The Freelancers' Show

Fairness in Pricing

Do you have questions about fairness in pricing? This episode features a discussion of this topic between Jonathan Stark, Curtis McHale, Philip Morgan, and Reuven Lerner. Tune in to learn more!

Do you think it’s fair for someone to charge you more for a product than they charge other people?

Reuven’s answer is that it is fair, but annoying. He wants to feel as if he has gotten a good deal, which is based on price for him. It’s fair to charge different people different prices, but he wants it to be to his advantage. 
Jonathan’s take on this is that people are bad at absolute value. Is thing worth X? He argues that value should not be based on price, but instead on value. He does not believe that the word fair can be applied to pricing at all.
 Curtis suggests some people equate fairness and value. He buys locally and will pay more sometimes at local stores, because he sees value in that. This is called the “feel good feeling.”
 Philip describes that he has two decision-making skills when it comes to price. The first is that money is not infinitely available, which he dislikes sometimes because he feels like it holds him back. Then there’s a no brainer category where if something has value to him, he doesn’t compare price. But he does have a threshold where he refuses to overpay, much like Reuven.

####How do you calculate overpay?
Philip suggests that there’s a feeling that he can figure out what the lowest price that a product sometimes gets sold for is and what overpaying would be for that product.  Jonathan doesn’t compare the price he is given to what other people spend on the same product. He personally determines the value that he will get out of the product. Philip suggests that the value depends on situation. Jonathan, who says that it has no value to him so he will not pay much for it, gives an example of a screwdriver. He still won’t shop around to find the cheapest one – just the cheapest one for him. 
####Two Types of Consumers: Maximizer and Satisfier   Curtis explains the difference between the two different types of consumers. A maximizer has to find the best price no matter what. For instance, if they buy a pair of jeans but then see a cheaper pair of jeans, then the value of the purchase made decreases. A satisfier has the mindset that if he finds a product that is cheap enough for them, they don’t think about the purchase again. Jonathan has never heard of these terms before, but based on the descriptions, these are the two types of people he hears from through emails. 

Why does this topic matter?

Because, as freelancers, you will set prices for products and services so there is a need to be aware that those two camps exist. Jonathan thinks the best clients are the ones not looking for the cheapest price, which are the satisfiers. He calls these the value shoppers because they are looking for the best product. Curtis agrees that maximizers create the “race to zero” – they lower your price quickly. One group of people will be angry no matter how you sell, so just pick how you are going to do it and stick to that path.


Can you sell to both groups?

Reuven believes that you can sell to both groups although it is challenging. He doesn’t believe many have the luxury of choosing what types of clients they work with yet. The proposed solution is to create a monopoly of a market of one; to differentiate yourself so there’s no other business to compare yours to.

Philip suggests that pricing is a big part of the overall positioning of products.

There are low-end and high-end brands that are controlled by price differentiations. 
He uses BMW as an example. They couldn’t drop the price to $20,000 all of a sudden. Consumers would not be happy because it would no longer be a status symbol or a high-end brand.

Value-pricing

It will be difficult to do value pricing well if you believe that there is fairness in pricing. While there is no scientific evidence to support this belief, Jonathan sites that his experience from clients has informed this belief. There appears to be a correlation between people who believe in fairness in pricing and their ability to value price. Because these people believe they are being unfair with their prices, they lower their prices, which make it tough for them to make money. He suggests for these people to attempt to offer products as services instead and establish set prices. This pricing point may be a better fit for these types of people’s personalities. 
####Relationship between the price set for something and your brand. Philip tells a story about a Hi-Fi Man, a Chinese company that makes headphones. They made headphones in the one to two thousand dollar range. The quality was known as less than what you paid by people when they first came out. In the last six months, they introduced a product priced at six thousand dollars. The reaction from people was very negative. There is a relationship between brand and a company that can justify a price - they couldn’t. Questions are asked when this happens.

What does this mean for freelancers?

Some freelancers decide they are going to price every service as the same thing out of fairness to their clients. But it wouldn’t be nice or fair to charge different clients different amounts of money for the same work. Every client wants a different result. Hourly billing is bad for everyone. People should set prices they are comfortable with selling to their clients. They should be self-aware of their pricing and know what kind of buyers they want to attract.

