How to Stop Clients From Comparing You on Price | Jackie Pelegrin

Abi Asija sits down with Jackie Pelegrin of Designing with Love, an instructional designer, college professor, consultant, and podcast host with nearly 20 years of experience in higher education, curriculum development, and learning design. Jackie helps businesses and organizations improve training, professional development, and employee learning experiences, but the core challenge is market awareness, client education, and moving beyond referral-only growth into a more scalable consulting pipeline.Key Insight: Expertise alone does not create demand if the market does not understand the value of the work. Abi helps Jackie clarify that her role is not just creating training materials, but diagnosing learning gaps, building custom training solutions, improving implementation, and helping companies connect better employee development to stronger business outcomes.The first strategic shift is narrowing the ideal customer profile. Jackie can technically serve for-profit companies, nonprofits, education, government, and military organizations, but broad positioning makes the offer harder to understand. Abi pushes her toward a clearer niche, starting with education-focused companies and organizations that already have training but are not getting the results they need.Abi also recommends removing fixed pricing from the website and moving toward custom proposals. Jackie's work is not a commodity because each client has different learners, stakeholders, systems, gaps, and business goals. A custom offer lets her build around the real problem, include the right mix of needs assessment, design, development, implementation, and evaluation, and position the engagement as a premium solution.The conversation also breaks down how Jackie can use LinkedIn more strategically. Instead of relying only on warm referrals, Abi recommends personalized Loom-style outreach where Jackie reviews a prospect's training presence, identifies opportunities, and gives away valuable insight before offering implementation support. The goal is to sell the implementation, not hide the strategy.Abi also explains why Jackie needs to become supply constrained. When her calendar is full with consultation calls, feedback calls, and qualified sales conversations, her sales conviction rises naturally. That creates stronger pricing power, reduces imposter syndrome, and makes it easier to use waitlists, scarcity, testimonials, and premium positioning without sounding forced.You will learn how to position an instructional design consulting business, why custom offers outperform fixed packages for complex training work, how to use LinkedIn outreach without sounding salesy, and how to build demand until your calendar supports premium pricing. Jackie can be reached by email at [email protected] or on LinkedIn by searching Jackie Pelegrin.