Raising Your Rates With Your Current Clients Without Losing Them

As a service-based business owner, setting the right price for your expertise might seem like an impossible task. While many freelancers might undervalue their services, it's important to periodically assess and adjust pricing to align with your growing expertise and business goals. Let’s explore how you can strategically raise your rates with existing clients without losing them, ensuring that your business not only survives but thrives.

Topics Covered In This Episode:

1. Raising rates can align your pricing with the value and results you deliver to your clients, particularly in ad management where value is easily quantifiable.
2. Evaluating your existing client contracts is crucial before raising rates, focusing on how long they have been with you and the results they’ve achieved.
3. Approaching price increases should involve a structured communication plan, possibly including a good, better, best pricing approach.
4. Price increases should be viewed as a benefit to both the freelancer and the client, allowing for more focused service with fewer clients.
5. Price anchoring is an effective strategy in communicating new rates, helping clients perceive the value difference.
6. Facing pushback from clients requires standing firm on your value and being prepared with alternative options or downsells.
7. Raising rates can prevent burnout for freelancers, aligning your client workload with your financial and business goals.
8. Incremental rate increases or new contracts with existing clients are ways to achieve better financial stability without completely disrupting your current client relationships.

Find the full show notes at:  https://brandimowles.com/248

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CLICK HERE TO LEARN HOW TO PRICE YOUR AD MANAGEMENT SERVICES

Additional Resources:

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DM me on Instagram @brandimowles and tell me how raising your rates is going OR tell me what’s holding you back!

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Transcript

EP 248: Raising Your Rates With Your Current Clients Without Losing Them

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Brandi: [00:00:00] Today's episode is all about raising your rates with your current clients without losing clients. Now, this is one of the topics that comes up so much in specifically in strategist society, but in conversions for clients too. You started working with the client. Maybe you charged a little too low when you took onboarded them, but now it's time to raise your rates, but maybe you felt stuck or terrified that if you raise those rates, you'll send your clients running the opposite direction. So in today's episode, I'm going to break down step by step by step how you can raise your rates with your current clients without losing them.

So if you're ready to raise your rates, get paid more by working less, this episode's for you. Let's jump on in.

Welcome back to another episode of the Serve Scale SOAR podcast. My name is brandi mowles and I [00:01:00] am your host and I am so stinking excited that you are here. Now on the Serve Scale SOAR podcast, we focus on ad managers starting, growing and scaling their freelance ad management business, but I'm going to break it down for you today.

No matter what service you provide, this episode is going to be super helpful if you're working with clients one on one in a done for you service type business. And so we're going to talk about raising your rates without losing your current clients. And a lot of my students, especially in strategist society, where they have.

Three, four, five, six, seven clients. Now they onboarded them at a very different price that they're onboarding their new clients. So maybe they were onboarding clients at 1500 for their first few clients and those clients are still with them, but now they're charging 2000, per month per client. But then they still have these clients at 1500 a month.

So [00:02:00] what do you do in those situations where, hey, it's time to raise the rates or maybe you've been working with this one client for a while, you're getting results and you're still stuck at that same price that you've been at for three, six, 12 months. Or as I was talking to a student the other day, they said that they have been charging this.

same price with clients for over two years. Y'all two years. Oh my goodness. So inflation has went up on everything. Your prices should be going up as well in the value that you bring the client. That's so worth it. And the great thing about ad management. is we can directly see the value that we bring.

We're not doing something that's sometimes hard to formulate the value like OBMs or the services that directly don't have an income dollar tied to them. They're still like super valuable, but it's hard to show the value. [00:03:00] And so as ad managers, it's so simple. to show the value because we work with numbers and we see the data.

And so we need to be raising our prices with the value that we're bringing our clients. So when we know that, where are you at now? That's the first question I want to ask you. But by the end of this episode, I promise. Let's jump into why exactly you need to increase your prices. First off, if we can see the value that you're bringing.

We wanna increase based on that value. Two, if you're undercharging, it's gonna be really hard to hit your income goals. So if you're only charging a thousand dollars per month, but you wanna hit $10,000 a month, you need 10 clients, that's a full client load. That's a lot of clients, which means that you're clients probably aren't getting the service that they deserve because you have so many.

But at the same token, if you were charging $2,000. per client, [00:04:00] you only need five clients. That means those five clients are going to get the best attention possible and you're not going to burn out. That's so doable. And so you're able to provide better service, still hit your goals without the burnout and your clients appreciate that because they don't want some burned out ad manager.

