Offer multiple options in your quote

Creating quotes that convert is as difficult as getting clients in the first place. As a business, you want to go for a high margin on your work but also for the highest possible customer satisfaction. This is difficult if you don't know hoch much a client can spend on a project and how much specific features are worth it. Before you go into detailed analysis with the customer to discover all possible options that solve their problem, try to understand the most important one—and build you proposal around this.

When working with clients, there are usually multiple ways and options that solve a business problem. They differ in their amount of automation, usability or design—but they all fix something that is broken, usually a process.

Why don't you offer multiple options and let the customer decide which is the best fit for them? This puts the solution to the problem into the focus and not the price for the only solution that you offer. It also removes your guess from the proposal how much a project is worth for a customer and how to price the project.

We mostly offer three options in our proposals, all solve the main problem, but in different ways.

Let's say a client wants to send out a regular newsletter and has never done this before. Your job is to make it possible for them to collect email addresses, get double-opt-ins and provide them with a tool to write and send the email.

Option 1

You set up a Mailchimp (Convertkit, whatever) account for them, create a new subscriber list and add a form to their website. Depending on the website, this involves adding the form snippet to the site or installing a CMS plugin. After that, you have a video call with them and guide them through the process of sending an initial test-email. This could be priced $1,000 and it makes it possible for your client to run an own email newsletter.

Option 2

This option includes everything from Option 1 but also tags subscribers based in their interest. Based on their interest, you set up an automated email campaign that sends specific product recommendations to a client or a free digital product on sign up. This option allows your client to automate parts of their sales process and grow their email list much faster than with a form without any incentive. This option is likely worth $3,000!

Option 3

As options 2 is already pretty useful, option 3 is a killer offering. This option includes writing the content for two email automation campaigns where every automation sends out 3 emails within 3 weeks. Creating content is hard and depending on the amount of research, your copywriting skills or hiring an external copywriter, this option is worth $6,000-$9,000!

As you can see, every new option doubles or triples the price and this is exactly what we are going for. Option 1 is 9 times cheaper that the most premium offering and it's still a good deal for you and your client. If you have done this a few times, doing the work for option 1 takes 2-3 hours including the call with the client or handing our some pre-recorded video tutorials that you made as you offer this option multiple times and only want to create them once. It's a task that takes days for someone who hasn't even thought about using a service like Mailchimp and the amount of research that goes into picking a tool is already worth a lot. The most premium option is one that takes care of everything and is priced much much higher than the first one—but if the client has the budget, it will have the biggest impact on their business, too. Option 3 makes 9 times the revenue of the cheapest option, but is not 9 times the work—so your margin is even bigger.

Offering multiple options create opportunities for you and your client. You are happy if they take the cheapest option but you can multiply your income by upselling them to much more valuable services. If you only offer something in between, you will likely fight for the price instead of the value that you can provider for your customer. Eventually, you'll see how you need to price your services to get more option 3 projects and this will make you and your clients happier.