You don’t need a portfolio, case studies or thought leadership to charge premium prices. You prove you’re the right fit in the consultation itself, through the questions you ask, and with a paid discovery step that shows the client exactly what you’ll do for them. We’ve helped clients 3x their prices by changing nothing but how they do their proposals, and by charging for the level of service they actually deliver.
I’ve been hearing some advice recently that made me think, “Ooh, that should be an Anchor High episode.” I’ve heard it a lot, in a lot of different places.
The advice is that you need to build your thought leadership and your reputation online first in order to get clients who are willing to pay you a premium for your services. So you need to be writing posts on LinkedIn, sharing more of your process, creating content, writing case studies and doing a lot to showcase the work you do for your clients and the transformations you help them create. The idea is that in order to justify charging more for your work, you need to prove it up front before someone works with you.
And I disagree. I wholeheartedly disagree.
Do you need a portfolio or thought leadership to charge premium prices?
You don’t need a portfolio, case studies or thought leadership to charge premium prices. Putting your thought leadership out there in the world is valuable to your business, but I don’t believe it is required for you to charge premium prices.
There are so many different ways to show a potential client that you can help them create the outcomes and results they really want. And they don’t really care about you, your thought leadership and your other case studies. They care about themselves and their current problems and challenges.
They do care whether you can help them get to where they want to be. But they don’t need you to prove it the way you think you need to prove it, through content marketing, thought leadership, speaking and all of those things.
All of those things absolutely work. They help position you as an authority and help get your name known. The part of the advice I don’t like is that you can’t charge more, or can’t “command” premium pricing, until you’ve proven yourself in those ways.
How do you prove you’re the right fit without case studies?
You prove you’re the right fit in the consultation itself, through the questions you ask. If you’ve been listening to this podcast for a while, you’ve heard me talk about how the Package Matrix™ helps you structure your offers. It’s one piece of the whole holistic ecosystem we teach.
Part of that ecosystem is knowing how to ask the right questions in a consultation, questions that prove to the client you are the right person for them without them ever having to read a case study of something you’ve done for someone else. Without them ever reading a post you wrote on LinkedIn, watching a YouTube video, listening to your podcast or hearing you speak.
From moment one, their interaction with you, from how you conduct that consultation to the questions you ask, is so different from what anybody else is asking. The “sales process” is so different from what anybody else is doing that they think, “Oh, this person really could help me. They’re not trying to prove themselves to me.” You’re not saying, “We’re XYZ agency. We help our clients get these outcomes and results, here’s why we’re so good, and here’s all of our social proof.”
I’m not saying those things don’t work. They do work. But you don’t need to have them all in place before you are able to charge premium pricing. In fact, if you don’t have them in place, our process is perfect for you, because we help you establish that credibility in the consultation through the conversation you’re having with people.
What is a paid discovery step?
A paid discovery step is an intermediate step where, instead of putting together a direct proposal for services after your consultation, you sell a strategy step. It doesn’t matter what industry you’re in, you can figure out a way to offer this. And it’s the secret sauce.
The strategy step sounds like this: “You’re going to pay me this much. I’m going to put together the full end-to-end strategy for you, and that is yours to keep. If we decide to work together, I’ll apply what you paid for the strategy to our ongoing package.”
Then you make an offer, using our Package Matrix™ strategy, for the how of implementing that strategy.
Why does a paid strategy step make a portfolio irrelevant?
That strategy piece makes the need for a portfolio, case studies, thought leadership and all of that completely irrelevant, because you’re showing that client exactly what you will do for them in a very comprehensive way, and exactly how you’ll take them to the results they want.
Instead of “here’s what we’ve done for another client,” which leaves them wondering how that even applies to them, you’re saying, “Here’s exactly what we can do for you. Would you like us to do that for you? And here’s how you can work with us.” It’s a totally different experience.
So if you’ve heard the advice that you need to do content marketing and all these other things to command the prices you really want to command, you don’t need to do any of that. We’ve helped our clients 3x their prices without changing anything else about their business except how they do their proposals.
Your next step
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