If You're Giving Your Client Options, You're Losing Gigs (Here's What To Do Instead)

Brian Hood (0:00)

This is the 6 Figure Creative Podcast, Episode 363

Welcome to the 6 Figure Creative Podcast, where our mission is to help you turn your creative passions into a stable, reliable income. If you're in audio, video, design, photography, or really any other creative field, and you just want to learn from other successful creatives, you're in the right place. One of the things that sucks about freelancing is that you just don't know what you don't know, and you end up sucking at something that you think you're actually good at. If that's not you, if you feel like you're good at everything, this is 100% you. You're not good at everything. And so this is the case that I've seen with the clients that we work with. We work with over 200 clients. We have them in client acquisition. One part of client acquisition is sales, and one of the things we do with our clients is we review their sales calls or their discovery calls to see how bad they truly are. And there's been many times where we're getting them some great leads, they're getting on good discovery calls with people that are like really good qualified leads for their niche, and then they end up not closing them. And once we dive in and look at the calls, we realize they're making this mistake or a version of this mistake, and you're probably making a similar mistake to this as well. They're falling into the mistake of what I call spa menu pricing. You have a good discovery call with someone, it's going to be a good fit, and you give them sometimes quite literally a PDF or a slide of what's essentially a spa menu. If you've ever been to the spa and they're like, here's the menu of options you have here at this beautiful spa. You can do this treatment or this treatment or this treatment. Mr. or Mrs. customer, what do you want? That's how you're treating it. So you're giving them a low or medium and high option, kind of like the tiered pricing. But what ends up happening is you give the client analysis paralysis. They're confused over which option even makes sense for them. I've seen the argument that when you present tiered pricing, the question is no longer, should I work with you or not? It's which option should I go with? But that's mostly bullshit. When people are presented with multiple options, they are slow to decide. They make no decision whatsoever. Sometimes at best it slows down your sell cycle where they're trying to mull over the options and figure out which one's best for them. Or you end up crushing your close rates overall because they're making no decision. And if you've heard me on this podcast before, I'm a broken record when I say this, a no decision by the client is by default a no, always. 100% of the time it's a no. So at the very least we always try to get our clients to make some sort of decision, even if that decision is no, because if you don't make them make a decision, it'll always be no. And when you give them a bunch of different options to go through, they're going to have more no decisions because they're going to go mull over their options for weeks and weeks, months and months until it just phases out into a no. And the reason for this is people hate making the wrong choice.

It's bad enough when I go to a spa and I'm about to spend $100, $200 on something. And I'm like, I don't know which option makes sense for me. I don't want to pick the wrong one. But when you're selling something that's thousands or tens of thousands of dollars, that's the amount of money at stake for your clients. It is a horrible thing to put them through. You're basically telling them you are the expert at the service that I offer. Therefore, you will make the decision. And I hope you can choose the right one. That's essentially what you're telling them. And worst of all are the people who just choose the cheapest option because it's the lowest number, but it doesn't actually give them the outcome that they want. That's why I hate tiered pricing. I hate spa pricing. I hate doing anything that just doesn't give them one option that is the solution. People come to you because you're the expert. You should not be giving them a choice for what they do. You should be listening to them with your ears, deciding with your brain on what makes sense for them, and then prescribing them a solution. And again, that's a single solution. So if you do this right, it'll not only position you as the expert because you are the expert. Let's just use web designers for an example. Web designers, you're working with business owners and you might be working with multimillion dollar, 10 million, 20 million, hundred million dollar companies, billion dollar companies, they're the expert in that domain. However, when it comes to web design, if they're hiring you, it's because you're the expert at your domain. And when you prescribe a single solution to their problems and not a mortgage board of things that they could choose from, it will position you as the expert. It'll speed up the time to close because they're just trying to decide yes or no on the option you've prescribed them versus which one should we choose? Take weeks, months, years sometimes. It also will support premium pricing because you are presenting this as the answer, like the answer versus an answer. And that's an important distinction when you're just saying this is the answer. Do you want it or not versus here is three potential answers? These are all potential answers, which implies that there's like a billion other potential answers out there that you can go shop around for. So you can charge a premium rate when it is the answer for the client. And it will ultimately increase your close rates, which is what we see with our clients. When we make sure they're following this process, what I'm going to outline today, a version of this process, their close rates go up. Before I get into the episode today, if this is your first time on the podcast, hi, I'm Brian Hood. This is the 6 Figure Creative Podcast. The 6 Figure Creative as a whole is a team of 10 people now. We have some awesome, amazing people as a part of the team. We've grown a lot over the last couple of years. And my goal with this podcast and with the company as a whole is just take a lot of outside influences from other industries, other niches, other business models, and bring them to freelancers and help you adapt them to your business in a way that makes sense for you. Because I preach that we should not be inbred business owners. Inbred business owner is a non-diverse gene pool that we're going to. We're just looking to other designers for how we run a design business. We're just looking at other music producers for how to run my music production business. We're just looking at other copywriters for how I should run a copywriting business. It's a horrible way to run your business because most freelancers don't know how to run a business. So we look to outside industries like the SaaS industry or the online marketing world or just the general business world or the agency world. People who have truly have good business acumen and they have come up with great processes or best practices for solving problems. And then we bring them back to this community. So if that sounds like something you're interested in, you're at the right place. You're at the 6 Figure Creative Podcast. So let's dive into this. We talked about diagnose and prescribe. We're not giving them a spa menu of options. We're trying to diagnose, like a doctor, diagnose the problem that they're having and come up with the solution, not a solution, the solution to the problems based on what skill set and what talents and what packages or package you can put together for the clients. And before I even get into this, if you offer a truly customized thing, get really good at on the fly, coming up with packages that make sense for the client. I call this modular packaging. There's probably something in the podcast backlog, but modular pricing or modular packaging is when you just take up modules, like think of like little square building blocks of things you could offer a client, and you just have those in your pocket that you can pull out to build together really quick, rapidly, a solution for the client on the call, along with pricing preferably. If it's too much to do that, you can always put it together after the call, but you're gonna have a lower close rate if you do it that way. So let's dive into this. First, diagnose. I'm not gonna go over the full discovery process. I have past episodes on this, and I'll give you a resource for where to learn a better, like a really good discovery process that works well for freelancers. But the first part of this is just clarifying your current state for the people you're talking to. When you're on a call, figure out the current state. Where are they at right now? Figure out the future desired state. What do they want to be? AKA what do they want? What do they need? Always discuss the timeline at this point, by the way. Have a list of questions to figure out what are their goals? What do you want with this project? What do you need with this project? One really nidger thing to do here is always discuss timeline when you figure out their future state, when they're talking about all the things that they want to happen. You discuss timeline so you can use it for the close later. We'll come back to this. But you figure out their current state. Where are they at right now? The things that they don't have, that they want, things that they have that they don't want. Where do they want to be?