Monthly Archives: March 2021

Administrative , , Leave a comment

Pricing: Retainer Fee, Flat Fee, or Hourly Rate?

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Congratulations! You’re in serious talks with a prospective client and it appears that the project is yours. As you listen to the soon-to-be-client discussing his/her must-haves and timetable, you’re also thinking about pricing and payment:

How many hours might this take to complete and how much should I charge?

What might the client be able to afford and what might s/he be willing to pay?

What value will I bring to the company—-how will my work enable the client to achieve important goals, enhance the company brand and status, or avoid trouble?

How should I suggest that we structure the billing arrangement—hourly rate, flat project fee, or retainer agreement?

Once you’ve asked the client about a ballpark project budget and more or less know how much you’ll request for an upfront payment (10% – 20% maybe?), which payment structure will best fit the project, guarantee that you’ll make a profit and not put you into the position of basically working for free and also support the client’s trust and confidence in you and your company?

Project fee

Charging a flat, predetermined project fee is common for larger projects and for working with clients with whom you’ve worked before, when you can more accurately estimate the hours needed to successfully complete the job. Often, a flat rate is based on an estimate of hours a project will take to complete, multiplied by your standard hourly rate for the type of work required.

In other cases, the value of the finished project is higher than just your estimated hours. For example, logo designs are often valued highly regardless of actual hours worked, because of their frequent use and visibility. Other factors that can affect the price include the number of pieces printed or sold, and whether the piece will be used once or multiple times.

Depending on the type of project, you might add a percentage to cover client meetings, unforeseen changes, email correspondence, and other activities that an hourly estimate doesn’t reflect.

The upside

  • The client knows what they are paying from the beginning (unless there are changes to the scope of the project).
  • You are guaranteed a certain amount of money, even if the job is finished quickly.

The downside

  • The job might take longer than expected (a possibility your contract should address).
  • Clients sometimes ask for extra revisions, etc. without expecting to pay more (again, cover this in your contract)

Hourly

The hourly rate is the most common payment arrangement for both W-2 and 1099-NEC independent contractors in America, according to data released by the U.S. Department of Labor in 2017.

Consider not just what it costs you to do the work but factor in the value you bring as well.

The upside

  • You have a straightforward way to charge clients

The downside

  • You may get pushback from a client if the work takes longer than expected and they receive a large invoice

Retainer

Working on retainer means that you charge clients a monthly minimum, no matter how much work you do. However, for certain types of work, setting a monthly minimum number of hours or projects makes sense. Working on retainer ensures that you have enough revenue coming in every month to keep your business afloat.

The upside

  • You do ongoing work for your client and build a close relationship to help them achieve success.
  • You invoice clients regularly (usually monthly) without having to keep detailed records of your time.
  • You receive recurring payments, almost like a salary, which gives you more predictable revenue.
  • You can scale your business by hiring contractors or employees to manage multiple clients.
  • You create stability for your business without needing to upsell current clients or continually search for new ones.

The downside

  • You may be asked to do additional work that’s not in your agreement if you haven’t set clear expectations or an additional hourly fee.
  • Your total hours worked may fluctuate significantly from month to month, which may make it difficult to schedule time-sensitive work for other clients or leave you feeling suddenly overworked or underworked.
  • Your clients may request to renegotiate your fee when they do their annual budget.
  • Your income, while steady, may be lower than with other billing options.

Thanks for reading,

Kim

Image: The Euro

Professional Development , , , , Leave a comment

Mastering Virtual Presentations: Feel Connected, not Remote

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Virtual meetings are here to stay and at some point you, Freelancer friend, will be asked to give a presentation on a virtual platform—so you may as well make it your business to learn how to do it right. Plan well and you’ll be able to give a talk that is delivered remotely but still connects you to your audience. The trick is to think of your talk as a TV show or movie, divide it into segments and assign them a role to play in the audience experience.

Obstacles

Talking to a webcam is probably not your idea of a satisfying communication process. You’re in a room intended for another purpose—-cooking? sleeping?—-but is now your stage and the audience can see you. You can see them, too, but only as a row of small images aligned along the perimeter of your screen. Everyone is together, except that you’re not.

In fact, you’re all isolated and some may be in another time zone or even another country. Still, through the miracle of technology, you’ve come together to share this experience. The speaker has the responsibility to make that experience rewarding.

Unfortunately, the speaker’s experience may not feel rewarding. Delivering a speech of some sort when using a virtual platform can be disorienting, whether one will discuss a committee report at a board meeting, teach a class, or give a quarterly earnings report to investors. The usual sensory cues are missing. The presenter can see everyone’s eyes, but is unable to make eye contact.

