Last week I was on a Mavericks Club Coaching Call and I was asked whether we should be discounting our services during Covid-19 crisis.
In short – no you shouldn't be.
To find out why then watch the snippet from the coaching call or read the post below.
Why You Should Be Charging More for Your Website Projects
I'll tell you the only difference between a $2,500 and a $25,000 website.
It's not how fancy your API integrations are.
It's not the code.
It's not the theme.
And it's not the font, or the typography, or the UX.
It's the clients capacity to get a return on investment. That's the only difference.
For example, you can't sell a $25,000 website to a fish and chips shop because they have zero capacity to get a return on that investment. So you're wasting your time.
The amount of work that actually goes into building and selling a $25k website is no different to building and selling a $2,500 website except the client that you're talking to. Their business model needs to have the capacity to be able to get a return on that investment.
So let me explain something that has never been more true because of what we're going through right now.
If a client is earning less than $500k a year, they'll probably pay $5k for a website. If they're earning $10 million a year, you'll want to charge at least $50k.
There are different brackets of the market that we can enter into as web designers which I will explain below.
Lower Bracket
When most of us when we start out, we are in the lower bracket of charging up to $5,000 for a website because it's comfortable and the stakes aren't very high. We can sell a website for $5,000 to someone who's making $500k because there are no board meetings and no RFPs so it's a pretty easy process – you have a meeting, you add some value, you write a proposal and they approve it.
Middle Bracket
Agencies in the middle bracket charge somewhere between $5k and $25k.
High-End Bracket
This is when you start charging $25k and above.
I'm not suggesting you have to be in this bracket because being in this bracket can be a pain in the ass. You have to do RFPs, there's a long sales cycle and there's a lot of stress involved.
The Myth
When you start dealing with clients who have bigger budgets and actually have the capacity to get a return on the website investment, there are fewer agencies serving that end of town.
Being cheap, actually makes it harder to get clients because there's more competition.
What keeps you in the lower bracket is the myth that what you're selling is worth a $5,000.
This is an unproven belief that what you're delivering is worth that much.
When someone first paid me $25k for a website, I realised that it took the same amount of work to build that site as it did for the website that I'd built the previous month for $4,000.
The website was for a non-profit that worked in the drug and alcohol sector. I loved the work that I did and they were an amazing client.
All of a sudden, I realised that what I deliver is actually worth $25,000 for the right client who has the budget and the capacity to see a return on the investment.
The not-for-profit got a massive return on their money because the solution that I built saved them so much time and money. The new website allowed them to scale up their communication with the sector because I plugged their RSS into Campaign Monitor. And they stopped wasting time trying to manage the old archaic website that they could hardly use.
Wrap Up
So right now, with the Covid-19 crisis, people are discounting more than ever and going cheap to get the business. But this is actually going to make it harder for you to get work because that's where everyone's playing and you've got nothing to compete on there except price.
If it makes you feel uneasy to raise your prices, check out Agency Mavericks coach, Simon Kelly's, workshop on mindset.
If you want to read more about pricing, here are some further resources for you:
