It’s a Tuesday afternoon, and you’re battling a mild panic about your puppy classes. They’re happening in two weeks. They’re only half full, and you need at least another booking to make them viable. You quickly start rustling up some discount codes in your booking system.
This is a very natural response to uncertainty. But before you start drafting a “limited time offer” email, it’s worth asking a question: what problem are you actually trying to solve?
Discounts can feel like a solution to almost anything. Enquiries slow? Discount. Packages not selling? Discount. Imposter syndrome flaring up at 2am? Discount, maybe with a side of rebranding your entire website.
The problem is that discounts often get used as a solution before we’ve properly identified the problem. Sometimes they help, and sometimes they’re simply a way to feel like we’re doing something.
Not every business problem is a pricing problem
Let’s say enquiries have genuinely dropped off over the past few weeks. Your instinct is that your prices are the barrier. But let’s think about what else might be going on.
Has your referral network gone quiet? A lot of dog training businesses rely heavily on word of mouth from vets, groomers, and rescue organizations. If one of those relationships has gone cold, or if the vet who used to send you everyone has hired their own trainer, that’s a pipeline problem, not a pricing problem.
Have you been slammed delivering services and basically stopped all marketing? This is almost universal in small service businesses. You get busy, you focus on your clients, and then one day you look up and realize you haven’t posted anything useful in six weeks and your last newsletter was sent by a version of you with fewer grey hairs.
Or is it just… January? Or August? Seasonality is real. People are distracted, travelling, or haven’t yet hit the “the dog is destroying everything” level of desperation that drives inquiries. Before you reach for a pricing lever, it’s worth asking these questions:
- Have inquiries dropped compared to the same period last year?
- Have they dropped for more than a couple of weeks?
- Do you have actual data, or could you be pattern-matching from anxiety?
None of these problems are solved by making your six-session behaviour package $50 cheaper.
What are you asking the discount to do?
This is the most useful question before doing anything.
- Are you trying to generate more inquiries from new clients? Before reaching for a discount, ask yourself whether enough of the right people even know your business exists. Frequent discounts can sometimes undermine the perceived value of your services without solving the real problem. If visibility is the issue, getting your business in front of more of the right people is likely to have a much bigger impact than lowering your prices.
- Are you trying to convert inquiries that are already coming in but not booking? Before assuming your prices are the problem, consider whether your marketing is attracting the right clients, your booking process has too many steps, your response time is slow, or your messaging isn’t clearly communicating the value of what you offer.
- Are you trying to fill a sudden gap in your calendar? Then a short-term promotion to your existing audience (people who already know and trust you) might actually move the needle.
- Are you trying to make training more accessible to people who genuinely can’t afford full rates? That’s a values conversation, and it deserves more than a blanket discount applied to everyone.
- Or, honestly, are you trying to feel better about charging what you charge? Because if that’s the underlying issue, a discount is not going to fix it. It’s just going to cost you money while the discomfort relocates.
The expertise problem
Dog trainers routinely underestimate the depth of what they know. You have studied learning theory, behavior science, handling and coaching skills. You have learned to read a dog’s body language while simultaneously managing a stressed human who is convinced their dog “just does this to spite them.” You have sat with genuinely difficult cases and have kept up with research. Many of you hold certifications that require years of documented case work and professional mentorship to earn.
A significant portion of that expertise is invisible to clients. They see someone good with dogs. They don’t see all the effort underneath it.
When you discount every time things feel uncertain, you can quietly reinforce the belief that your value is tied to being affordable rather than being skilled. That’s a hard belief to untangle once it takes hold. It also tends to attract clients who are primarily price-motivated, who are the most likely to push back on your methods, skip homework, and leave a lukewarm review because they expected more for what they paid.
Discounts aren’t the only way to make training accessible
A lot of R+ trainers genuinely care about accessibility. That’s not a soft business aim to dismiss. If your values include making good, science-based training available to people who can’t afford premium rates, that’s worth building into your business model thoughtfully.
But a blanket discount is actually one of the less effective ways to do it.
Payment plans let people access the full value of what you offer while spreading the cost. Group classes dramatically reduce your per-client cost without touching your hourly rate. A well-designed online course or resource library can reach people you’d never see in person. A discounted slot reserved specifically for low-income households is targeted and intentional rather than quietly bleeding revenue from every booking.
The trainers doing this well tend to decide in advance which populations they want to serve at reduced rates and why, rather than discounting because someone in a consultation mentioned they were “on a budget” and it felt rude not to respond.
When discounts make sense
Here are situations where a discount is a reasonable, intentional business decision rather than a response to anxiety:
- A new service launch where you want genuine case experience and testimonials before setting a full price.
- A values-based discount for specific cases that align with your mission.
- A package structure where the discount for buying a block of sessions incentivizes commitment rather than the one-and-done approach that produces worse outcomes for dogs and worse reviews for you.
- A loyalty offer to existing clients that deepens a relationship, promotes retention into additional services, and generates referrals.
The common thread is that you know what you’re trying to achieve, you have a way to measure whether it worked, and you have a plan for what happens when the promotion ends. That’s completely different from dropping your prices because three inquiries in a row said they needed to “think about it.”
So, should you offer a discount?
Maybe. But instead of starting there, try starting here: What outcome am I trying to create, and is a discount genuinely the most effective way to create it?
Sometimes the answer is yes. More often the answer is that you need better visibility, a cleaner booking process, a re-engaged referral network, or simply to wait out what is probably just a slow month.
And often the answer is that you need to charge what your expertise is worth and stop apologizing for it.