April 13, 2017

Ditching Hourly 023: Converting Hourly Clients To Value Pricing

In this new episode of Ditching Hourly, I talk about how to transition your existing hourly clients over to value pricing.

SHOW NOTES:

It’s wicked hard
- They don’t think of you the way you want them to
- It’d kind of like being in the friend zone
- Probably easier to find new clients who don’t have you pigeonholed in the wrong place
- BUT if you love the client or whatever, and want to give it a try, here are some tactics for you
Quietly lay the ground work while still billing hourly
- Try to gain more access to business people (e.g., founder, president, ceo, sales director) vs tech people (dev lead, dev manager, project manager, cto, even cio)
- Start probing for business cases behind specific requests
- Politely offer alternative solution when they occur to you
Wait for an opportunity to quote a new chunk of work
- Pull your business contacts into the “scope” meeting
- Have a Why Conversation to get at the desired business outcomes
- Present a proposal with both and hourly estimate and a fixed price
What you SHOULD NOT do:
- Don’t barge into their office a say “so, we’re going to do value pricing from now on!”
- Don’t try to explain what value pricing even is
- How you price is none of their business
- But if they ask, say “based on past experience with this sort of thing”

Enjoy!

Yours,

—J