Even if you have qualified your lead correctly, there are still times when your prospect is asking for a reduction in your fees. In this blog post we examine, how to avoid lowering your fees, so that you maintain your profit margin and STILL sign up the client. Unless you are in a competitive bidding situation, a client asking for a fee reduction isn’t a showstopper, but sometimes a very good sign that you are about to sign them up. Your aim at this stage of the process is not to arbitrarily reduce your fees, as this is educating your client that every time they want a fee reduction, they just need to ask and you will do it. You need to establish exactly the value you are delivering to them. I.e. what it is that they really want, and what is a non-essential. If you can cut the non-essentials from your packaged offering, then you can offer your client a more bespoke package at a reduced fee. Your client is happy, and you are happy because you have signed up a client and not reduced your hourly rate or devalued what you do for clients. If you don’t have the option to trim away parts of what you will do for the client, you may find that one of these approaches may help eliminate the deadlock:
- Explain that the price is what it is, and if they don’t want to pay this price you will happily walk away, no hard feelings. Sometimes this works, and they still sign up.
- Restate the benefits of using your services and how this will help them achieve their organisational goals.
- Demonstrate to them why it costs so much and why you don’t have the room to reduce your fees.
- See whether they would accept a more junior member of staff working on their account, in order to reduce their fee level.
- Use a Credibility Story to illustrate how other clients have also had doubts about your fees, but achieved great results, which justified your fee.
- Offer to stage payments, if they are worried about the hit to their cash flow.
- Agree a different pricing structure based on results achieved.
Which of these options have you tried? Author Credit: 
Written by Heather Townsend. I help professionals become the ‘Go To Expert’. I am the co-author of ‘How to make partner and still have a life‘ and the author of the award-winning and bestselling book on Networking, ‘The FT Guide To Business Networking‘. To find out whether I can help you, have a look at “our services” Connect with me on Google+, LinkedIn and Twitter