It is sometimes apparent whether or not audience members are paying attention, but feeling their presence and energy, which signal to an astute speaker when the audience is with you and when you are losing them, is not possible. In virtual communication there is no feedback, no way to confirm that the audience understands or agrees with the points you’re making. The presenter is hanging out there alone, sort of in a black hole. There are no familiar landmarks on the trip.

Solution 1: The voice

Presenting on a virtual medium is like being a television newscaster, talking to the red light and with no studio audience to interact with. Nevertheless, speakers working in a virtual medium must remain acutely aware that there is a listening audience that needs him/her perhaps more than does a face2face audience. The online audience urgently needs a responsive connection to the speaker, on whom they depend to lead them into the topic, earn their respect by sharing relevant and timely information and hold their attention so that they won’t be tempted to sign out of the event.

When talking to a webcam, there is often a tendency to speak in a monotone. Some may speak too fast, others will ramble on and on. It’s because talking to a webcam and a row of tiny pictures feels off-kilter. The normal exchange of communication between a speaker and audience, subtle but powerful, is missing.

The overall most effective solution is for virtual format presenters to rehearse the talk thoroughly, to ensure that the tone of voice is strong and confident and the pace of speaking is neither rushed nor slow. Diction should be crisp and the vocal expression pleasantly enthusiastic.

Solution 2: Technology —polls

The drop-off rate of virtual presentations is high. It’s easy for audience members to leave when the talk begins to seem boring. To combat the problem, speakers must prepare to work with the platform technology, rather than allow themselves to become lost and flailing within it. Speakers must always maintain control and this is especially true when the format is virtual and the ability to read the audience mood is severely restricted.

Presenters are advised to quickly capture audience attention and establish their control by engaging them at the start of the talk, perhaps with a fun activity that employs the platform’s polling function. When the speaker invites the audience to respond to him/her they’ll give back a helpful dose of positive energy, precisely what is needed to not just deliver a talk, but to communicate and connect with the audience.

Asking a question is a tried-and-true audience “warm up” technique, but your question must be more specific than “How’s everybody doing today?” The virtual presentation opening question should be devised along the lines of a survey question, to make taking a poll feel appropriate.

Presenters can create a question that’s related to the talk, or even ask about the weather. Since most of the audience may be working from home, staying indoors is easy. If local temperatures have been unusually cold or warm, a creative speaker might want to ask when’s the last time audience members have ventured outdoors? The question and answers received could be good for a chuckle and will pave the way to finding common ground between speaker and audience and also between audience members.

You may be able to take another poll or two later in the talk by asking a question about the topic and challenging the audience to predict what your data show. Once you’ve displayed the audience answers, then present your data. (“96% of you predicted that our customers would like this new product feature. Let’s bring up the official statistics now and see how customers responded.”

Solution 3: Technology —chat

Chat is tailor-made for Q & A and it’s the go- to virtual audience engagement tool. Every presentation includes time for Q & A, often structured as a forum at the talk’s conclusion. Some presenters will also take a question or two earlier in the talk and then address the rest in the Q & A forum.

Whichever format you feel will work best for you and your topic, the chat function will be useful. Presenters can invite audience members to type questions into chat throughout the talk, which may cause certain of them to be addressed during the talk. It will be wise for presenters to discreetly check into chat periodically during the talk because audience members could be trying to signal that something is amiss—-maybe a sound or lighting problem.

Thanks for reading,

Kim

Image: Walter Cronkite (1916 – 2009), lead anchorman for CBS-TV Evening News 1962 – 1981. During the 1960s and 70s, Cronkite was regularly named as “ the most trusted man in America.”

Marketing , , Leave a comment

Notes on Branding

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Hello there. It’s been quite a while since we’ve explored the topic of branding. Establishing and maintaining a reputable brand for your company has the power to generate significant financial rewards even for single owner Freelance entities. Let’s dive in.

What it is

A brand is the characteristics and attributes associated with a company. The company brand consists of the qualities for which the company and its products and services are best known, by its customers and by the public. The company brand defines and communicates the experience it provides for its customers. Especially for larger companies, the company brand is powerfully and memorably communicated by its logo symbol. Brand = Reputation.

Branding

The process of creating and communicating the benefits, characteristics and trustworthy reputation that company owners and leaders envision for the products and services that the company sells. The objective of branding is to persuade customers and prospects to associate those benefits, characteristics and positive reputation with the company, as demonstrated by its products and services, because it will resonate with, inspire trust in and appeal to current and potential customers. Branding gives a business an identity and distinguishes the company from its competitors.

Create and discover your brand

Brand development is a two- way street. Company leaders must understand what the most likely (that is, target) customers for the products and services will be. The brand within is what company leaders determine the brand should be, as represented by the market position, pricing, sales distribution and product placement sections, advertising and social media strategies, packaging and so on. But customers also have a say in a company brand. The brand without consists of how current and prospective customers perceive and respond to the company brand.