So one, it comes from a place of we have to figure out what are our goals. Does our pricing align with our goals? And then remembering in our head, I think we always go to that place where it's like, Oh my gosh, my client's going to hate me. But actually by you raising your prices, you're doing your client a favor because now they're going to get more attention and you're working at a better rate because.

In terms of rate energy rate, because you don't have 10 clients, you have five. So when we think about pricing, we really need to come at it from this isn't to hurt your clients. This is to actually help your clients. And I know that if you're listening to this [00:05:00] podcast, you are someone who is of service.

You always want to help your clients at the highest level, get them the best results. You truly deeply care about your clients. If you truly deeply care about your clients, then having more premium pricing is better for them. And that's one thing that we have to just know this is why we need to get our prices.

It's so you can serve your clients at a higher level because you don't need as many of them. Also, when we get into charging, it's also about perceived value. Someone's who's charging 1, 000, and then let's say they get on a call with someone who's charging 2, 000 and maybe they get on another call with someone charging 2, 000 and maybe someone that's charging 3, 000 and then you were the lowest, a lot of people aren't going to see that as a plus.

They're actually going to see that as a signal of quality and usually things that are cheaper are not quality. Now I know from working with so many [00:06:00] freelancers, that's not necessarily the same with people. Because a lot of times when people are under charge, it has nothing to do with the quality of their work.

It has to do with how they feel on the inside about their own money. And when they have thoughts about what's expensive and that's what they base their prices on and things like that. It has nothing to do with the value that they bring. It's actually their own money baggage showing up in their pricing.

So when we look at this, we have to think, okay, am I pricing the way I should be? Or am I pricing because of my own money baggage? And understanding that when you're the lowest. That typically signals low quality, low confidence, low results. And so when we look at that and we know that's how buyer psychology works, we definitely don't want to be the cheapest price and the clients who pick the cheapest ones are going to be the most difficult clients.

So when we look at this, we [00:07:00] need to look at it from what are our goals, where do we need to be priced in order to hit those goals. And does our pricing currently signal low quality or high quality? So that's the first evaluation I want you to make before we even jump into this. Now let's go into the right way to raise your prices with current clients.

And the first thing that we're going to do is we're going to evaluate the clients that we have. We're going to look and see how many clients do we have. And I always do this with strategist society members when they come in. I always ask how many clients do you have? What are you charging? How long have they been with you?

Do you have contracts? And so when we get into this, I'm always looking at okay, how long has this client been with you? If they've been with you for less than three months, we're not touching their pricing. You haven't built up enough trust yet or probably case studies or results in order to justify raising the price.

[00:08:00] Now, if you're coming to an end of the contract, you've onboarded a lot of clients. Since then, and they're at a new rate, then maybe we can talk about it, but that's usually not the case. Now, if we have some clients and they've been with us for six months plus, and we haven't raised their rates, these are good ones to look at.

And we want to know what are the results that I've got? So we're going to write down all of our clients. We're going to write down. What we're charging them. And then we're going to look at the ones who have been with us more than three months. The less than three months we're just leaving alone.

More than three months we're going to look at them. And then we're going to start writing the results that you've got in them. We want to know have they had a launch? Have they got their bookings? Are they meeting their goals? What have you done for them? And a lot of times we undervalue this, but when we get it on paper we can see.

What, where did they, where were they at when you started? Where are they now? And we want to write this down. This is one for us to then present it to the client in a very structured way that I'm going to go through. [00:09:00] But also, it's for a way for you to feel the confidence to raise your price. And so we're going to gather all that data.

What are the clients that were even available to raise rates? What have we got for them? What is the value? Then we're going to decide on our new pricing. And I don't want you to decide on new pricing for each of these clients. I want you to take, what is your goal? How many clients do you want to have?

And where do you need to be priced to make that happen? So like we used earlier, maybe you're at a thousand or fifteen hundred now and you really want to get to two thousand because you want five clients to hit those ten thousand dollar months. Okay, great. So when we look at that, let's say we have We put my goal is 2000.

Awesome. So that's our goal. Now we're going to look at the clients that we have and how can we get them to two clients. We have a few different ways. So if a client's at 1000, it's the big [00:10:00] jump. You're doubling their contract if you go up to 2000. So that may be too big a jump. So now we're going to go in and we're going to do I'm going to show you how to do incremental jumps for this client.