Picks Curtis

Are you a satisficer or a Maximizer

Jonathan

Leviathan Wakes

Phillip

My Dad Wrote a Porno Podcast

Reuven

How Online Shopping Makes Suckers of Us All
The Impossible State: North Korea, Past and Future

Building Better Training Exercises

On today’s episode, Philip Morgan and Reuven Lerner discuss Building Better Training Exercises. Reuven Lerner provides insight on how he creates and makes training more effective through the use of exercises.

How can you make your training more effective by giving good exercises and questions for people to learn from?

Reuven thinks that it is ineffective to teach people simply through lectures. He says that people will not remember what was said long term because they will not internalize the material. Having people do things can combat this; in other words have them do exercises throughout training in order to help them retain information.

How many and what types of exercises should they do?

Exercises should be a good balance of easy and hard. They should be interesting and amusing, but also effective and stick with your audience. Reuven says that this is a hard balance to reach and takes time but is well worth the effort. In his experience, students learn and appreciate this more.

Ways We Think About Learning

A typical teacher talks the entire class. During this time, students may listen and get the information taught while in the classroom. But after class, they lose a good majority of the material.

Reuven discusses Jean Piaget, a psychologist, who studied children to research how people learn. His theory is that people do not learn by hearing things. Instead, they construct their own knowledge through teaching themselves. His theory states that children are like scientists - they’re constantly doing experiments and trying new things. Reuven, like Piaget, is a constructivist - he believes people should create their own knowledge. Another person discussed is Seymour Papert who studied under Piaget. He was a mathematician who looked at how people learn efficiently. He agreed with Piaget; that people create their own knowledge. The best way is to create something that is of value to them. Talking to people isn’t going to teach them; having them do things they’re interested in will. Provoking them to think is the best way to accomplish this method. 

Reueven’s goal in training is to maximize the doing and creating new things. His personal balance is that he does 30% exercises and 70% lecture/discussion. He is constantly experimenting with exercises to see what works.

Can exercise be too granular?

Exercise can never be too granular; can never be too simple. He has discovered during his time teaching that the simpler the exercises are, the more people feel they are being taught.

How do you order exercises? Do you sequence or order them in some way?

Typically structured so that exercises follow each new topic. For example, introduce Topic A, and then do Exercise A. Then within topics he gives multiple exercises that build on each other.

How do you help people interpret what/if they did something wrong?

Reuven simply says that he doesn’t. His solution walks them through the answer step by step, which should teach them the technique they are learning. He does what is called a “think aloud,” which helps students understand not just the content, but also the process it takes to get to the content. In his email courses, he follows up by asking how the students did and what answer they got.

How could you define prerequisites so that people don’t lie or misinterpret what advanced means?

There are problems with this in certain places. In order to combat this Reuven suggests using a pre-class survey. He sends this to participants of his classes in advance in order to gauge what topics need to be taught. This way he has something to show the training manager if they are to say that people complained the course was too basic.

How do you come up with a new exercise?

Hitting the sweet spot between easy and hard is hard. The first time you do an exercise it usually fails. So try to make topics relevant to their lives. The smaller and easily graspable the concept is, the better. There are three popular exercises that work. One is the “monkey see-monkey do” exercise. First, I’ll do it and then you’ll do it also. The second is to take something people know and then re-implement it. Third is to do longer projects that build on themselves. Philip agrees with Reuven – he usually starts with most basic problems and builds from there. He states that this is because people do it in the real world. 

Can you think of any exercises that a trainer could try himself or herself where they might develop some skills?

Reuven suggests people speak at conferences, local user groups, or do webinars. Each of those are great opportunities to try out material. Will help understand where people have questions. Philip agrees that people should start small. This means speaking at webinars and venues where you can be the person who’s teaching.

Picks Phillip

Stainless Steel USB Cables

Reuven

Music for Makers
Trainerweekly.com
Weekly Python Exercise
Tech Training Group on Facebook

Brent Weaver on Sales Process

On todays episode Phillip and Jonathan chat with Brent Weaver, founder and CEO of UGurus.com. Hear a bit about how Brent started UGurus to help people build their digital agency companies and to offer online courses as well as a bit about his ups and downs running his own digital agency company. Tune in to check it out!

How did UGuru get started?

Brent talks about a company he ran before UGurus called Business Catalyst and how how he took that companies idea and expanded it to a wider audience of digital agency owners. This expanded version was the starting of UGurus. Brent had ran a digital agency for 12 years starting in high school. He talks about getting into making websites and made a website that had overhead in server costs and so he needed to find a way to cover those costs. He started telling people he could make websites, with his first being a $500 job that took him a couple days. This job inspired him to quit his day job. He created a company with a friend and to their surprise the business made it for a long time. In 2005 they made the business their full time business.