Building a brand starts with knowing the customer and the customer’s expectations for your company’s products and services, which are shaped and influenced by what competitors, those who’ve come before you, have done.

Nourish and promote the brand identity and voice

Believe it or not, a brand has a life of its own and a personality to go with it. Company owners and leaders must build a brand whose voice and identity convey trust, reliability and good value for the money spent to acquire the company’s products or services.

The brand identity may be cutting edge, solidly dependable, luxurious, user-friendly, inexpensive and practical, or any number of other qualities. The brand voice will convey brand identity attributes through the style of the website, the company logo, colors used for the website, email marketing templates, company business cards, product packaging and other marketing materials, social media platforms used and marketing messages. Increasingly, company values and guiding principles, from environmentalism to current interpretations of social justice, influence the the brand voice.

What impression do you want customers and prospects to come away with when encountering and interacting with your company? Who are the primary customers? What do they aspire to communicate about themselves when they use your products or services? Those are the guide posts used to create and sustain the brand identity and voice.

Manage the brand

Company leaders must vigorously and continually monitor the tangible and intangible elements of the brand and ensure their relevance to customers and prospective customers.

Advertising and sponsorship choices, marketing and PR campaigns, content marketing topics, social media posts, the company website, product packaging, or the verbal “packaging” of a service, i.e., its defining message and, ultimately, the customer experience, from the Top of the Funnel buying cycle through to actual usage of the product or service, must communicate all that is valuable and memorable about the brand.

Getting started

As always, everything begins with knowing your customer. What motivates them to seek out products or services like yours? How do they use those products or services? Where do they expect to buy your products or services and how much do they expect to pay to for them?

Define the qualities and benefits that customers and prospects value your products and services for. To make the most of that information, the Marketing 4 P’s could be helpful—-Product, Price, Place and Promotion. I like to add four more P’s: Position (luxury or low-cost?), Process (the customer experience, from visiting the website to making the purchase to speaking with customer support); People (all interactions with customer-facing staff, including the company owner, manifests the brand); and Packaging (especially for a tangible product, the style and quality of its packaging, its customer eye-appeal, conveys the brand).

Thanks for reading,

Kim

Image: Brand identity 1950s style as presented by still powerful Nestle. The character “Danny O’Day (L), ventriloquist Jimmy Nelson and the much loved Farfel

Business Strategy Leave a comment

Grow, Expand, or Scale?

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Business owners, including my clients, are known to start bandying about the term scale once they’ve been in business for a couple of years and they are bringing in a few customers. They are in search of a few more customers, so that they can make more money.

So the prospect is referred to me by way of a mutual colleague, makes contact and shares his/her agenda with me. “I want to grow and expand my business. I’m ready to scale. Can you help me?” “Yes, I’ll be happy to help you with that,” I reply. “Please tell me a little more about your company and we can set up a time to talk.”

To be honest, until recently I’d never given the terms much thought, other than they all mean growth—-more customers, more revenue and more profit (ideally) for the company. However I’ve come to realize that there are real differences between them and that they should not be considered interchangeable.

While basically all ventures can grow and growth is a perennial goal, not every enterprise can achieve growth through either expansion or scale. It all depends on the business and what the owner(s) would like to do.

Growing the business

When a business owner or management team decides to grow the company, the strategy is to add certain resources—money, technology, training and staffing, say—-to produce more sales and therefore, revenue. But essentially, not much changes in the way business is done.

If the business hires two new employees and also buys new computers plus a software program that speeds up order processing and keeps track of inventory, for a total investment of perhaps $125,000 (staff salaries are ongoing at $120,000 / year total), the expectation may be that in one year the investment would be covered by the additional revenue that the upgrades make possible and that by year two, sales revenue will increase by 15%/ year for the next 3 years and then continue to more modestly trend upward, producing growth in the high single digits until market conditions change.

If the business leaders want more growth, more money must be invested. The resources needed might be too costly relative to the desired results.

Expansion

Growing the business through expansion is, as noted, another strategy. The business owners or leaders may open more locations if demographic and other marketing research indicates that a significant number of current and potential customers live in certain zip codes and would spend more money if stores could be more convenient to visit.

Likewise, introducing new products or services to the marketplace is capable of expanding the customer base and revenue generated. Entering a niche market is another potentially successful expansion, i.e., growth, strategy.

Like traditional business growth, the costs associated with business expansion can be significant and in fact the costs can be much more significant if opening new locations is involved. As well, a new product launch is potentially a costly undertaking. Entering new markets is usually less costly, but a special marketing campaign may need to be developed and rolled out to reach the new demographic.

But not every business can expand. There may be no additional markets that can successfully be entered. Opening additional locations may be neither affordable nor beneficial. Developing and launching a new product or service that fits with the organization’s mission and current line may not be possible or practical.

Scaling the business

The idea of scaling a business to promote significant growth gets all the publicity these days. When business leaders create a strategy to scale a venture, sales revenue is meant to be generated at a much lower cost per unit sold relative to the scale- up investment made because the production process becomes much more efficient. Automation of one or more key functions is the usual method used to keep overhead costs low (few employees and little office space, for example). A successful scale enables the number of customers reached and served and corresponding revenue generated to grow exponentially. The more efficient the means of mass production and delivery of a company’s products or services, the more scalable the company will be.

Drop the price of producing the widgets from $2 each to 80 cents each and sell them at the original price, but sell 10 times as many as you used to. That’s scale. Hire a new employee or two and buy a new piece of equipment so that you can produce more and manage a moderate drop in production price along the way, so the widgets that once cost $2 each at wholesale now can be bought at $1.25 each because you’re buying more of them and a discount kicks in. That’s growth. Open up a new location, launch a new product or service, or enter a new market, bringing in new customers or give your usual customers new reasons to shop with you and that’s expansion.

Thanks for reading,

Kim

Photograph: Snow drops in the Fenway neighborhood of Boston scale their operation.

Sales , , , , Leave a comment

LinkedIn Special Report: B2B Selling in the COVID era

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In our uncertain times, for-profit organizations have elevated selling, the means by which revenue is generated, to the highest priority. Sales revenues are the life blood of a business and enable its survival. As a result, sales professionals are under significant pressure to identify, connect with, engage and bring in new clients, as well as obtaining additional business from existing clients.

No surprises there. Making sales is the role of sales reps. It’s just that thanks to COVID, the playing field has undergone a seismic shift. Once-thriving industries, most notably restaurants, hotels and fitness, have been greatly diminished. Commercial real estate sales and leasings are staggering, as legions of white collar professionals cobble together DIY offices and work from home. How can sales representatives reach prospects when they’re usually no longer in the office? How can they introduce themselves and their products and services when they can no longer meet prospects face2face?

Virtual technology has solved most of the communication problem, but virtually enabled conversations do not make it easy for sales reps to meet and lay the groundwork for building new relationships. Furthermore current or previous clients, who now work from home, are often overwhelmed as they strive to meet the new and growing expectations of their jobs. Receiving a request from a sales rep to schedule yet another videoconference call does not spark joy.

LinkedIn has issued its fourth annual State of Sales Report after interviewing some 1,000 B2B buyers and sellers in several countries, including Brazil, Canada, France, the UK and the US. Here are some key takeaways.

Good data matters

To clarify and justify their buying decisions, the report found that 49 % of prospective B2B buyers feel that objective data is a required element of a sale and data- driven decisions have grown in popularity in the COVID era. Data adds value. Sales professionals need only to determine which metrics matter to the prospect?

Doing some homework and asking a few questions is the way to learn what information will persuade your prospect. Now when you send an email to request a videoconference call, you can tempt your prospect with a couple of data tidbits that signal you understand what matters. Now you present yourself as being a problem-solver. Present some data and ask what other information will be useful.

Getting to know your prospect as you get to know their business challenges and objectives is part of engagement. Demonstrate that you’re not just trying to make a sale, you’re trying to help the prospect do solve, or avoid, a problem.

Be a problem-solver

Problem-solving emerged as an attribute that 47% of B2B buyers value highly. As always, effective selling means knowing the customer. One way to engage prospects is to ask about their business and learn as much as politely possible about why and how your product or service could help the organization achieve important objectives. In short, what do they really need to do and how can you help them get there?

Furthermore, you might ask prospects how they did what they need to do before you and your product or service came along? Now you’ll pick up some useful intel on competitors and know how to position your offering as superior, as you assume the role of problem- solver.

When sellers focus on client objectives and provide meaningful data it’s possible to position oneself as a problem-solver, if not as a trusted adviser and collaborator for the prospect. In this way B2B sellers earn trust. For 75% of B2B buying decision-makers, the amount of trust that they have for a seller is the number one factor that leads a buyer to do business with a particular company.

Expect change

In sum, 70 % of survey respondents feel that leading through change is now a required competency for sales managers and is more important than it was five years ago. Sales leaders are wrestling with the question of what the change in the business environment means for their organization and their team. In a separate LinkedIn survey of sales managers conducted in March 2020, 55 percent of the 200 respondents feared that a decrease in their sales pipeline is inevitable.

Thanks for reading,

Kim

Image: Over tea, Moroccan Berbers (Amazigh) build a relationship and discuss the potential sale of a rug.