Ditching Hourly 023: Converting Hourly Clients To Value Pricing

Hello! and Welcome to Ditching Hourly. I'm Jonathan Stark.

Today, I'm going to talk about how to transition your existing hourly clients over to value pricing.

• It's wicked hard
  • They don't think of you the way you want them to
  • It'd kind of like being in the friend zone
  • Probably easier to find new clients who don't have you pigeonholed in the wrong place
  • BUT if you love the client or whatever, and want to give it a try, here are some tactics for you
• Quietly lay the ground work while still billing hourly
  • Try to gain more access to business people (e.g., founder, president, ceo, sales director) vs tech people (dev lead, dev manager, project manager, cto, even cio)
  • Start probing for business cases behind specific requests
  • Politely offer alternative solution when they occur to you
• Wait for an opportunity to quote a new chunk of work
  • Pull your business contacts into the "scope" meeting
  • Have a Why Conversation to get at the desired business outcomes
  • Present a proposal with both and hourly estimate and a fixed price
• What you SHOULD NOT do:
  • Don't barge into their office a say "so, we're going to do value pricing from now on!"
  • Don't try to explain what value pricing even is
  • How you price is none of their business
  • But if they ask, say "based on past experience with this sort of thing"

That's it for today. I'm JS and this is Ditching Hourly. Thanks for listening.

The next time someone asks you for your hourly rate, this is what you should say: "I don't have one." To learn what to say next, visit http://valuepricingbootcamp.com to signup for my free email course. Again, that url is: http://valuepricingbootcamp.com

The next time a client asks you to justify an entry on your timesheet, go to http://valuepricingbootcamp.com to signup for my free email course. Again, that url is: http://valuepricingbootcamp.com