Every discovery call ends with send us a proposal and we will see. I quote, they go quiet, and I never find out whether I was double their number or half of it. Asking directly gets me we do not really have a fixed budget, what do things like this normally cost. What actually works - a range in the call, tiered proposals, or refusing to write anything until there is a number?
Name a number first, in the call, out loud. Projects like this usually run between X and Y depending on scope, does that sound like the right neighbourhood. You will lose ten minutes of comfort and save two days of writing proposals for people who were never going to pay.
Careful with giving the range first, though - I did it for a year and anchored myself low repeatedly, because I quoted the band I was comfortable with rather than the value of the work. Where it goes wrong is projects that are worth a lot to the client and simple for you. I now ask about the outcome and what it is worth before any number of mine goes on the table, and I have had two projects come in above what I would have quoted blind.
Both can be true. Give a band on commodity work to filter fast, and stay quiet on anything where the value is unusual. The mistake is having one rule for both.
Since I started opening with a band in the first call, my close rate went from roughly one in six proposals to about one in three, and the number of proposals I write dropped by half. Same revenue, fewer evenings. The people who vanish at the number were always going to vanish, they just used to do it after I had done the work.
I spent about two years writing detailed proposals for people who had not decided to buy anything. Twelve pages, mockups, a timeline, all before a number existed. Now nothing gets written until there is either a budget or a paid discovery session, and the paid discovery is what actually separates buyers from browsers.
@rough_draft_rob · 2mo ago · 2 replies
I have done both and tiers beat ranges for me by a distance. A range gets heard as the bottom of the range; three named options with different scopes gets them talking about which one, which is the conversation you want. The other thing that unlocked it was changing the question - instead of what is your budget, I ask what have you spent on something like this before, and if the answer is nothing I ask what would make this not worth doing at all. People will tell you their ceiling if you let them describe it as a limit rather than a plan.
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@invoice_chaser · 2mo ago
What would make this not worth doing is the best version of that question I have seen. It gives them a way to say a number without feeling like they have shown their hand.
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