What if, instead of selling your service, you started selling the cost of your absence?
Hear me out: what if your fee was not so much a representation of your effort, but a (relatively) cheap insurance against a costly disaster?
The benefit to this mental exercise is two-fold:
– Sometimes it’s just hard to say good things about your work convincingly, since you know all of the little flaws
– Since you are charging for a completely different thing than others in your industry (a risk-premium, not a wage), it makes price-shopping irrelevant
Why would the client go for it: by highlighting the potential fallout of your absence, you make the stakes in this project clearer, so the client gets an emotional connection with your value.
So try the following:
1. Identify the systems, processes, or relationships that depend on your expertise.
2. Use examples and stories to illustrate the consequences of not working with you.
3. Price your services based on the cost of avoiding disaster, with the work being thrown in as a freebie.
This is not useful in all cases, but it’s a good antidote for the type of client who expects you to negotiate against yourself. It pulls the rug from their logic so hard, it’s almost adorable.
Flipping the underlying question of your presentation from “What do you charge?” to “What does it cost if you walk?” is a major boost to your arsenal.