So if we're at a thousand, we also need to look at, do we have a contract? If we do, when does the contract expire? That's a great time to bring up the new pricing. Two, if we don't have a contract, this is a great time to get a contract in place. What I like to do is tell the client, and we always have to come from this.

I want you to know, we always need to come from this as if I raise the price, There is a chance that the client will leave. Some will, some won't. But there's always that chance that they will. I want you to look and say, Okay, if this client leaves, is it going to make or break my business? If it's not going to break it, and you've been doing marketing, and you have discovery calls on your books, then let's do it.

If it's going to break your business, now's not the time. We need to focus on marketing. Let's say that [00:11:00] you have, five clients one of them's at a thousand, two of them are at fifteen hundred, and two of them are at your new price of two thousand. We're not going to do anything with the two thousand, but the two fifteen hundreds and the thousand dollars have been with you more than six months, so it's a good time.

We're coming up on the end of their contract and we want to get a new contract in place. So we're first going to look at the 1, 000 a month one, and we're going to say, okay, I need to figure out how I'm going to work this. So we can do jumps or one time jumps. With the 1, 500, you could probably do a one time jump, and that would be fine.

With the 1, 000 to 2, 000, that's a little bit too big of a jump. So we're going to tackle that one first. I always like to tackle the one with the lowest contract before tackling anyone else. So the one that's at the lowest, that's the thousand. So this is the one we're going to tackle. And with that, we're going to say, you know what contracts coming up, we need to have a call.

And [00:12:00] then this is what you're going to do. You're going to decide, okay, what are my options for this before you get on the call? And I always like to have a good. This is going to be a big jump. better and best when it comes to pricing. So then I can really outline it. So if I'm at a thousand and I need to get to two thousand my best pricing is going to be two thousand.

Okay? But that's going to be a big jump. So then, there's some options. We could go maybe to fifteen hundred. That would be a better, and then maybe a good would be to get them up to 1, 300. Okay? So when we look at this, we have to figure out which one matches the transformation I've been getting this client.

Maybe you've been 2X ROAS all the time. Maybe this is the type of client that's really hard to know what's happening. Maybe they're a local business and you're running a lot of awareness, so it's hard to track. So then [00:13:00] maybe that one we start at 1, 300 or 1, 500, but what I like to do is go to the call with confidence, communicate, and talk about why you're doing this.

When we jump on the call, we want to Really come with announcing this without feeling guilty about it. And so we want to always Anchor the price. So when we get on the call, we always anchor the price with our new pricing So what does that mean? That means that when we come we're like, okay. Hey, oh my goodness I love working together and our contracts coming up to an end and we've been working together for the last six months.

And we've got X, Y, and Z results. You started here. This is what we're doing now. And as I've been growing my business and now my new clients are all at 2000 a month. But as a loyal client, I am going [00:14:00] to present you with a special transition offer. So as I, we're currently at 1, 000 a month.

My new clients are at 2, 000. So we do need to get closer to that 2, 000, but because of your loyalty, I don't think that we Like I'm not gonna jump you double your pricing in the next 30 days So what I would love to offer you is some of my new packaging at a gradual increase So what we can do is if you go on and sign a six month contract It'll be 1, 300 a month for six months after the six months.

We will need to bump up to 1, 700 And then we'll get to 2, 000 or if you don't want to sign a six month contract, then what we can do is three months at 1, 500 at the end of those three months, we would need to go up to 2, 000. So that is my special pricing I have for you and I would love to continue to [00:15:00] work with you.

So what questions do you have for me?

And we just leave it there. We present it. Here's the thing. With these, you can make it your own. You could go straight out with the 1500. Sometimes, it's better to have long term contracts than to have a longer term, Price jump. So it just depends on what you want and what your business looks like.

Maybe the 1, 300 doesn't feel like a good enough jump for you and you go straight to 1, 500. I think that's totally fine. I like to use longer contracts as a way to lock people in so you know that's guaranteed revenue. But you have to look down at this and figure out what's your best, better, or your good, better, best.

And so in that situation, that would be the good, better, best situation is we get a six month contract at 1, 300. Or we get a three month contract at 1, 500. Or then knowing that in six months, three months, whatever it is, that we'll be at the 2, 000. And so that's a way to present these offers. But it's [00:16:00] the power of anchoring.

