Have you ever sent a proposal to a prospect who seemed super eager, only to never hear from them again?
I know I have, too many times to count in the early stages of my freelance career.
I always noticed an increase in being ghosted after finally building the confidence to increase my prices.
It’s fair to say that didn’t help my conviction in my pricing, and I considered running a flash sale or lowering my prices back down to what they were before 🥲
But I didn’t, because I knew running constant sales is just a race to the bottom. And if I wanted to succeed, I had to start charging more.
So what did I do?
First, I had to deal with the rejection. It was tough because, after raising my prices, I finally felt like I was making progress, only to be shot down at the first hurdle. This sapped my motivation.
But once I went through the inevitable grieving process:
Denial: Telling myself the prospect just got busy or forgot to get back to me.
Anger: Blaming the prospect, thinking they just want the cheapest option, not the best results.
Bargaining: Following up with the prospect, offering a discount on the initial project fee.
Depression: Feeling helpless, as though I’m never going to succeed and will always be stuck in this loop of trying to earn more money.
Acceptance: Realising that lows are part of growing a business and that I can learn from this.
I came to the realisation that it must be something to do with the way I was delivering my proposals, because I was confident that my work was worth what I was charging.
Here’s what my enquiry stage looked like at the time:
A prospect would fill out an enquiry form on my website.
I would then email them to introduce myself and confirm the deliverables and project scope, along with any questions I had after viewing their enquiry.
Once they confirmed, I would put together and send over a proposal.
On paper, this didn’t seem like a bad approach, and at the time, I was unaware of how I could tweak or improve it.
So, I did some research.
This research proved the concept of the ‘Ignorance tax’ to be true.
For those not familiar, this is the price we pay for not knowing what we should know by now.
In my case, it looked something like this:
Ignorance: Not understanding the mistakes I was making during my enquiry stage.
Tax: Not landing high-paying clients.
After this research, I came away with 3 big realisations about my current enquiry process:
The prospect had no idea what price to expect before receiving the proposal, and any unexpected cost feels expensive.
I wasn’t building trust or a connection with the prospect before presenting a proposal.
I wasn’t giving myself an opportunity to address any of the prospect’s concerns or objections upfront.
It’s so odd how, after closing a knowledge gap, we can look back at our previous uninformed selves in disbelief that they couldn’t see what obviously needed changing. But that’s the wonderful thing about hindsight!
Anyway, with these realisations in mind, I made some changes to my enquiry stage, and it ended up looking something like this:
A prospect fills out my enquiry form, now with an added budget question that shows a starting price for my services.
I then send a confirmation email with a link to book a discovery call.
The prospect and I have a 30-minute call to chat about the project, their goals, concerns, and budget.
Then, I put together a tailored proposal for the project that confirms everything we discussed on the call.
I’m not going to lie and say that after I made these changes, my sales skyrocketed and I never had a prospect ghost me again, because business isn’t that simple.
But what I will say is that it did dramatically improve my conversion rate from prospect to client, and I rarely heard the excuse ‘you’re too expensive’ again because people came into the discovery call knowing my price range already.
If you can take away one thing from this email, let it be this:
If you’re not landing clients, before you think about lowering your prices take a look at your marketing and processes instead.
See if you can identify any objections that might be scaring people off, make some changes, and experiment to see if it makes a difference.
One last thing, if you want a fast track way to start converting more prospects, focus on your proposal—it’s where the value is built.
Chat next week 😊
Abi
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