Are you making this common mistake when selling your services?

How much do you charge per hour?

The reason I ask you this, is that I have a suggestion for you.  If you currently quote prospective clients an hourly rate for your services, I would like you to reconsider.  In my experience, you will almost certainly do a lot better, if you quote based on the value of the result you deliver, rather than how long it takes you to deliver it.

Here’s why:

• People never pay for the hour.
• People always pay for the result.

For example:

• You pay a gardener for cutting your grass and pulling up your weeds, not the 3 hours they spend doing it.  If you were just paying for the hours, it wouldn’t matter whether your grass was cut or not.  If using up the gardeners time was your outcome, you would be fine if he or she just spent those 3 hours looking at the garden or reading a book.
• You pay the chiropractor for getting you out of pain, not the 30 minutes they spend doing it.
• You pay the copywriter for the 500% increase in your marketing leads, not the 5 hours they spent writing the marketing pages on your website.
• You pay the seminar provider for the information they give you, not the day they spend delivering that information to you and the other delegates.

Results based marketing

When you sell your services based on a per hour fee, your income is capped, because the number of hours you can sell each week is capped.  When you sell your services based on the value of the result you deliver, you can increase your income almost infinitely, by learning how to provide results that are increasingly valuable.

Prospective clients appreciate this value / results model, because the hourly rate model rewards incompetence.

If a service provider charges X per hour, there’s an incentive for them to take as many hours as they can.  Equally, the per hour service provider earns less, the more efficient they are.

In short:  Look at what the prospective client wants to achieve and then quote them a fee for you to deliver that result.