Good news: clients want you to lower your fees

As part of our research with clients this year, we asked them to choose which things, from a long list, would encourage them to buy more consulting services. They could have chosen from things like the ability of a consulting firm to implement as well as advise,  the availability of highly-specialised skills in a particular field or a willingness to listen and tailor services to their needs. Guess what came top of list. Yep, lower fees.

The interesting thing about lower fees is that if you lower them by 20% it does very little to encourage clients to buy. You have to lower them by 50% before they start to get interested, and you're not about to start doing that, right? So this just looks like more frustrating news about clients who think consulting is a commodity and want to pay less for it.

But let me ask you a question: what would you rather was at the top of the list?

You see I reckon this is actually good news. Very good news in fact. Here's why: if I didn't like...let's pick on Coca-Cola...if I didn't like Coke then you could try to sell me a can for one cent and I wouldn't buy it. The price would be irrelevant - the problem would be that I don't like Coke. But if I did like Coke then what would I want more than anything else? I'd want you to find a way to sell it to me for one cent. Perfect product, perfect price (at least for me).

The same thing goes with consulting: if people didn't like the product, price wouldn't be at the top of the list of things they'd like you to change. It might be second (the worst place it could be - wrong product, wrong price) or it might be at the bottom, but it wouldn't be at the top. If I didn't like Coke then I might be telling Coca-Cola to make their drink flat and orange-flavoured but I wouldn't be telling them to make it cheaper. If clients didn't like consulting they'd be telling you to do it better before they told you to make it cheaper.

So there you go: every time clients tell you that what they'd like more than anything else is for you to lower your fees, you can congratulate yourself on having a product they want to buy.