As a passion driven skills based entrepreneur, did you ever dislike the sales part?

Brent talks about how he likes working on cool projects with cool people, and it takes selling it to be a part of that. He looks back at his first big pitch, and despite being a natural born salesperson it didn’t go so well. He adds that it was mainly due to a lack of experience as a sales person. He talks about how he didn’t learn the client before getting there and that being a major factor. After being told they didn’t get the job, they went out for drinks and discussed the business as a whole and its viability. It took years of experience to reflect what went wrong during the pitch. It wasn’t until years later that he learned a better sales discovery process. Cold calling and talking about your product doesn’t give the potential customer a chance to talk about their needs and to create a real connection with the salesperson.

What are the top things you’d recommend for someone about to do a pitch?

Brent talks about coming in with no expectations and being ready to ask questions. The best clients are clients you understands well and those clients often will connect with you in a way that you can continue to do work over time. Getting them to talk about themselves is key. Also, spend at least the same amount of time preparing as you do pitching, learning about who the client was. Learning about them and their industry informs the questions you ask them. Find what the essence of why they are looking for your work in the first place. If there are multiple people in the room, they may all have varying ideas on what the work should do and how it’s important. Sometimes you will need to mediate their own conversation as well. Adding your experience to that facilitation can sometime highlight the reasons they need you and reinforce your value. Sometimes it’s about not having the questions ahead of time and learning them while being there. As a salesperson, if you can get into a consulting range and help create a high value impact in their organization it’s a good position to be in. Jonathan adds that many times when someone calls in a salesperson or consultant and starts to ‘brain-dump’ their issues, it in many cases is because they feel like they are in over their head.

“Never Say ‘WordPress’ When Selling a Web Design Project.”

Brent talks about writing a post called “Never Say Wordpress When Selling a Web Design Project” and how many clients would self diagnose their situation. He would often have clients come to him and ask him to work on a project and for him to use Wordpress. He would help them dig in to find out if WordPress is actually what they need. Often times their issue isn’t fully understood and many times their solution isn’t actually fitting to the issue. This leaves a good opportunity to sell what services you offer that better fits the issue anyway.

What was your decision making process like when needing help or needing to pivot?

Brent tells how they had a really nice office and the office was a bit more expensive than they could handle so eventually they reached a point where they had to borrow money to keep the lights on. A client of theirs offered to help them professionally to bring their business back to their feet. They went out to lunch and they doubled their revenue in the 12 months following the conversation and the advice. His advice was around focusing on what was important and what wasn’t. Brent started tracking his time and found out that much of his time was spent on unbilled support and training and busy work. This drained his time as well as his energy. He hired someone else to handle the type of work that ate up his time. With his extra time and energy he repositioned himself in sales. He partner suggested that he ‘divide and conquer’ by splitting up work into focused jobs, making his new job focused on sales. He also would bring in consultants when he met anyone who was smart in a field that was useful to the business. Simply asking “what can I do better?” He took on consultants for 5 years whenever he could. That process doubled his revenue in the course of a year and allowed him to sell the company with a successful exit.

Sales vs Persuasion

Sales generally needs a level of persuasion, and it may sometimes look like manipulation, but if the client needs something, be it an item to service, it’s a positive persuasion. He adds that you absolutely cannot make the “Sales Salad” without the “Persuasion Sauce”. Persuasion is part of non-sales consulting relationships as well. Jonathan adds that If someone pays you to coach them, it’s your job to persuade them into action. Persuasion tends to have a negative connotation but sometimes it should just be seen as inspiring. If a client hires you to help them, they are looking for your expertise and your guidance. Brent talks about the sales person leading the process with confidence, starts with the first interaction. The sales meeting is a trial process, if they are hard to work with in the meeting you learn that they may be hard to work with over time. If you can hold a meeting and they follow the sales leading process you know that they can be a great client. If a client pushes you around during the sales process, expect them to push around when you’re working on the project.

Confidence as a Salesperson r a Freelancer.

