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 James Cho who asks,
Hey Jonathan, I have a question about the value conversation. You said that it's not necessary or appropriate to tell your client that you were value pricing them. Totally makes sense. I wonder, are there signs that a client has understood the value of the potential project through your questions? The most obvious sign would be if they simply agree to the price you set forth. But during the conversation, I wonder if you can see signs that they haven't understood the value yet, so that you know to try and ask a few more questions so that both parties are on the same page.
All right. When you're having the value conversation, the thing that scares me is when the client is not clear about what business outcome they want. They're going to pay you money. They want money back. There's no two ways about it. They want value back. It might not be bottom line dollars, but it's either going to be savings or it's going to be something that's worth it to them. It could be increased morale. It could be better brand reputation. It could be intangible like that, but they want ROI. They're not doing it for fun. They're not doing it because they want elegant code or they want a really pretty Gantt chart. They don't care about that stuff. They want business value back.
If we get through an hour-long meeting and I'm not really clear and confident that the client and I are on the same page about what we're trying to do, then that's a pretty bad sign that we're not done having a meeting.
Another thing that can be a sign that you're not on the same page is if you do have this kind of home run desired future state is very clear, but you don't have a good progress metric, something that you can measure during the project to make sure that you're going in the right direction.
You want to find some kind of leading indicator that is going to allow you to kind of like steer the car back onto the road if you're drifting to the ditch. You want to be able to know you're drifting toward a ditch. You want to get to the end of the project and have no surprises like, hey, we've been trying to reach this four out of five stars or we've been trying to reach these net promoter scores or been trying to increase the number of leads by this amount or the conversion rate by this amount. And look, we did it. You can declare victory. You can declare success.
So if you feel like if your confidence is high and you believe the client's confidence is high in this agreed upon home run metric, the kind of desired future state and or the progress metric that they're going to look at so that and you're going to look at to make sure that you're doing something beneficial for them, that I'm pretty confident in. I'm pretty confident that we're on the same page. I'm pretty confident that the price prices that I'm going to put forward are at least going to be in the ballpark.
But this is a gray area and your level of confidence might not be super high, but high enough to move forward with a proposal. So if you're still kind of you're pretty sure, you know, pretty sure, you know what the home run is, you're pretty sure what the desired future state is, you're pretty sure, you know what the progress metric is, you're pretty sure that the progress metric is a leading indicator for the desired future state. But you're like, I really don't know what the value is here. So for whatever reason, you just can't get a beat on that. Then you could say to them, okay, thanks for all that information. As a next step, I would like to go back to my office, crunch some numbers, and then I can have a proposal to you on Wednesday. Does that sound good to you? They'll say yes. You say, okay, great.
You know, just to give you a heads up, I'm thinking there are three ways that we could probably tackle this. So I'm going to give you three options. At the high end, we're probably looking at $250,000. At the low end, it's probably $50,000. Is that kind of in line with what you were imagining? And then get their reaction to those numbers. So if you're if like even the $50,000 is just totally off the table, and they flip out, then you've got some information like, oh, well, let's maybe revisit a couple things. Because what I understood was that you were trying to achieve this outcome in a business of your size, it seems like a small investment for these kinds of results. So either they don't trust you, they don't find you credible, they don't believe that the project is going to be as valuable as you think. You could just be totally off base about something, who knows.
In any case, doing this sort of giving them this pricing guidance before you spend time putting together a proposal is something that Blair ends advocates, I think it's a great idea in a case where you're just not sure how you're just not sure what the value is, you just just not getting a sense of it, you just bounce some numbers off of them. And then when you sit down to write your proposal, say, okay,

Here are my different budgets that I have. Here's the needle that I'm trying to move. What can I do at each of these price points to advance their cause and kind of reverse engineer a scope around how much money they're willing to invest? Okay, I hope that helped. My name is Jonathan Stark, and if you have a question for me, you can hashtag AskJonathan on YouTube, Twitter, or LinkedIn, and we'll find it and I'll add it to the queue. Thanks. 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 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 slash call, C-A-L-L. That URL again is JonathanStark.com slash call. Hope to see you there.