
• “Deal” or “special” — delete entirely. You do not discount a black belt education.

This is not word-policing for its own sake. Language sets the category you are competing in. If you sound like a retailer, families will comparison-shop you like a retailer, and comparison shopping always resolves to the cheapest option. If you sound like an academy, they evaluate fit — and fit is where you win.

Run this audit on every piece of language your staff uses: the info-call script, the intro, the enrollment conference, your voicemail greeting, your text templates, your website. It takes an afternoon and it changes the frame of every conversation you have for the next decade.

The Physical Infrastructure That Makes the Ladder Work

Here is the part nobody wants to hear: memorization is about five percent of it. You absolutely must have your team memorize and role-play the info call word for word — an info call, a first intro and an enrollment conference are the three conversations in your school that can and should be scripted verbatim. But memorization alone fails under pressure, and it fails completely with part-time staff.

What actually holds the system together is easy-reference form. Physical, visible, idiot-proof reference at the exact moment of use.

• A clipboard at every phone. An 8.5×11 sheet that is simultaneously the script outline and the information-capture form. They fill it in as they go, in order. The outline is the form. That’s the whole trick.
• Pre-printed pads with the outline on the back. Little appointment pads where the fill-in side faces up and the call outline is printed on the reverse.
• The intro outline posted on the wall. On the wall the instructor faces during a first lesson — above the parents’ seating, next to the clock — post the outline of what that intro is supposed to be. When a young instructor gets nervous and starts talking too much, his eyes drift to the outline and he finds his place. I have done this for decades and every top school I visit has some version of it.
• An enrollment-conference sheet. One page: feedback on how they did, the pre-qualifying questions, then the tuition presentation. Flip book, iPad, or paper — I use paper.
• Pre-filled clipboards when you’re busy. When we were slammed I would have twenty-two clipboards stacked with the agreement pre-filled with the family’s information and the evaluation ready to go. Grab one, bring them in, done. Then the next.

I love technology, and in this specific context I hate it. I don’t want the battery dead in the middle of an enrollment. I don’t want the internet down when I need to pull up an agreement. I am not taking fifty tablets to a movie theater booth and hoping they all come home. A sheet of paper on a clipboard solves almost all of it.

One more piece of infrastructure, and it’s the one that will surprise you most: a tracking pad at every phone that can ring. I once worked with a very large school where the owner could never tell me how many info calls he was getting. The reason was structural — thirteen phone lines came into that building, and anyone might answer any of them, including an instructor in the middle of teaching a class. So there was no data.

The fix was two hanging file pockets on the wall next to every phone. One holds blank forms, one holds completed ones. Rule: if you answer the phone, you start filling out the form. If they ask three questions and hang up, you write “info call, no appointment” and drop it in the completed pocket. Suddenly there was a number.

Expect the data to be optimistic. Any time a school owner tells me they had 20 info calls and 20 appointments, I know they are not counting the ones that didn’t convert. Staff always undercount their misses — not maliciously, just naturally. Even an undercounted number beats no number, because it gives you a call-to-appointment ratio you can coach against. This is the ratio, more than any other single figure, that tells me whether a school is going to grow. If you want more on the ratios that actually drive enrollment, work through our sales and enrollment training.

Congruence: You Cannot Defend $397 While Acting Broke

The last piece isn’t a script line. It’s whether your school is congruent with the number you charge.

The worst thing you can do is tell parents you teach success skills, goal setting and the ability to achieve anything a person sets out to do — and then have yourself and your staff look broke, talk broke, and act broke. That is an incoherent message. You are effectively saying: we teach people to achieve everything they want in life, except us, obviously, because we’re all losers.

With my high-school and college-age staff I have literally taken them out and bought them a decent watch and taken them shopping for clothes. Then I had a lot of conversations about how they talked about money, opportunity and their own goals — because that had to be congruent with what we taught on the floor.

Over the years people have occasionally made comments about what I drive or what I wear. I used to overthink it — one school of mine sat next to a very high-end golf club and one served a mostly lower-middle-class neighborhood, and I adjusted accordingly. In hindsight that was mostly wasted worry. Here is the actual rule: if the school looks sharp, the program is run well, and your staff is paid well relative to what they contribute, then nobody has standing to have an opinion about your car. If the school looks like a dump and the staff is complaining they can’t pay rent, then people have every right to judge. Nobody hesitates to hear a wildly successful founder speak because he made too much money — they want to hear him because he succeeded.

