Don’t Discount Your Work
Don’t Discount Your Work
Are you underselling your agency and adding a discount to your work before you even give it to a client?
I have a hell of a lot of confidence in my creative and artistic abilities. It could very well because I have parents that always encouraged my creative pursuits and routinely told me things like, “you can do anything you set your mind to.” So I’ve been using those talents now for over 17 years but recently had to ask myself this question, “Why am I still submitting $5k proposals for $10k websites?”
I took a week to really mull this over and identified three reasons to avoid offering a discount of your work: existing client base, average new client, and a tiny bit of guilt. Let me elaborate.
When it comes to customer loyalty, we really excel. The very first client I ever created a website for is still an on-going client. We have multiple clients who have been with us 8-10 years and many newer clients that continue to engage our services. These existing clients are responsible for the majority of our business and while we have raised our rates over the years we were in a bit of a pricing stasis on new projects. We had a large client base that was enjoying gradual price increases but we were also basically giving away our services at reduced overall project rates for new clients. Many of the new client inquiries were also coming from small businesses and individuals, with equally small budgets. We would get a fair share of small and mid-sized inquiries but lose more projects than we won. I ventured to contact some of these prospects that chose to go with someone else and ask them why. The top reason? “Your bid was too low.” Ouch.Let me be the first to say, it’s easy to want to do your best work and it’s easy to want to give people the best deal, but you shouldn’t compromise your worth and experience to do the latter. Our company’s longevity, customer loyalty, talent, and of course experience are worth premium rates. No guilt. I had to realize that nothing was changing with our work, it was just being undervalued and that is what had to change.
We now have a strategy in place that we feel best meets the needs of our diverse client base without adding a discount to our work and services. Individuals and small businesses with small budgets can still enjoy high quality services and our experience, but those services are tailored to the budget – meaning no more $10k websites for a fraction of that price. Larger, more complex projects will be competitively priced.
It wasn’t about confidence as much as it was about paying attention and not discounting our work. It’s only been a few weeks, but the small changes we’ve made have already had a positive effect.
Blog post by Sherry Holub – JV Media Design
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