I'm not sure why I started this thread, but I'm actually learning some things from your responses and may change my approach as a result, so thank you. I basically advertise once a year, during Chinese New Year (tomorrow) and usually stay full for the year and don't normally have open spots available, but because of my current ad push, I'm getting more calls than normal and it is interesting to me to see patterns in the dialogue. Some are very good, by the way.
I always encourage newbies who come here asking what style to take to do the same thing...
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I always ask price, and it's typically one of the first questions I ask. It turns a lot of instructors off for some reason.
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The way I look at it, as a potential student, is if I can't afford it, let's not waste each other's time. ...
You typed some things that helped me, so let me try to explain the part that you said you don't really get from my perspective. As others have pointed out, I deliberately didn't put the cost on my website, that may be prompting the question and I'll consider that, but it's also I sign that I don't really want it to be public. So, when someone contacts me and ONLY asks that, they're just fishing for information that I clearly withheld. I'd like to know who they are and what their interest is, ideally before I share.
When I visit a kung fu teacher of any kind in their space, even if they are junior to me, the first thing I do is thank them for having me and discretely press a red envelope into their hand with enough money in it to buy themselves a beer. This is universal code for "I respect who you are and I'm not here to be any trouble to you." It opens up tremendous doors for me.
I don't expect someone not on the inside to be quite there, but I would like them to tell me who they are, tell me why they're contacting me e.g.- "I trained x years ago and am interested in starting up again because y." and it seems like there are a few critical things that they would want to know about us, - like how do we train? Is it dangerous? What do I think about x? In that line of questioning, logistics like "what do you charge?" and "do I need any special equipment?" is fine.
Oddly enough, most of the people who ask, never follow through. The one who prompted me to start this finally caught up with me and said he is not available on our class nights....which are posted on my website...so he really didn't need to know what I charge and he actually did waste both of our times.
What I have learned from this discussion is that by not making it public, I may be making people concerned that it isn't affordable. The irony is that I'm under-priced for the market, which is one of the reasons, I don't have it posted. I don't want to undercut the sifu up the block and I don't want people choosing us because we're cheap.
I get that I'm marketing a service to the public and in marketing (I'm told) if you're not getting the response you desire, you have to change something about your marketing and I will consider and do so at some point. But, sheesh.
