How do I respond when a client says that I’m out of their budget?

This is where there’s a mismatch between the value that you have for the work and the value that the client sees in the work.

As the professional, you need to close this gap through education and focus.

The education is on the potential of the return on investment. That return on investment is focused on the success of the project.

Focus on the success of the project

The first thing you need to do is ask your client “what does success look like 6 or 12 months time?”

Here’s why this is important.

It takes the focus away from you and what you are charging the client for the work and onto what they are looking to get from the project.

Because that’s why they are talking to you in the first place, right? They didn’t come to you because they want to spend money with someone. They want their own problem solved.

So if they answer with something like “we want to have 1000 new signups to our email list” or “we would like to have 100 new customers” or “we want to show up on the first page of Google for a specific keyword”, all these things translate to the bottom line, the value they are putting on the project.

That bottom line is now out in the open for you to either follow up with another question that asks them what that value of a customer is, or if you can go ahead and do some quick math based on your knowledge of the business and how much they make from their customers, you can position the project price to that value.

A client needs to be educated by you before they buy from you

The education piece comes into play during the follow-up.

When you talk budget, you should be talking about very early on in the process. If you are doing so and still getting this objection, that means the client hasn’t had the proper education on the value of their problem.

This is where most freelancers and consultants fail. They fail at delivering a followup sequence that is valuable and defaults to waiting a few days and then sending an email that says “just wanted to check in and see if you have any questions.”

The reason this is the default is the fear that you don’t want to bug or bother them. The only way you will bother them is with that lame followup email. Because that followup has no value to them at all!

If you were to fire off some links or resources that pertain to their problem and the solution you are proposing to them, then how could that be bothering to them.

You are simply sending them what they want.

In fact, 80% of sales require 5 follow-ups after the first meeting. How many are you doing?

When you follow-up, you need to provide value. There’s no reason to ask them for questions, if they have them, they will ask, don’t worry about that.

During your own education and surfing online, when you find something that betters your business in any way. Or come across an interesting article on the industry. Save it, write some quick bullet items as takeaways and fire it off in a follow up to a client.

It’s that simple really.

This is something that you can do manually or as you mature the process, build out an email sequence.

Ideally, you want to the followups to be relevant and take the client on a journey that leads to you at the end.

If you’d like more details on exactly what goes into each email or the automated sequence, Stop The Cycle is a course that Curtis McHale and myself that teaches the finer details.

So if you are getting push back on your pricing, then I hope this was helpful to you. You just may have to start reframing the focus which is the hard part that needs practice. The easy part is following up.