Everyday Tales of Business Folk: a business story for business people – Episode 7

Welcome to day 7 of Tales of Everyday Business Folk, your daily instalment of the adventures of our hero Katherine.

We find Katherine in a tumult. She’s been asked to quote for one of Julia’s clients, on what looks at first like a straightforward copy writing job. Or is straightforward?

She’s pacing around her flat, making the cats run into the bedroom for safety. Katherine has got her mojo back. She’s gone from being desolate and depressed, staring at her diminishing funds, to being the person she was three months ago.

Three months ago she was an experienced content marketing strategist, with a full-on job in London. She was exhausted all the time from commuting and working long hours, but she looked good, exercised regularly, ate healthily and loved her work. The surprise redundancy and period of unemployment had made her confidence levels dip right down, and she would have unravelled completely if she hadn’t had those freebie jobs to do for her pal Claire and her father.

The words “he’s got budget” had completely changed all of that. Somehow, she’s gone back to being Katherine the content marketing expert, and her confidence had come flooding back. It was like she’d put on a new set of clothes, done her hair and make up and polished her shoes. Even though she was pacing around her flat in her running gear, and her hair in a scrunchie.

Now she’s lying on the floor drawing a mind map. Planning out a new website architecture, calls to action, content sections, lead magnets, case studies for Julia’s client. Within 2 hours she’s drafted a proposal. All except the pricing. The proposal looks good, Katherine has done dozens of these before, and she has all the templates from her old job in her Dropbox folder, which her previous company had forgotten to cancel.

But when she applies the pricing matrix she would have used before, she knows it’s all wrong. This guy is just not going to have 30k to spend on new content. His company employs 3 people, is 2 years old, and although his existing site is pretty poor, she just knows that he’s not going to spend 30k. She wouldn’t advise him to spend that much anyway. She starts to look at how she can trim it down.

Hi Julia, Good to talk to you earlier. I just wanted to ask what your client is looking to spend here. There’s lots we can do, but I don’t really know how far to go, without some idea of his budget. K

Hi Katherine, I haven’t got a clear budget from him, but I know he’s happy to invest in his online marketing. Where it is working with his current site, which is the stuff aimed at private schools, he’s getting leads for jobs of around 4-6k, so it makes sense to get some more leads to bring in nice little chunks of work like that. But he’s not got mega bags of cash to spend. Why don’t you do 3 options, with different levels, and maybe something that spreads the cost for him over time. I usually advise clients to do 3 different price points when they do a proposal, so they can still get the job if they don’t know what their client’s budget is. Let me know how you get on. J

Katherine ponders. Three price points. That’s three different options. Oh, well, what else am I going to do tonight anyway? She gets typing.

So Katherine has finally been brought into the dark world of self employment by the wicked witch Julia. She’s writing the proposal. Pitching for work. What will happen tomorrow?

PS: If you’d like to hear about how to do your proposals with three price points (and why you might want to do this) my guide to three price point pitching is here.