April 18, 2019
“Should I send pricing via email or discuss on the phone to answer objections” and more...
Sent by Jonathan Stark on April 19th, 2019
In today’s group coaching session, we had a bunch of good questions that touched on topics like:
- Options for renegotiating a referral commission agreement
- Whether or not to send pricing via email or discuss on the phone
- Understanding why a client’s budget might seem disproportionately low compared to their desired results
- How to charge more than “the going rate” or “the market rate”
- Understanding the difference between the client’s perceived value of their desired outcome and the value of your contribution to the desired outcome
Good stuff!
Here are the actual questions in all their glory:
I need to renegotiate a referral agreement. An agency owner I know gets leads through his website that he can’t service, so he sends them to me. If I close a deal, he gets a kickback of 25% for 3 months which is just too high. Initially he was more involved in the sales process, but now he sends everyone the same copy-paste email intro and leaves me to sell. I much prefer being left to sell and am happy paying for the lead, but the $ needs to drop. Any advice? Have closed 8 of 22 leads so far. Extra info - most projects have an initial discovery component which is less $ than the project itself, and can often be 3 or more months between discovery and project, so I’m usually only paying a referral on the discovery component anyway. I’d be happy to create an arrangement that is a % of the discovery only, and remove the 3 month timeframe, but open to better ideas if you have them! (timestamp 1m 56s)
After you have a value conversation with the client, do you like to talk about pricing/budget on phone with them so you can answer their objections? Or do you prefer sending pricing via email? (timestamp 13m 54s)
Recently I have become much better at ascertaining the value of the project to clients, but their budgets are consistently disproportionate to the results they want to achieve. For example, the client wanted to increase their sales by 500k with a new website, but only budgeted 8k for the project. (timestamp 22m 14s)
I had a client who wanted to increase their conversion rates by $45,000 a month ( we were going to redesign a sales page ), and I quoted a value based price and the client didn’t take it well and told me there were other designers who would only charge 3-5k for this same thing and that it was basically highway robbery. I have been feeling like I will always be anchored to industry rates even though I have really great value based conversations. (timestamp 48m 38s)
Another thing the client said was “I’m not there yet so there is no way I would pay this.” It seems like clients base their budgets on their current sales, not the future goals they want to achieve. (timestamp 66m 8s)
(If you’re curious, you can review the entire list of past questions here)
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Yours,
—J