A freelance digital marketer asks:
“Recently send out a quote to a prospective client and they said my quote was on the high side? How do I approach this nicely without giving too much discount? How do you price your services? I’m a digital marketer.”
TLDR; Don’t give a discount.
Let me give you an example…
I once had a prospective client ask me to discount my price. Luckily, I’d been through the ringer a bit and was on my G-sh!@, so I told him no. He said okay, then asked me to justify my price to him.
I told him, “I’m good”.
He then freaked out, called me some names… but still wanted to hire me. I told him, “No. You can’t hire me… for any amount of money.” He, again, freaked out, called me names, but still wanted to hire me.
I said no and stopped responding to his emails.
You know why?
Asking for the discounted price is a big red flag. It’s just the beginning. If you let these people hire you, they’ll ask for the discount, constantly ask you to do extra work that’s out of scope, never be happy, bitch and moan the entire project, be a PITA to get a payment from and leave you a bad review/referral.
They’re not worth it.
I know the money is tempting, but it’s about opportunity cost. You could get hired and deliver for 2-3 other, reasonable clients with the amount of time and energy these people will waste.
AND, get solid reviews and/or referrals from them.
So, like I said… don’t do it.
Better yet… what if this kind of thing never happened in the first place? That’s one of the biggest lessons I’ve learned in my 15 years of freelancing. When you position yourself properly, all this stuff goes away.
Clients stop asking for discounts.
They stop questioning everything you say.
They stop trying to push scope.
They stop being unreasonable and rude.
Not because they “love” you or you’re great friends or any of the other lovey-dovey nonsense the “kumbaya crowd” of freelancers will tell you. It’s because they FEAR you. And, that fear leads to respect.
With it, your freelance life is easy and lucrative..
Without it, you’ll wonder why you ever freelanced in the first place.
In any case, that’s the raison d’etre for my Turn Content Into Clients course. To position you as an authority in your industry, so clients clamor to hire you, hoping they “qualify” and wouldn’t dare eff with you.
Because YOU are the expert… not them.
In any case, you can get free access to the course over on Skillshare. All the details on the course and how to get access for nothing are here: https://content2clients.com.
Later,
John
P.S. For more details on the Skillshare offer and all the courses you’ll get free access to, I created page for you here: https://johnmorrisonline.com/skillshare
