Get Your Branding Agency Clients To Pay You More: Do These 3 Things

How do you get a client to spend more with you, give you more work and basically give you a raise?

I asked Google and all it gave me was how to get a raise from your boss.

And while there were some decent pieces of advice in there, they didn't translate into how branding agency owners like us can get clients to pay us more.

As someone who has lots of clients and also pays lots of contractors and freelancers, let me give you my take on the best way to get your clients to give you more work, and or pay you more money.

And I’ll also tell you what you absolutely, categorically, should avoid.

What NOT to do if you want your clients to pay you more

I’ll tell you a story about how somebody that we’ve been paying over the last year approached us for more work and more money, so I can paint the picture of what not to do.

If you’re reading this - you know who you are.

And I'm not chastising you, I’m sharing this as it’s a useful lesson for everyone - you’re not the only person who has made these mistakes.

In fact, it gave you a chance to learn how to better yourself as a business owner, and as a company. And it gave me some great content that I can now share with a whole bunch of people who are probably also making these same mistakes when trying to get more money from their clients.

So here’s five things to avoid when looking for more work or more money from clients, and what to do instead.

Using your personal life as a reason for more money.

Look, we’ve all done it.

I'm guilty of it - sharing excuses or things that are happening to you in your personal life as a reason that you weren't able to do something, or a reason that you need something from someone.

It’s a natural human trait - I’ll do a whole post about this some other time.

Say someone is late with work that they're going to do.

What’s the first thing they say? They usually give you a reason, and it’s probably legitimate, right? Maybe someone died, maybe someone got sick, their child had to stay home from school because they have COVID…

There’s a lot of reasons out there, and it's not that I don't have empathy for them, but I don't think they are your client’s business.

I think by sharing anything personal like that as an excuse, or a reason that your client should be doing something, you're doing yourself and the client a disservice.

Because what you're really saying to them is ‘I want you to excuse me not living up to my promise and the expectations that I said, and so I'm disappointing you, but I'm not going to let you be upset about it’ or ‘I'm going to give you a reason why you can't be frustrated with it.’

So you put your clients in a really bad spot.

Sometimes it's not even something so personal, like ‘I need to charge you more because the Government is going to be really buckling down on taxes.’

What they aren't getting is that your taxes as a business owner are your business - they’re not a reason that I need to pay you more, and they're definitely not a reason that I'm excited to pay you more.

Right?

Now, I will gladly pay top dollar for top value.

But if you're adding in all sorts of charges, because you have to pay for something extra in your life, that doesn't make me as the client feel better about spending that money.

So keep your personal life to yourself and show up as a professional who is going to focus on the things that matter most to your client.
Bringing up a list of past grievances

Another thing you never want to do is bring up a list of grievances or things that you've been bothered about for a long time, as a reason to charge more.

The person I’m talking about brought up the fact that because they travel to us in order to do their work, they were starting to feel it and now they needed us to pay more for that.

When they emailed us, they hadn't been charging us for travel for a long time, but now it's affecting them that it's been costing more and more.

Again, not really any of our business. And certainly, if you are approaching me to pay you more money, the last thing you want is for me to feel defensive, because I'm the client.

So I told them, ‘Hey, six months ago, when you realized that travel was getting more expensive, all you had to do was say something and we would have paid you more.’

It’s your responsibility as the business owner to ask for the money you want or need.

For example, say your project is doing five social media posts a week, and you've got this extra expense of travel.

Instead of saying, ‘Hey, I'm going to increase your price by $50, because I have to pay for travel’, you could say ‘Hey, I'm going to increase your price by $100, my expenses have gone up, and I need to cover that. But I'm also going to add in a couple of extra social media posts to make sure you're getting the value you deserve.’

Adding something in is going to make the client feel excited to get this added value, and you can add value in ways that don't take up more of your time or that are very easy to do.

So look for ways for the client to be excited to pay you more, not ways where they feel like they're just getting an unexpected bill.

If you’ve been frustrated because you haven't been getting paid enough for a while, then instead of bringing that up to your client, take responsibility for it.

As the business owner, it's your job to keep track of your expenses, and tell the client how much you want.

If you under charge a client, it's not their fault.

It's not their responsibility to look at your price and say, ‘I think you should charge us more.’ It’s your responsibility, so take it.
Using inflation as a sales pitch.

Yes, there is a lot of talk about inflation out there.

Yes, we're all aware of it.

But like the last reason, I'm not excited to pay you more because of it.

If you're feeling the pain of inflation, so am I.

If you want me to pay you more, position your offer and what you're delivering in terms of value as being worth more. There are always ways to do it.
Writing long emails.

I would say this is a good rule of thumb in business.

Outside of a well-crafted email marketing campaign, if you are finding yourself spending more than 10 minutes on a general business email, it is too long.

If it’s more than two and a half short paragraphs, it’s too long.

Anything that needs 10 or 20 paragraphs needs to be a phone call.

Anything that has something heavy or important needs to be a phone call.

Why?

Well first, if you write a long ass email, you are obviously spending a lot of your time.

That’s wasting your time, which means you’ll also be wasting mine reading it.

