#189: A New Prospect Is Asking for My Rates Right Away. How Should I Respond?

Welcome to the High Income Business Writing Podcast, helping you propel your writing business to a whole new level. And now, here's your host, Ed Gandia.

Hey there. Welcome to the High Income Business Writing Podcast. I am your host, Ed Gandia, and this is the podcast for business writers and copywriters who want to earn more and less time doing work they love for better clients. You can find detailed show notes for this episode@b2b launcher.com Episode 189 and those notes include a summary of our discussion here, as well as any links to resources I may mention during the episode. So this particular episode is a little different and a little shorter than usual. If you've been listening to this show for a while, you know that most of my episodes run about 30 to 45 minutes. Many are interviews with practitioners who are doing really cool things out there, and others are monologues where I personally share an idea or a strategy or a tip to help you improve your writing business. But in this episode, I am answering a question one of my coaching clients recently asked, and this is a very common issue out there, and I really thought that you might benefit from the answer that I gave her. This in between episode is a new format that I'm experimenting with. We're going to be releasing a few of these over the next few months and hopefully it's something that you'll get good value from. In fact, I'd love to hear your feedback. If you ever want to drop me a line, let me know what you think. If it's helpful, edwlauncher.com would love to hear your thoughts on it. So the question that she posed to me was I reached out to someone on LinkedIn and they connected, but immediately they messaged me and asked what my rates are. She continues, I feel like this isn't the right place to start from. Should I respond and say my rates vary much on the project? Would you like to schedule a short video or a phone call to discuss your current needs? This is a really, really good question, and I bet that as you listen to this, you've had this happen to you at least a couple of times before. Maybe a lot. Before I get to the answer, I think it's important to keep in mind that your job as a freelance professional is not to convert every prospect into a client. Your job is to convert good prospects into clients. So let me explain why this is so important, because this is something you may have to process a little bit because it's not the natural reaction that most of us have. This Is not how many of us just naturally approach our businesses. This particular mindset is important because it's just so easy to lose sight of the goal. It's easy to lose sight of the fact that, hey, look, we're trying to bring in good clients, good, profitable clients into our business, not just try to bring every opportunity to the goal line. And if you do, if that's the way you approach it, if you try to close or try to convert every opportunity into a client, into a deal, you're going to resort to jumping through hoops. That's going to be a big part of your day. And that's stressful. I don't need to tell you how stressful it is to now just run around and just respond and agree to everything a prospect says and try to make them happy and try to give them what they want and satisfy every request they have. It's extremely stressful, it's counterproductive, and it's a waste of valuable time. You're not a Fortune 500 company with a whole sales team on staff who can basically respond to every single request and have all the resources to do whatever the prospect is asking. You are typically a one person operation. You probably don't have someone else who's helping you close business, who's helping you market and sell your services. And whatever time you spend with a prospect is time that you're not putting into billable work. Okay? So very, very important that you just understand that that is not your job. Your job is not to try to take every opportunity to the finish line. Your job is to make sure that you're closing or you're converting the right prospects into clients. Second, this situation is a classic example of what I like to call a hot potato. And a hot potato is a prospect or client who throws a problem your way. And the tendency for many of us is to automatically assume that we have to hold on to and deal with that problem or that hot potato. There are many different versions of this, many different situations where this happens. This is something I'm going to be covering and just kind of expanding on over the next few months because it really is a huge challenge out there. And there are many different instances of hot potatoes. But I don't need to tell you that hot potatoes burn your hands, right? Holding onto them is painful, is dangerous, is not pleasant, and many of us just hold on to hot potatoes. It's just kind of our natural instinct. I feel this comes from a service mentality that so many of us have. Look, we're in the service business and many of us live to serve. It's not a bad thing necessarily until you start saying yes to everything. And that's exactly what we do when we just comply with every single request. So instead, you need to get into the habit of tossing hot potatoes back at the prospect or the client. It's not about getting angry. It's not about just holding onto it and burning your hand. It's none of those things. It's like, okay, yeah, let me toss it back to you. And if it comes back, that's okay. Playing hot potato is perfectly fine. What's never a good idea is to hold on to a hot potato just because you feel you have to. Because you feel that, well, I have to respond. I would not be professional or I have to respond a certain way. You should always respond, but you have to hold onto it. That is your burden to carry. So let's get to the situation and I will give you a little background there. That may have seemed a little dragged out, but it's really important because otherwise my explanation is not going to make any sense. In this situation, you can toss the hot potato back to the prospect by replying with something along the lines of, hey, thanks for connecting. I don't have an hourly rate. It sounds like that's what you might be asking. I quote a fixed fee for each individual project based on the specifics of that assignment. What do you have in mind? So notice that when you respond to a hot potato, it's more than just that last question. What do you have in mind is the actual tossing. Okay, but it won't work or it won't be as effective if you don't give them at least something. Okay, so you gave the explanation and the justification for the question you're about to toss back at them. The hot potato you're about to toss back at them. Okay, so thanks. I don't have that. I don't do it that way. Here's the way I do it. Okay, now let me throw it back at you. What do you have in mind? Something else you could do in a situation like this is to do a bit of email conversation first, which is kind of what I was doing with that sample response. So you don't necessarily need to take them to a phone call immediately, a phone conversation. You can do a little bit of email triage, if you will, a little bit of pre qualification over email. Ask for a phone call after a bit of back and forth if it makes sense to do so. If they seem like they would be pre qualified. That approach has been working really well for me and for some of my coaching clients because not only do you get to pre qualify the prospect, you also get to build a little bit of rapport and trust through that email conversation before you offer the phone call. So again, the phone call is a big investment of your time and of course their time. So just going a little bit back and forth over email can work really, really well in these situations. The bottom line here is, look, you want to start paying attention to hot potatoes and the hot potatoes that prospects and clients throw your way. The more you look for them, the more you ask yourself, wait a minute, is this a hot potato that I'm holding on to? You know, the more you're going to recognize them and the better equipped you're going to be to deal with those hot potatoes and deal with them effectively. So give it a whirl. See how it works. I hope you find this helpful and I hope you have a fantastic rest of the day. Take care.

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