Ditching Hourly

Hello and welcome to Ditching Hourly. I'm Jonathan Stark. Today I've got an audio excerpt from an answer I provided on my YouTube channel. You can check it out at thejonathanstarkshow.com and it'll redirect you to YouTube if you're into watching videos. Otherwise, you can just listen to the audio here on the podcast. Enjoy. Hey, Jonathan here. I've got a question from Misha Kay who asks, Do I have to be the most expensive quote with a potential client? Is there a reason to quote top number? Why can't I be somewhat higher middle quote? I don't have a track record of notable clients. My clients are long-term engagements for small firms nobody knows. Even though I'm very experienced, I find it hard to pitch high-priced projects. Honestly, I myself struggle to answer the why me question. I'm afraid if I ask a potential client why me, I'm very expensive, they will say you tell me and I'll be on the spot doing song and dance trying to justify cost for them. Okay, great question. So the first part of the question, do I have to be the most expensive? Well, you won't know what numbers they get from other people, so you'll never know if you'll be the most expensive. But you do have to have the confidence to set high prices if you're going to set high prices. And where does that confidence come from? And to answer that, I want to key on another section here where Misha says, even though I'm very experienced, I find it hard to pitch high-priced projects. Okay, what that says to me is, well, literally, I assume it's a she, I'm sorry if it's not, maybe it's a he, but this question asker is very experienced. So they're confident in their mastery of their skills. Okay, great. But if you're finding it hard to pitch high-priced projects, it's probably because you aren't aware of the results that you've been delivering to your clients. Results make it really easy to justify high prices. If you're delivering great results, it's perfectly reasonable to ask for high prices. So, for example, you could go back to past clients who you've worked with and have been very happy. And even if no one's ever heard of them, you could go back and say, hey, listen, I'm redoing my website. I'd love to get a testimonial from you if that'd be okay. If so, just reply with a yes, and I'll send across a few questions to sort of help you write the testimonial. Assuming that you're on good terms with them, you're probably going to get a bunch of yeses to this question. You can send across six questions that I have in my website. If you go to Jonathanstark.com slash building the perfect testimonial with dashes in between the words, just Google for Jonathan Stark testimonial. And it's these six questions that you can email to your past clients. And these sort of magical testimonials will pop out. And the way the questions are asked, it incentivizes or encourages the past client to talk about the benefits that they received from working with you more than like Misha was great to work with, very professional, super creative, always on time. Those are nice things to hear about yourself, but it doesn't really communicate a lot of value to other potential buyers who are potentially reading this testimonial. What you'd rather see is Misha transformed our business. We doubled our sales or before Misha built this interface for us, we were doing everything by hand and it took us entire weekends to get payroll out. Now we can do it with a single click of a button. Our time to send invoices has gone from five hours to five minutes. So you want to get these sort of numbers, these business improvements quantified with some sort of number, whether it's absolute or relative percentages, get those into your testimonials. And if you can, once you see, you might not even know. You might, a lot of people don't even know what value they've delivered to their client. It's like, what are the results that you've gotten from this work we did together? A lot of people don't know because they don't ask. And typically what the client is going to tell you has nothing to do with the kind of inside baseball nuts and bolts of software development or copywriting or photography. They're not familiar with all the little details. They just know the big picture stuff, how their business was changed as a result of working with you. And if you can get that out of their mouths and onto your website with numbers so that people understand, other business owners can sort of insert themselves into the shoes of your past client and say, wow, it'd be amazing if we could get invoices out in a 10th of the time what we're currently doing, whatever it might be. So hearing from past clients what results you've delivered to them can boost your confidence quite a bit. And you don't have to do a song and dance when somebody says, you tell us why you're the most expensive. Well, you can say, well, I deliver results like these. If you want results like

and for business in your particular situation, it seems like a reasonable price, doesn't it? Like if, you know, if you want to decrease the amount of time it takes to invoice all of your customers, you're talking about like $100,000 in, you know, delayed invoices and that your cash is all tied up in accounts receivable. What if you could get those out on time early every week instead? Wouldn't that be make a big difference for your cash flow? Well, I'm confident that I can deliver those kinds of results. You can see here, I've done it before with other people. I've investigated your business, you know, in this conversation that we've had, I'm confident that I can do it. So there you go. You know, if that's worth it to you, great. If it's not, that's fine too. We can maybe engage in some other way. I can teach you how to get those results instead of me actually doing it for you. So just to wrap up, I would say focus on the results that you've delivered to past clients, find out what that is, try and get numbers, and then you can use that to justify a high price to somebody else. And when I say high price, I just mean a price that's reasonable based on the kinds of results that you're planning on delivering. So if you have, you know, it's probably just saying high because it's probably higher than you would charge in an hourly basis to do the same kind of activities. Okay, hopefully that helps. I'm Jonathan Stark. If you have a question for me, just hashtag AskJonathan on Twitter, LinkedIn, or YouTube, and we will find it and add it to the queue. Bye. Would you like to learn how to get paid what you're worth? How about selling your expertise and not your labor? We work through all of this together in the Pricing Seminar. Pre-registration starts soon, and you can sign up to be one of the first to know when early bird pricing is announced at ThePricingSeminar.com. That URL again is ThePricingSeminar.com. Hope to see you there. Hey, Jonathan again. Do you have questions about how to improve your business? Things like value pricing your work instead of billing for your time, or positioning yourself as the go-to person in your space, or maybe productizing your services so you never have to have another awkward sales call or spend hours writing another custom proposal. Book a one-on-one coaching call with me and get answers to these questions and others in the time it takes you to get ready for work in the morning. Best of all, you're covered by my 100% satisfaction guarantee. If at the end of the call you don't feel like it was worth it, just say the word and I'll refund your purchase in full. To book your one-on-one coaching call, go to JonathanStark.com. That URL again is JonathanStark.com. Hope to see you there.