Also, so much gets lost over email. Having a live conversation on the phone or even on Zoom allows both of you to hear how the person is expressing these ideas.

And especially if it’s an email that’s about looking for more work, asking for more money and listing all the reasons you feel like you are owed that.

It can actually come off aggressive and defensive even if you don’t mean it to.

So you're always better off having any heavy, important conversation over the phone.
Thinking your clients owe you.

This should be a given, but I know that when it comes to people's businesses and money, there's a lot of emotion there.

So do not ever explicitly or implicitly demand anything.

Just because somebody floated an idea that they might want to hire you for more doesn't mean that they owe you anything.

They don’t owe you anything except the thing that they agreed to buy from you.

And if somebody said that they would hire you for something in the future, and then they didn't, that doesn't mean they went back on their word.

It just means that you didn't have a contract or an agreement in place.

I always tell people - the deal isn’t closed until the check has cleared.

People can tell you ‘Yes, I'm totally in! Let's book the project’ and they’ll let you start.

This has happened to me (luckily, only a couple of times) before I really learned my lesson.

But some people will let you start working on their project, and then decide not to do it, so then you’ve lost all of that time and all of the money that you expected to get paid.

So if you ever feel like you are owed something that was not agreed upon explicitly in a contract, and then you didn't get it, take responsibility for it. That's on you.

Look at your process and figure out how you can improve it so that you never get into that situation again.

Act like a business owner, not an employee

OK, what could you do instead?

Act like a business owner in your branding agency, not an employee.

I’m not even saying that employees should act like this, but there’s clearly a difference between the two.

When you own a branding agency, it’s your responsibility to set the tone for all of the interactions, and take responsibility for everything that has happened.

That's really what I’m talking about.

When it's your agency and you're working with clients, it's your job to lay out exactly how you want to work with them, how much it costs, what that process is, etc.

If you want to get paid a lot of money, you will do this even more, and it’s something I teach in the No BS Agency Mastery Program.

In fact, it’s a theme throughout all three phases of the No BS Agencies model.

The more you show up as a leader and guide your clients to the answer, the more you take their hand and say, ‘Hey, let me understand your situation, let me tell you exactly what I think you should do, and lay out a plan for you’ the more you'll get paid, and the easier the buy in will be from the client.

When anything happens in a project that doesn't go the way you want it, your best bet is to look back and say, ‘What did I do to cause this situation?’

Even if it goes horribly wrong, goes horribly out of scope, and you aren’t getting paid what you're worth - all of those things are your responsibility.

You may say ‘Well, I pitched them a $5,000 project, and then they bargained me down to $3,500, and then they made the project take three times as long, so now I'm getting paid less than I pitched.’

We've all been there, and that may have happened, but that's still your responsibility,

It was your choice to take it at $3,500.

It was your doing that allowed this project to take three times as long.

I know it sounds like I'm blaming you, like you did something wrong.

It's not that at all.

In fact, this is actually good news.

Because the more responsibility you take for any situation that happens between you and a client, the more control and say you have over how your agency, and your life, goes.

And that's what acting like a business owner looks like.

Here’s another way to look at it.

If you blame the client and think it's their fault, you are giving up all control of your business.

You're saying that the success of your branding agency lies in the hands of strangers - that they get to decide how profitable your business is.

So how about this.

Imagine if you looked at the worst clients and projects and asked yourself ‘What did I do to create this situation? What did I do to cause this project to go off the rails?’

You'll end up adding in new processes and new systems that will prevent that from happening in the future, and over time, you’ll build a business exactly the way you want it to look, that supports exactly the kind of lifestyle you want.

Like I said, it’s happened to me. I've been frustrated by clients in the past.

But every year, I actively looked to take more and more responsibility from those clients.

And guess what? I haven't been in a situation where a client has driven me crazy or asked for too much or went out of scope.

I haven't been in that situation in years, because it took me years to learn how to move from blaming them for things that went wrong to taking full responsibility.

Lead with value, always

Anytime you are asking for more work, or more money, always tie it to the value you provide.

That's all that matters to your clients.

So how are you going to provide value that is worth more than the price you're charging?

Like I said before, you might need more money because traveling costs more, or you didn't factor in the fact that you have to pay taxes, or you have people working for you, and you have to pay them more.

That's all legitimate, but it’s not why you're going to charge somebody more.

Your job is to decide, ‘This is how much my agency and I need’, and then in client-facing conversations, ‘Here's the value I can provide you for this number, and this is why it's worth more than that.’

And this was probably one of the biggest lessons that I shared with this person who wrote us this email.

None of this is to say that there's anything bad or wrong about this person, because we know them so well, they work really hard and do great work.

So even though we were completely ticked off by this email, we put it into the context of who they were and said, ‘You know, this is really just a novice writing us this email. They have no idea how to treat a client - they're not in a business-owner mentality, they're still in an ‘employee’ mentality.’

What I laid out for them was that, instead of these 20 paragraphs about all the things you want and need and think should be different, here's what you could say:

‘Hey, I've got some great ideas for you. I've been doing this work for a year, and here's what I've learned about you guys.

You guys saw this, this and this, guess what, you have a huge opportunity to make a lot more money if we expanded what I'm doing here into another platform and into more content.