This connects directly back to the phone. A staff member who is secretly embarrassed by your tuition will quote a low number the first time a parent asks. A staff member who believes the program is worth $397 and can see that belief reflected in a sharp school, a well-run class and a well-compensated team will hold the ladder without effort. Congruence is not a mindset exercise. It is operational.

Install This Monday

1. Open your info-call script and delete every dollar figure below your real tuition. Today. Don’t update it — delete it.
2. Rewrite every line so it ends in a question. If a sentence ends in a period, it’s a leak.
3. Write out Rung One, Rung Two and Rung Three verbatim and post them on the script sheet where they are impossible to miss.
4. Calculate your real range — annual paid-in-full divided by twelve as the floor, standard monthly on the twelve-month Trial Enrollment as the ceiling. Write both numbers down.
5. Put a clipboard and a form pad at every phone that can ring, plus two file pockets for blanks and completed forms.
6. Post the intro outline on the wall where the instructor teaching the first lesson can see it.
7. Role-play twenty calls this week with each person who touches the phone. Not five. Twenty. Have them run the ladder while you play the pushiest parent alive.
8. Run the language audit across every script, template and page.
9. Start tracking call-to-appointment ratio weekly and post it where the team sees it.

Frequently Asked Questions

Isn’t refusing to give a price on the phone dishonest or evasive?

No — quoting a number would be the dishonest thing. You don’t yet know which program fits, how many days a week the student will train, or whether they’ll qualify for the black belt program at all. A number given before that evaluation is a guess dressed up as a fact, and the family will feel misled at the enrollment conference. If a parent has a genuine budget concern, give an honest range built from your real paid-in-full and monthly figures, then defer the specifics to the appointment. That is more honest than a made-up point price.

What if the caller flatly refuses to book unless I give a number?

That happens roughly one call in a hundred when the script is run properly, so don’t rebuild your system around it. When it does happen, give the range, then immediately return to the appointment question. If they still won’t book, close gracefully: no obligation, come try a class, and if we’re not the right fit financially you’re happy to suggest someone who might be. Then get their name, address, email and phone into your database and market to them for the next twelve months. A no today is frequently a yes in March.

My part-time staff can’t hold the script. What do I do?

Assume they can’t hold it from memory and build the environment so they don’t have to. Clipboard at every phone with the outline printed as the intake form. Intro outline posted on the wall in the instructor’s sight line. Enrollment-conference sheet on paper. Then role-play relentlessly — twenty reps, not five, and re-drill monthly. When you find someone deviating, the answer is almost never a new script; it’s more repetitions and a simpler reference sheet. As staff grows, simplify systems rather than complicate them.

Your Next Step

If your call-to-appointment ratio is under 70 percent, you do not have a marketing problem — you have a twenty-second problem, and it is entirely fixable. Book a Free Consultation and Personal Evaluation — a $1,297 value — and my team and I will go through your actual numbers with you: leads, info calls, appointments, show rates, intro-to-enrollment conversion and tuition. In one conversation you will know exactly which ratio is costing you the most money and what to do about it Monday morning.

And if you want the front end of the system — how to generate enough qualified leads that these calls are ringing in the first place — grab my free book Six Simple Steps to Add 100 Students at FillYourSchool.com. It lays out the lead-generation program that fills the pipeline the Three-Ask Ladder converts.

Once the phone is fixed, the next constraints are almost always upstream and downstream: where your leads come from, and how long students stay after they enroll. Work through our marketing resources to build the lead flow, and our retention resources to make sure the students you enroll are still training three years from now. Fix all three and the math on a million-dollar school stops being theoretical.

About the Author

Stephen Oliver, MBA and 10th Degree Black Belt, is the Founder and CEO of Mile High Karate and Martial Arts Wealth Mastery, CEO of NAPMA (National Association of Professional Martial Artists), and Publisher of Martial Arts Professional magazine. A martial arts school owner since 1975, he and his coaching team — including Grandmaster Jeff Smith and Dr. Greg Moody — have helped school owners across the world build $1M+ schools.