It’s true in life in general and it’s even more true when it comes to freelancing — a LOT of headaches can be avoided with a little expectation
management.
You probably see it all the time from other businesses (think Dominoes’
pizza tracker that let’s you see the stage of your pizza, and hospitals that let you do basically the same thing with surgery patients.)
Expectation management calms fears before they even pop up and since they can help establish trust, can even make people more likely to work with you in the first place.
That’s why this month, we’re going to cover four areas you should actively be setting expectations (yes, should) and how to do that on a practical level.
First up? Your price.
Setting Expectations on Price
I’m not a fan of mystery pricing. You know what I mean — freelancers who have a services page with no prices listed, or no services page at all.
The price of my packages and services are right on my website and that’s for a couple of reasons.
First,
I’m not cheap and I want people to know that up front. That’s because the products my clients sell are really expensive (I’m in a B2B niche after all) and as a content strategist and writer, I directly help them sell more. I want them to know
that the work I do aligns with the work they do, that I’m fair (charging everyone in the same range), and that I’m confident in what I’m doing.
Second, there won’t
be any surprises. If someone asks me to write a 4-page case study, they won’t be surprised when they get a $4,000 invoice at the end of the month. That saves me the pain of having to have the discussion AND the headache of getting angry or confused phone calls. (In the almost 5 years I’ve been at this full-time, I’ve never had an invoice questioned.)
Expectation management, especially in pricing, is an opportunity to establish mutual respect and get right past the question of testing each other and haggling.
I do remember though, when putting pricing out was scary. I was super worried nobody would pay what I was asking (when I was charging almost half what I am now), but you know what? You never know what your market will tolerate until you get it out there.
Use ranges if you’re nervous, but trust, unless your site’s generating a huge portion of your leads, putting your rates up for a month or so isn’t a big risk at all.
Give it a shot this month and see what happens.
Megan
Here are the Academy resources that you’ll want to check out this month…