Picture yourself reading a restaurant menu. What are you in the mood to eat? What’s your budget?
Now, picture the most expensive thing on the menu. Are you prepared to shell out $49 for a main dish tonight? Do the $22 entrees look more reasonably priced now? Or are you now thinking the $14 salad is the way to go? Maybe you’ll decide to start your fast right here and now.
This is the basic premise of three-tiered pricing—the way that freelancers can upsell. Don’t simply quote what the client has asked for; offer them three tiers of service (pricing) with the services they requested in the middle position.
When you present three levels of service in a project estimate, you show the client what they can get for more money (the premium entrée) and for less money (the side salad). The benefits are several:
- they learn about the additional services you offer
- the price of what they asked for looks moderate
- they see what they get for less money
“Yes, I would like fries with that.”
It’s not a new idea. McDonalds started using a version of this with its upsell. Some clients will look at your premium proposal and say “oh, I didn’t know you could do that as well. Please do.” That’s how I turned short-term copyediting jobs into several-months-long development jobs and added services like photo manuscript development to my invoices.
You could also include a platinum option: Something so expensive that no one may ever ask for it. But, one day, someone will. So you may want to just ruffle the bushes a bit in advance, to know that you could call on the necessary resources to deliver that platinum service when it sells.
Me? I’m thinking of adding kick-in-the-pants service to my developmental and copy editing clients, since I don’t do project management. Offering developmental edits to my copy editing clients (and CE to my proofreading clients) is how I moved up the editorial chain, so I know this upselling works.
What are you going to offer as add-ons?
For another take on this topic, see Ed Gandia’s Freelancers Academy podcast: The Smarter Freelancing Podcast, episode 15.
In this series:
- Stop Wasting Time On Estimates: How to give a ballpark estimate on the fly
- Track Your Pace to Estimate with Confidence
Burger photo by Reyner Media used under CC BY-2.0 license.
