If you want to sell high value creative services, then this article is for you. Over the next few minutes, I’m going to break down the exact processes and strategies that you can use to increase your sales success, no matter what service you offer.
In case you’re new here, I’m Connor McAuley Managing Partner at Move at Pace and we help agency owners to scale and one day exit their business, if they choose to. Before this, I built a multi-7 figure agency, before successfully exiting a few years back.
But when I sold my first logo, the price was a whopping £150. The last number of brand projects before I exited each topped £20k. Of course, the services we provided in each project were at opposite ends of the spectrum, but the process of selling in these instances, couldn’t have been more different either.
The original logo was priced the traditional way. I looked at the amount of time it would take to create the output, applied our hourly rate and got a figure. The project was transactional, both in cost and output. Today, I don’t remember the exact identity and I’m sure it looked nice, but it was a sticker at best, not a brand of value.
But pricing this way is outdated. If you sell service and you price hourly, you’re penalised for being an efficient creative. If you work at a more considered pace, the client could theoretically end up paying more. Without understanding the benefit of this, they might think you’re just slow, they won’t value the work and well, they’ll quickly leave.
But if we look at how other sectors consider pricing. There’s a guy called Mat Armstrong on TikTok. He takes the worst damaged luxury cars and rebuilds them to keep or sell. But in his quest to rebuild a recent Lamborghini Murcielago he made a stunning realisation. The side indicator light on the Lambo that he needed to replace, each costs £121 direct from the manufacturer. But he realised that this is the exact same indicator used on a MK1 Ford Focus and it can be bought on ebay for 1/20th the price.
So the question I have to ask you, is how can the exact same part, be priced with extreme differences?
Well, the answer to this question is the starting point of our journey today.
Value to the client
Let’s say you create a website or creative campaign for a local beautification salon. I’m not even sure that’s a real word, but it’ll do. They sell £20 manicures and £30 waxes all day across a number of therapists. The truth is that the results of your creative work, would result in considerably less value to this business, than a project potentially could for a multi-million-pound construction company.
I have successfully sold significant brand and web projects to beauticians. However, for smaller businesses, the cost is a greater consideration than for a larger company. This makes for a harder sell. While this challenge is real, I acknowledge that it may be partly based on preconceived notions and shouldn’t be overgeneralised. The key question then becomes:
How can we quantify the potential value our services offer to prospective clients? And then, use this to sell at a higher value?
We do this in our fact find. If you’ve not heard this term before, its a part of the sales process where you ask questions about your prospective clients business. There are many reasons why you want to do a fact find and I’ll cover those another time, but for the purpose of this article, it’s to understand the value you can bring to the client.
Let me explain.
As part of my fact-finding, I’ll ask about revenue or turnover. I’ll ask about capacity in their business. I’ll try to understand the factors that will influence their growth, such as creating new products or moving into new markets. And if our service can help them achieve these goals, would that be a factor to consider? I think so.
I’ll stop here for just a little second to explain this further. I am not a designer and my coding skills stop at a HTML email footer. I am a business owner, an entrepreneur and ultimately a salesperson. My goal is to demonstrate how my business can help our prospective clients meet their commercial ambition. I’ll pause again as this is the most important point of the article. Well maybe the second most important part.
Your primary goal is to show the potential commercial value of your service to the client’s business.
And we do that not by talking about the creative because it will always be beautiful. Nor do we talk about the coding language and platform the site would be built in. Instead, we tell them how the outcome of these functions will meet their objectives. Because the truth is, that’s the only thing they care about.
The second stop on our journey to high-value selling is the target market.
A bottle of water costs 50p in a supermarket, £2 in a convenience store, €12 in an Ibiza nightclub and it’d be priceless to someone dying of thirst in a desert. The product is the same, but the audience or location is different.
And this is exactly the same when it comes to selling high-value services. Go where the money is.
Now you can take this literally and head to bigger cities or figuratively and look at market sectors that are more affluent than others. I’ve seen some agencies focus on working with banks or pharma, others are the premier brand agencies for hospitality venues worldwide. These teams have made conscious decisions to target high-value clients and with acute focus, they have become incredibly successful at doing so.
But I live in the real world and many of you reading this article will have an agency like my own. We’ll take on almost any client if they’re willing to pay our prices. But let me ask you this. Are you actively marketing to lower-value clients? Is your own brand language and presentation attracting them unconsciously?
Now I’m not shooing anyone from our door and nor should you. These clients are often the bread and butter of agencies. They provide the foundation for growth and allow us to build the experience and knowledge required to demonstrate commercial value to others. But if you’re marketing to lower-value clients, your efforts are reduced elsewhere.
What creatives often don’t understand is that businesses view their investment in your services as a risk. What if the rebrand goes wrong, what if conversion rates drop on our site? The truth is that our experience mitigates a lot of this risk. Of course, things happen, but reducing the perception of risk and highlighting the commercial opportunities is critical to becoming the preferred supplier.
For example. If you were going for eye surgery. Would you want the cheapest option or the best option? Of course, price might be a consideration, but not if the true cost is never being able to see again. Now, rarely are your services a life-or-death scenario for a person, but it could be for a business. And this is what the client is thinking. They will learn to love their brand or their website, but the truth is, if it doesn’t do what it’s meant to, that’s a bigger issue.
So we understand that, right? Demonstrating experience and presenting the benefits of our creative services helps to overcome objections. It also positions your business to help them capitalise on the opportunities that will help your clients meet their commercial objectives. This is the key to selling at a high value.
If you’re enjoying this article, I just want to let you know I’ve left a link to the new courses section on https://courses.moveatpace.com in the notes below. There’s some amazing content just like this. Some free and some some at a cost. Go check that out because there’s new content and courses shared there regularly and everything on my site will help you scale your agency. That’s the pitch, let’s go back to the article.
And what are examples of this commercial value I hear you ask?
- Increased revenue
- Increased profitability
- Moving into new markets or supporting new products or services
- Recruitment and retention
Now many of you will be scratching your head and asking how we find this information from our clients. The answer won’t shock you. We ask them. When you speak like those in the room, you speak like an entrepreneur, a founder or a commercial director and you talk commercially, asking questions is not uncommon.
I have multiple talking points in each of the above examples that I can use to demonstrate commercial value. You need to have your own and you need to be able to confidently discuss these with your prospective clients’ own ambitions in focus.
The final point I want to make is a personal one. Not for me, but it can be applied to anyone hoping to increase the value of the services they sell. You’re already doing great work, you deserve to be paid fairly for it. Deciding to raise your prices and then actually doing this are two different things. You need to have confidence in the value you bring to your clients because if you’re not confident in your ability, this is written all over your face when you present a quote for your work.
So I want to leave this article with this quote from Warren Buffet “Price is what you pay. Value is what you get”. Stop thinking about the hourly rate and consider how pricing based on value can give you the opportunity to sell at a higher rate.
And on that note, if you’re going to take action, move at pace! Thanks for watching. Don’t forget to like, and subscribe, to stay updated on our latest content. See you in the next article!”