Raising Your Rates
How I built a brand that can charge $20K+ for it's offer.
Good evening everyone
Including the 28 of you who just subscribed to me via twitter from this tweet lmao:
I appreciate all of you, and I’m glad you’re here. Today I want to talk with you about how I’ve been able to raise my prices and get across the understanding of what we do to high ticket prospects. That offer in that tweet, well it was a larger org so they had the room for us to spend time to research their demographic and strategize the roll out. Which is nice, and not unusual for us but we start with a core offer first and go from there.
First off, I want to be very clear and honest with you. It’s not like I just built a team and shared an inspiring story and I woke up with it going on. I spend 95% of my time doing 3 things and I’m going to touch on all of those today:
Offer Development
Researching my niche & reaching back to survey previous clients.
Client experience
Team Development
To go from charging $800 on a landing page to making $20k offers and closing them, which now we’re working towards scaling that — it took some understanding on how to create a holistic experience around our 5 figure offer.
I realized It’s not enough to say “we’ll design and develop for $10K” even though if you find a company with that budget you can land that once maybe even a few times. It just becomes a different game when you do this on a consistent basis.
Let’s get into it!
Developing your offer
A huge part of this as been developing our offer. This may be the most valuable thing I’ve done in the past year. Moving from a list of capabilities over to a strong offer that makes our prospects want to work with us. A strong offer puts you in the driver seat.
Have you ever been in a sales call and the potential client is pulling you in multiple directions? They want this, they want that, they want basically everything except to give you money lmao no but seriously.
This happens because the process is missing an offer that allows you to quality or disqualify whoever you’re speaking to. It creates a “if we feel you’re a good fit, I’ll present what we can do for you” situation and that situation is way less tense.
It’s way less tense because you’re not attached to an outcome. If they’re a good fit then great, but if not, then it may not help the business move forward. You can still help if you like the persons mission, but that’s a more personal decision.
For example, if I love what someone is doing, then I can offer something to them minus a feature or two but they can still get a ton of value, and see if they’re interested in that. I’m aware that a solo-entrepreneur may not be able to afford our $20K offer but maybe our $10K one that’s split up into a couple different payment plans, they just might.
That’s okay –– an offer just creates a parameter, you don’t need to be so militant because we’re only people.
What a good offer does
Imagine being catered to in a special way, someone makes something that’s carefully prepared for you. They thought through a process that makes it easy for you to get the result you wanted.
That’s exactly what a good offer does, it takes your needs and applies an experience around that need.
Creating an offer
I’ll be honest, this whole topic alone takes time. I don’t expect you to figure it out after reading this and neither should you. A good offer depends on plenty of variables:
Your skill set
Your experience
Your niche
Your belief that you can make a difference
Notice how I didn’t say team? I’ll talk about why later. Ideally a good offer intersects all of these things. I love business way more than design and development and even art. I leverage the fact that I am a visionary & strategist and can see the bigger picture of certain situations. I also love to talk to people and ask questions, so sales to me is just another conversation where I’m curious to learn more.
Your toolkit may have other tools, and that’s fine — but leverage all of your experiences. It’s a good thing we’re different.
Finding a niche
“Niche” is still a word that I don’t fully commit to yet, but I narrowed down my studio into a few different “verticals” so we have some breathing room to operate in different sectors and still help them with the same offer.
We help established companies on the cusp of growth, outgrowing their old website or brand identity and looking for a team that can help them create something that reflects or enables their growth.
This in itself is a niche, it’s not as tight as “helping SaaS companies build marketing websites” but it’s still niched.
Finding a niche has been helpful, I don’t want us to take anything. We have an agenda, and that agenda plays a key part in our decision making. Finding this has been simple, who do I already work with? What did we do for them? Can I duplicate them? Sometimes you may even find yourself in a position where there’s no similarities in their businesses themselves, but maybe it’s a similar problem. That can be a niche as well.
What a niche can do for your business
A niche helps create a roadmap. If you know exactly who you want to help it’s easy to layout a path for your clients success.
Also, if you have testimonials that prove you can do what you claim that’s even better because it’ll attract those same prospects that need your offer.
Do you see where I’m going with this? It’s really an holistic approach to business building this way.
Take a breather
Okay, this is probably the longest newsletter to date and I’m lifting up my thumbs and seeing a little bit of smoke coming out of them. Yes, I type these on my phone smh.
But I promised to go into detail for y’all, so here’s our last two topics for today.
Client Experience
We’ve been working on how our clients experience working with us, we created a custom project management system, developed by our lead dev (Chris) but it will and has helped us create a more “In House” experience since everything is custom. It shows the clients their project progress, we can send screenshots, we can leave comments on anything, and we can keep track of how much of the budget has been paid already. This brings something new to the table, it’s been dope so far.
Aside from that, we have a particular process that helps clients to where they want to go so it doesn’t feel like we’re struggling to get by.
Invest in client experience, it’s worth it!
Team Development
A part of running a studio for me has been team development. I’m not perfect here, this is my first leadership role but I’m slowly getting better.
When you’re building a studio the goal is to create a good team to fulfill the roles you defined.
They’ll need training to some aspect, everyone does — but when you have an offer, you have a niche, you’re properly positioned for opportunities then it’s only a matter of giving them the right Standard Operating Procedures they need to fulfill the work.
You just don’t want to be in a position where if someone leaves, they take the business with them because you built the business around the team and not the offer. This is what I talked about earlier, last thing you want is your team to leave you and you’re left with an offer that can’t be fulfilled. Every organization will have a great team member, but the goal is to put the offer in the driver’s seat because then your leads will just seek out your team members instead (speaking from experience).
I started this studio knowing exactly what I wanted to do and how I wanted to get there has manifested in many ways, so it took a little bit of foresight.
Bonus insight
Here’s some quick thoughts about raising your rates you may want to consider:
Invest in your business
Spend a high 4 figures to 5 figures on a service and pay attention to how that experience is laid out. A well refined business will show you how you can improve just by listening and watching the journey they put you through. How many staff members it’s taking them and how they’re treating you.
How you position yourself is everything.
Are you positioned for good opportunities? Are you making valuable connections? What’s your value proposition look like? These are good questions to reflect on before raising those rates
You can grow too quick
If you’re not us and are not interested in corporate design and you serve an audience you may want to consider if your audience is prepared for your new offer and rate changes.
Some of it is about your mentality
I think believing you can charge x amount is just as important as the work it takes. I just wouldn’t underestimate the work it takes though. You can do it, I definitely believe in you.
Recap
Raising your rates is a business move and a mental move, especially if you’re building a sustainable business. You want to create an offer that stands the test of hires and fires as well as time.
All of this is my opinion and to my experience though and there’s still a lot more to unpack. Next, I’ll talk about ways I’ve marketed Crafted and built a bit a love for the brand so far by designers and clients.
Feel free to comment below or reply back about your thoughts, your challenges, and your recent wins. I’m interested to hear all about it!
Talk soon, take care
-Dexter