Are you getting these walls from clients whenever you bring up your retainer fee after doing some strategy work for them?
- “Can we pay you with rev share once we prove the concept?”
- “Once we hit this milestone, we’ll pay”
- “We’ll pay once we see results”
Yet these same clients pay other firms for similar services.
Why?
At the surface level, the issue may have to do with your
- Perceived value of your services
- How you sell your service (are you selling just the service or anchoring towards an outcome for the client)
- Offer packaging: the price and payment terms may not be aligned with how your clients want to pay
But the real underlying issue is harder to swallow:
You’re training your clients to devalue your work.
If you
a) Give strategy and consulting away for free in order to hopefully win implementation work
Or
b) Don’t set clear expectations and guardrails from the start (like waiting until later to discuss how you will get paid)
You’ll ultimately make your clients question your fee…
So how do you flip the script?
Make your strategy work a journey in it of itself:
by setting
- An outcome goal of the strategy
- Proper scope
- Timeline/milestones
- Length of support and access to you
- Communication expectations
- And price
You can bring your clients along with you during strategy development.
And in the course of that journey, you can seed the upsell (or cross sale or even down sell) for implementation work or another service.
If not, you will end up in the experts dilemma:
Excited & frustrated
Excited: working on exciting and new projects with unique teams and products
Yet at the same time
Frustrated: because you’re underpaid, undervalued and struggling to build a real team around you
You have too much of a solid track record and experience to be stuck here.
On your next sales call test offering your strategy as you would a service and sell your client on the outcome AND journey of your strategy work.