Here's what I think that looks like.

I think you need X, and over the course of three months, I think I could get you Y results.

You know, we could increase your following and your viewership and target marketing to your very specific niche.

Just on average numbers, if we got this many followers, with a conversion rate of x, we could add this many people to your email list every month and based on your offers and how much they cost, that could result in a minimum of X dollars added to your bottom line.

Here's how I think I could make you a lot more money, just conservatively.

I think if did this plan that I see for you, I think we can get you at least an extra X number of sales, X number of clients, and because those sales and those clients are worth x $1,000, that would add, you know, $10,000 a month to your bottom line (or $20,000 a month), so I would like $3,000 a month in order to execute this.’

Doesn't that sound really exciting?

You want me to pay you $3,000 a month, and you feel like you could get us a minimum of an extra $10,000 a month?

Isn’t that the definition of a no brainer?

OK, I get it.

It's not a no brainer for everyone. But it's a no brainer to me.

Once you show me how my money is going to translate into more money, every investment makes sense.

We're all taught in sales and marketing, ‘Lead with the benefits, lead with the outcome, show them the value that you provide.’

It’s the same when you've already been working with someone and you want more money and more projects.

Lead with the value, show them the opportunity, get them excited, and show them what they want.

Then ask for that money and say ‘This is how much I need or want in order to get that for you.’

Tie everything to the value you can provide.

If you take away nothing else, do that.

Concrete ideas and concrete asks get concrete raises

Make your clients' lives easier by being clear and concrete in your ideas and asks.

If you’re not explicitly telling them exactly what you want to do for them, how you're going to help them, or how much you want to get paid, you’re making them do the work.

That’s another thing I shared with this person.

We’d actually been thinking of hiring them for more money on a retainer to do exactly the kinds of things they were talking about.

It’s not as if it’s not on our radar.

But because they didn’t make it easy for us and say ‘Here's what I think we should do, here's my plan for you - let me show you what this looks like’ it made it really hard for us.

If we have to do the math, figure out the strategy, figure out exactly what we think it should look like, and then figure out what we think that's worth to us, it’s not as if we won’t do it, but it’s really unlikely, as it's a lot more work for us.

We’re busy agency owners!

So give us a plan that’s already laid out, make our lives easier, take away friction, and you're going to make it easier for us to make a decision.

One of the ways that I teach how to do this inside No BS Agency Mastery is by doing the Lead Product.

The whole point of a Lead Product is to lay out that plan with total clarity and vision and then say, ‘Hey, don’t you love all of this? Well, guess what? I can do all of that for you for this number.’

The reason the Lead Product works so well is because after a client has seen the clarity around their business, and they have the plan and vision that they want, and they've seen that you understand it, by presenting them with a complete ‘soup to nuts’ plan, that dollar sign amount almost doesn’t matter.

You’ve just solved the problem and made their life easier.

And that's what people are really looking for.

You can get me to the goal that I have, and you can do it easily, and all I have to do is pay you that amount? Done.

By the way, this is probably a good theme for anything in life.

If you want people to do things for you, or you need things from people, the easier you can make it for them, the more likely it's going to happen.

If you want people to share something for you on social media, that’s why swipe files exist.

That's why people do the work ahead of time to write the copy.

Because if you ask people to share something, and then they need to write the copy, they're not going to do it.

If you’ve ever been cold pitched by people who send you lengthy emails - do you read those?

No!

Because it's hard and I have no reason to.

However, I’ve been cold pitched by people where they make my life really easy by sending me something that's bite size, or that's really quick or that has clear value for me and when they make my life easier, and I go for it.

So instead of writing a long email, or saying ‘Hey, can we talk some time,’ say

‘I would like 30 minutes of your time to ask you some questions, so I can get more clarity on what's going on in your business and where you could really use help. And then I would like to put together a plan for you to show you exactly how I can help you get to your goals. Are you available to meet at this time, or this time, or this time?’

Do you see how clear and concrete that is?

And how different that is from, ‘Hey, we should meet some time? Can you let me know your availability?’

It's the reason that when you are reaching out to people, and you want to connect with them, I always say either send them a booking link, or give them a couple of times you're free, or both.

We all know that awful back and forth email exchange, so give them a time and a clear plan.

Then, when they get on that call, say:

‘Hey, thanks so much for taking the time. Here's what I'm going to do today, I'm going to ask you these kinds of questions. And then I'm going to put this plan together and share it with you in a follow up meeting.’

This is the best way to pitch someone who's already been working with you.

For anyone else that’s a new prospect, my Lead Product process will take care of all this.

Here’s what you need to get…

When you want to do more work for a client, and want them to pay you more, remember to lead with value, and actually lead!

Keep personal stuff, the economy, and past grievances firmly out of the picture. Show how you can help make your clients’ life easier, and you will put yourself in a great position to get that raise.

P.S. You can always jump on a call with my team if you want to know how you can get your clients to pay you more, and learn all my other tools and strategies to scale up your agency - just go here to get started!

Entrepreneurship, Pricing StrategiesPia SilvaNovember 10, 2023Growth Strategies