#192: Communicating Your Value to Prospects—an Example You Can Learn From

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 1 92. Those notes include a summary of our discussion here, as well as any links to resources we mentioned during the show. So this episode is a little different and a little shorter than usual. If you've been listening to my podcast for a while, you know that most of my episodes run somewhere in the neighborhood of 30 to 45 minutes. Many are interviews with practitioners who are doing really cool things out there in the marketplace. Others are monologues where I personally share an idea, strategy or tip to help you improve your writing business. But in this episode, I'm going to just address a really quick situation that happened in my business a few months ago and just extract the core lesson for you because it is so important. I think it's a great illustration of this concept of value based pricing, which can feel a little bit abstract to many freelance professionals. So we had a big scare in my business a few months ago and without getting into all the details, our main website that houses all of our training for all of our coaching programs and memberships went down. There was, it's not just the fact that it went down. What made it really troublesome, really scary was that there was malware. Somehow malware got through and it really looked, even though we back everything up, it looked like my team, at least two team members, were going to have to spend their entire weekend working to restore the site, get the backup files, get everything back in working order. And there was a chance that we would have lost some things. And you know, here again we got backups. But you know, backups aren't the kind of thing that you can just kind of switch back on and everything's great. There's a lot of work involved in recouping files and getting everything back in order. Bottom line is this would have cost us a lot of money, not just in just time, but also obviously my team having to work through a weekend because of course these things always happen at the worst time. It happened on a Friday. And most important, because we are a client focused organization, it would have turned into very frustrated clients because, you know, not everyone is going through Everything all at once. But you know, I got clients who, they make time to go through the training that I've assigned them and many times it's going to be over the weekend. And of course if we would have been out all weekend, that would have created a lot of problems. So here's where you come in because again, there's a great lesson here that I think you can learn a lot from. And it's about pricing your work and how to position that pricing based on value. A couple of years ago, my team and I hired a web hosting professional. We had had so many problems in the past with web hosting. It's not that we were going with cheap and cost effective programs. We do not cut corners in this area. This is kind of a strange business, web hosting in that almost every player out there is trying to be the bottom feeder. There's a race to the bottom in terms of pricing when it comes to web hosting is what I've learned. This is my impression of the business. And when somebody like me comes around and says, look, I don't want the cheapest thing, I want really good service and I want really good uptime and reliability. My impression, and my team agrees with me, is that very few companies are set up that way. They don't know how to react to that. They don't have a service for someone like me. My entire business is online. The only exception is really once you get into enterprise level services. So in other words, the kind of web hosting that a Fortune 1000 company spent a lot of time trying to find something that was, I mean, reasonable. We were willing to pay a premium and we wanted to pay a premium for the right service, but we couldn't find anything in between top notch uptime in reliability and speed of accessing. Or it was enterprise level services that were really way beyond what we needed. And believe me, we were willing to pay good money for the right hosting and the right help. Because I've always known, look, if our entire business is online, if we're down and we're down constantly, or, and, or if our sites are really slow and we were having a lot of problems with that, our clients are going to get really frustrated. I mean, what does that say about us and the organization, you know, that we've put together here? Well, we finally found someone. Honestly, this took years. Okay. I can't tell you how we search. We ask everybody in almost every peer in the industry that I would talk to, they were with a really low cost service. That's not really a reflection on Them, I mean, I guess it worked for them. And then I had a couple of peers who were really big and what they had was way beyond what we needed. But we found someone who seemed to be somewhere in the middle and he immediately saw the problems we were having. He took the time to just look under the hood, see what's going on, saw the problems and understood exactly how to solve those problems. He knew exactly what we needed. Now here's the thing. Hosting through him, he doesn't do the hosting himself, but he will. He finds a company that will work for us. And having him on call to monitor everything and to take care of problems if and when they happen was five times higher than anyone who had paid for this in the past. To give you an idea, the most we'd ever paid was about 100, $125 a month. I think for hosting this guy was almost $600 a month. And I can tell you that I've shared with this information with some of my peers who also have online businesses, and many of them had just scoffed at that number. Again, no judgment. I'm just saying that many people, just so you understand that number and what it means is for most online businesses like mine, you have online courses, training, coaching programs out there. That would be way too much. Okay? But as a client, that my business success hinge on having top notch uptime in reliability, in speed of accessing the training that I have up there. I didn't care because I saw the value. And the value was based on two things. Again, better performance. We've talked about that, but here's another one that's kind of implied that is so important and that is less risk. I saw the value and that this option going with this guy would mean less risk for my business. When our site went down, we knew we had the malware. We knew we made the right decision with this guy. So he responded within minutes of us reaching out to him, immediately found the source of the problem and had our trip training portal back up in a couple of hours. My team didn't need to spend a weekend working on this. My coaching clients barely noticed. We were down and everything went well. The lesson here is for you, this is so important. I mean, I think you can connect the dots here, but your fees need to be presented in the right context. When you're presenting and discussing your fees with clients. It can't just be a number, okay? Because a number is just one aspect of what you're providing. Okay, what about the most important part? What are you providing? And why is there better value in those fees? So you need the context. You need to present that context in the right way. There's a value to working with you that you're probably not communicating or communicating well to your prospects and clients. And you can't assume that all your clients will understand that value, even specifically with prospects, because if you've been working with clients, many of them will hopefully understand that value because they've already had that experience with you. But with prospects, you know they're taking a risk in hiring you and they don't know. They don't know what you're like. They haven't worked with you yet. You can't assume that all your prospects are going to understand your value. They probably don't understand or aren't thinking about the risk of making the wrong choice. So in a situation where maybe you're higher and they're thinking about going with somebody who's lower, they're probably just looking at the number. They're looking at one factor out of two or more factors in the decision. And they're not really taking into account the risk of making the wrong choice, of going with someone who might cost less upfront, but who doesn't have your experience or your track record or your insights or knowledge. So it's up to you to bring this up and explain it. Don't assume they're going to connect the dots. Present your fees by providing that value perspective. And really, it needs to come across as something like, hey, this is what you get when you work with me. You get this and that and you don't risk getting x bad outcome. You don't risk getting this, because that doesn't happen when you work with me. And let me explain why. You also need a little bit of justification there. But if you can do that, you're going to convert more of your good prospects into into better clients at higher fees. Again, this is not about converting every prospect into a client, but if you can do that well, you're going to convert more of the good ones into better clients who appreciate what you do bring to the table. This has been Ed Gandia. Hope you have a wonderful rest of the day. Take care.

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