Articles about Sales for freelancers

If your services are simple,
lots of people want your services, And you don’t have enough time to speak to all the people that want your services…
Show your prices,
Which wil vet out bad fits early.

If your services are complex, And you want to sell them for a higher price, And price isn’t the most important decision factor to your customers…
Hide your services,
Until you’ve had a proper conversation about goals and values.

❓ “What if the client say no?”

They might. Not everyone will be onboard.
But if you are maxed out on time, then you have scarcity.
Sometimes you outgrow your clients and have to clear house to make room.
Extreme example:
If you were to double your prices but lost half your clients,
You’re making the same amount of money with half the effort.

The more you want the sale, the less likely you are to get it.
Go into every sales call with the attitude that you don’t need the job. The outcome is out of your hands.
Now you can act as an advisor, instead of selling to them.

❓ “How much do I raise my prices?

“I don’t want to be greedy, but I don’t want to miss out!”

The number differs for everyone.
A rule of thumb: your prices should feel a bit uncomfortable.

Test it:
Try a small raise to gauge reaction, and increase from there with the next conversation until you start to hit resistance.

If you have a troublesome client, you can take a bigger risk:
Pitch a large jump to see how they react,
If they don’t accept, then you’ve lost nothing.
If they do, then you could be raising your prices more than you think.

❓ “What if a retainer ends up more work than hourly?”

Be careful to set caps on your packages, define how much is included, what’s not.
Always give the client an opportunity to upgrade if they need more.
I usually assume they want a middle package, and ask “is that enough for you?”

❓ “How do I bring up raising my price?”

No-one likes talking about prices.
But the road to success is full of awkward conversations.
There’s no way to pitch with 100% confidence.
If you haven’t updated your prices in the last year, I guarantee you’re not charging you’re worth.

This doesn’t go away.
When I get a yes I wonder “Could I have charged more?
When I get a no I wonder “Was it too much?

✅ Bring it up over a call so you can gauge reaction.
✅ Explain why, emphasize your value, pitch with confidence, ask if they are still onboard, wait for the response.
✅ Have your packages and pricing prepared, but be prepared to tweak them on the fly.
✅ Prepare answers to all possible objections in advance
✅ Be ready to move them to the new payment method on the call.
✅ Be prepared to get a no.

Check out my full guide to pricing as a freelancer

Here’s tips on setting prices as a freelancer

I always try to operate from a position of surplus freelance leads, where I only take on four clients per quarter.
That’s one per month.
And the reason for that is…

1. I want to put out good quality work.
2. It sounds big-headed, but I’ve got enough money. What I don’t have is enough time. I don’t want more money. I want more time.
3. It creates scarcity which allows me to put my prices up incrementally every quarter,

There’s going to be someone that will pay more money, so you can turn away bad fit clients more comfortably.

Introducing scarcity makes it easier to sell.

People can smell desperation in the sales call.
If you have confidence and operate from a position of surplus,
Then you can pitch to people who are decision-makers,
people who will take or leave your offer.

People get results, so long as people get good value from it then you can pitch with confidence.
And that’s when you send them an automated onboarding link and you say to them:
I’ve got two spots remaining, this is how you sign up.
First payment, that’s what secures your spot in the work queue.
So once you have a surplus of leads,
Scarcity of supply
and urgency in your offer…
Then you can continually increase your freelance prices, without fear of losing clients.

This is why running good sales calls are so important:
Because you’re gathering data and you’re establishing your authority and you’re selling all on a sales call.
Whereas if you just send people an email list with your hourly price, it achieves almost nothing.
So on the sales call, which you should start doing if you’re not already, don’t give out your prices by email.
Just say,

“I just need to jump into a call, scope out your project and figure out whether they’re a good fit”.

Then on the call, you can ask them questions to feel out how much they make per customer, and get an idea of their budget.
So if you’re selling digital marketing, it’s pretty easy because you can ask them what’s their revenue and what’s their digital marketing budget.
If you can’t do that, and you sell something more abstract like branding, you have to ask things like:

“where do you picture this business in three years?”

“How many customers do you have a month?”

“What are the customers worth to you? “

Questions like that will help you figure out the right pricing strategy.

Start to do what’s called “bracketing”.
So you start to drop numbers into the conversation to gauge the reaction.
So for example, if I had an enquiry, who didn’t want to reveal their budget, I would say something like…
“well, in the past, here’s a project we’ve done…our client for this project invested somewhere in the range of 5000 to 8000 for this project”.
Make it a wide range, as wide as you can.
And then gauge the reaction and if they fall out their chair, then you’re probably too expensive.
Basically just feel them out the sales call is about figuring out if they have the budget to fit your results.