So the power of anchoring is where we said. My new clients are at 2, 000. So you're showing them what the new client is. But as a loyal client, I want to give you the special transition offer. That's price anchoring. So you're showing them the big one, and then so 1, 300 or 1, 500 doesn't feel so big for them.

So that price anchoring is really important when we're communicating this.

What happens then if they come back with pushback? And the big thing is you have to stand firm. You have to stay firm and, I totally get that this is coming out of the blue, but as we've been working together for six months and my new clients are at 2, 000. You're still at 1, 000.

That's a big gap between the two, which is why I'm coming to you with this special offer, but that's the best I can do. And I hope that we can still work together. So you have to stand [00:17:00] firm. If that doesn't fit their budget, you could always downsell them. I will be seeing a lot of you guys in the comments later on in the video because I will be looking at some of you guys in the if you guys have any questions, or any feedback, feel free to send them to me.

I'm always happy to answer those. I just want to let you guys know that I'm not going to be replying to your On board that takes time. They don't know if it's gonna work out if you already have that No, and trust they'd rather just pay the three five hundred thousand dollar Extra so they don't have to go through that.

And so with that being said It's really important that we present this in a way that makes our client feel good That's why I like to do it on zoom. Some people like just to send out an email. I don't love that way because I feel like it is a little passive. However, if you're [00:18:00] someone who's going to freeze on the Zoom call when you present this, or you just feel like you can't, then an email is fine.

Totally put it in an email. And so the big thing is you have to stay firm on the price increase. You can't like negotiate this. You stay firm.

Raising your rates is about aligning your pricing with your expertise, not just charging more to charge more. It's actually of service to your clients for you to charge more so you can take on less clients and give their accounts more attention. So I want you to take 10 minutes today and map out your pricing strategy.

Where are you underpricing yourself? Where are the clients that we can raise? What is the good, better, and best situation? that you can do. When you follow this path, you will see your income jump. I was just talking to someone and she was struggling in her business and she said, I'm at 4, 000 a month. And I said, how many clients do you have?

And she said, four. And I said, [00:19:00] what in the world are you only charging a thousand dollars for? You've been doing this for so long. And these clients have been with her for two plus years. And she said, I know. I just, I was like, If you went to them and you increase their rate just by 500, which is still a bargain for what she was doing, 500 with each of them per month, that adds an extra 2, 000 to your monthly revenue without even having to do any more marketing.

That takes you from 4, 000 to 6, 000. That's the power of raising our rates. And I said, if you did that, would it be worth it to you? And so I want you to see that sometimes when we're feeling burned out, a lot of times it's because you're undercharging. You're not valuing your services where they should be.

So if you are experiencing any burnout, the first place to look is your pricing, because chances are you're undercharging, which is causing the burnout because you have too many clients. So my friends, [00:20:00] I hope you take this. I hope you go apply it because first step, remember, we have to take inventory of what clients we have.

Two, we got to decide on who we're going to go to. Do we need contracts in place? We're going to get all the logistics in order, and then we're going to create that good, better, best situation. Are we going to do incremental jumps or a one time jump? What is that going to look like? And then we're going to communicate these new pricing plans with our clients with confidence.

And we're gonna stand firm in our pricing when we go to our clients. And remember that you are valuable, you bring in expertise, and you should be paid for that.

And the best way to avoid burnout is by raising your rates. It not only serves you at a better level mentally, it serves your bank account at a better level, and ultimately it serves your clients at a higher level. So there's no downside to ever raising your rates when you follow these steps. I can't wait to hear about you raising your rates.

If you [00:21:00] do this, go on and DM me at brandimowles on Instagram, I'd love to hear it. Or let me know what's your biggest fear around raising rates, cause then we can do a whole nother episode on fears around raising rates. And if you want more personalized plans, one on one support in doing this, I'm going to encourage you to apply to our Strategist Society.

This is for service providers, no matter if you're an ad strategist, an OBM, a launch manager, who already have consistent clients and consistent revenue and you're ready to take it up to the next level. You're ready to step into your strategist era. You want one on one support from me plus a group of like minded people who are also growing their business.

to 10, 15, 20, 30, 000 months without burnout. So if that's for you, we'll link up this. You can go to brainyandcompany. com slash strategist society and apply to work with us and we will see if you're the right fit. So until next [00:22:00] week, my friends go out, serve your clients, scale your business and soar into the success you deserve.