Phillip ask Brent how he has built confidence and has reached a point where he feels strongly about his ability to get work and do the work. Brent says that it’s important to know a process that works or at least be familiar. He talks about having a few processes he offers as courses. He sold it for a few years and would call those customers back to get feedback. For the people who finished it, many of them needed to tweak the course for it to work for them. Brent talks about how that always bothered and that his customers that bought the course didn’t get the that level of confidence. So he decided to offer a video course and weekly calls, with the goals of having the customer getting their first $10,000 in 12 weeks. In 2014 he launched their 10K bootcamp program to do just that. With the bootcamp, there was a 96% completion. He adds that the person to person interaction is very important. He also talks about having methods of accountability and some basic coaching about the person’s core beliefs. Often people believe that their work is not worth the money, or that the work they are offering is a commodity that can be bought cheaply anywhere. He adds that those sort of beliefs tend to be on a personal level and take some personal coaching to get past. When you beliefs change, confidence is the result.

What do you recommend for attracting the right clients?

Brent talks about how the way you generate leads is important to creating the right kind of pool of clients. Leads come from your own actions and depending on those actions is where your clients come from. Brent talks about once having a mix of good clients and bad clients and going through the whole pool to figure out where those leads came from. He found that there were certain things that he did that lead him to having good clients as well as certain things he did that generally led to clients without money. For example, picking up business from a new business incubator meeting generally leads to clients without money. To illustrate he gives an example of a business that makes $50,000 annual revenue. If that business follows the Small Business Administration guidelines, they will spent 8% to 9% annual revenue for marketing and so they will have roughly $3500 for a budget for the whole year. If that is your client, the economics are against you. Chances are that client will never give you a $20,000 project, and if they do, they will be high maintenance and hard to work with. Brent gives a comparing example with one of the previous clients he worked with being a 150 million dollar a year company. Their concerns weren’t focused on the budget, but the project itself. If you want those kind of clients, you have to ask yourself, “Where do these people hangout?” You may not know the answer but asking and trying to figure it out will be a good way to start finding better clients.

“Carrying your own Bag.”

Brent adds as a last piece of advice to find the people you you want emulate and create businesses like and reach out to them. Reaching out to those people and trying to create connections to those people can yield more responses than you expect and has been a vital part of his success.

Picks Brent

$200 course on sales for free

Jonathan

Cashflow podcasting episode with Jonathan Fighting Butterflies Article

Phillip

Dev Shop Marketing Briefings - Pia Silva interview

Links

ugurus.com Email Brent

Curtis, Philip and Jonathan answer some questions they have from listeners. Among them are questions about competition, team management, and dealing with clients. Tune in to Listener Q & A! They just might have answered one of your concerns, too.

On today's episode, Curtis and Jonathan discuss Getting Started with Facebook Ads with Mojca Mars. Based at Sienna, Europe, Mojca is a Facebook Advertisement Expert, author, and speaker. She is focused on helping businesses generate more leads and increase their sales using Facebook advertising strategy. Tune in to learn more!

Today's episode features Choosing Content Marketing Topics. Content marketing is everywhere. It helps boost a startup's reputation, and encourages meaningful content in the community. But, what does it typically requires? How can someone go about choosing topics? Tune in! 

On today's episode, Curtis and Reuven discuss Increasing Monthly Revenue with Jason Resnick. Jason is a web developer, freelancer, and consultant. He specializes in establishing e-commerce businesses, aiming to help entrepreneurs and freelancers increase their sales by strategies and implementations. Tune in to learn more how to increase your monthly revenue 10 times in 6 months!

On today's episode, Philip, Jonathan, and Curtis discuss about Working with Designers without Wanting to Kill Them with James Stone. James is a Design Systems Engineer, and is top contributor to the open source ZURB Foundation. He also teaches at Penn State University. Tune in!

“I've had experiences in the past where I've worked, where a designer would be so caught up with their idea in a design that they'll just root for it and push it through no matter what the cost. Sometimes that ends up being a lot more engineering time to accomplish more less the same thing.” -James Stone 

How do you get better? Philip, Jonathan, and Reuven have been consulting for some time already. At present, they think about how they can improve and receive feedback on their work. Tune in to episode 246 of the Freelancers' Show as they discuss about continuous improvement!

On today's episode of the Freelancers' Show, Philip and Reuven discuss Getting Started in Consulting with Bob Zeidman. Bob is the founder and president of Zeidman Consulting. He has been in the consulting industry for around 15 years, and specializes in intellectual property and software forensics. Tune in to this fascinating talk!