How To Leverage “Lead Flow Thresholds” To Raise Your Rates

Today I want to talk about how you can use lead flow thresholds to raise your rates systematically, so I’ve got a post here from the dye accelerator Community, from Maya whom you will recognize if you’ve watched our scaffolding video. If you haven’t watched it, I’ll put a link gosh, where would it be up here?

It’ll, be here I’ll, put the link up there I’ll try to anyway um so with Maya, as you know, from the scaffolding video. Basically, her current priority has been lead generation and she has one good source of leads and she’s having trouble, because that source of leads tends to be lower, paying and so she’s wanting to establish herself with better lead sources. That would use her more top tier packages. But um she’s, actually with the lead, gen effort she’s been putting into these like potentially lower quality, leads she’s, been getting some really good results. So, the premise of this video, these lead flow thresholds.

What I’m going to be telling Maya, which I’m telling her now, because Maya I’m sending this to you – is that um. While I think it is smart to be doing this, other marketing stuff that we’re talking about to get in front of higher quality leads the fact that you’re now getting booked out and have a waiting list to me is the perfect time to start raising rates. So I am personally a proponent of not booking yourself out too far. Maya already knows this, but you the viewer, might not. I think it’s best to maybe book yourself out a month or two, but once you get into the three-month territory.

I have done this before, and I had a three-month queue and projects started to balloon so that three-month cue became like a five month.

Cue – and it was just I felt like I was trying to work out from some pile of unconquerable work, and I like wanted to go on vacation, but I couldn’t I wanted to work on other stuff, but I couldn’t so um. I think one month as a minimum uh booking out is like really solid and then two months out is pretty good. But I’d say that’s a good cap and the reason I’m talking about being booked out is because, as a freelancer or an agency owner you’re negotiating power comes from your willingness and ability to walk away from a potential project. When we don’t have enough leads, we don’t have enough clients, we feel scared.

I still do you know like if, even if I have a bunch of money in savings, I still feel scared. When I don’t have a project on the horizon and when people feel scared, they make compromises that they shouldn’t because they just want to secure the lead. So, let’s say that you get to the point where you have a one month: cue or a two-month queue, or you have a waiting list, or you have something to give you a little bit of security uh. That’s where I think it’s really smart to start. Raising your rates in Maya’s case, I know what she’s charging.

I know that she’s under charging, so my thought for you Maya is that, while I do think it’s smart and good that you are investing into other lead sources now that you have this queue building, I would say for any new leads you get try just I Don’t know 25 30, 50, maybe even 100 price rates I used to do a service called online in a day where I would basically work a really intense 16 hour day and turn a website around for a client.

In a day, it wasn’t the best site in the world, but it was like it was very good, but, most importantly, it was very quickly done, and I did this process with John Lee Dumas from entrepreneur on fire and after I had done the process, he was Like Zach, you need to be charging more for this. Don’t charge me more for this, but you need to be charging more for this in general. When I first did this, I was working my day job and I think my first online in a day style thing was like a thousand dollars for one day and then, when I quit the day job and I had more leads coming in, I think it was 1500 – and I think when I did John’s it was either 1500 or 2500 or something um, but then since then like.

If I were to do that now, I would charge a lot more and I just straight up: wouldn’t do it now, I’m old and tired. I wouldn’t want to do that, but um in any case, the point I’m making here is that value-based pricing and other things we teach in W freelancing rate are one really good way to raise rates getting close to the money. One really good way to raise rates, but another good way to raise rates is just standard old supply and demand. So, if you can get your lead flow high enough that there are more leads coming in than you could work with.

You don’t have to have your first step, be, like add, friction which we have another video about. That will go up here. Um, One Step that you could do is just raise your minimum rates, and you can you can even publicize what your minimum start at, and that is a way of adding a little bit of friction without asking for like questionnaires or whatever and a lot of the Time our rates are a reflection of our own confidence in ourselves, and I find the easiest way to feel more confident is to go through the process of creating a case study for a past client who you’ve really knocked it out of the park for which fun Fact we have a case studies course at dye that I’m finishing up right now.

You can get in on it in the dye accelerator and if you go through this process of creating a case study for a client, and you see how your work has like really affected their business and you really just look at the numbers, and you say: Oh, my gosh, they paid me 500 bucks for this and I’ve, given them thousands of dollars for value or of a value, sorry or whatever. The ratio is for you like.

These are the kinds of things that, at least for me, make it a little bit easier to force myself out of my comfort zone and try raising my rates but to Circle it all back.

If you try to raise your rates when you don’t have many leads coming in it’s scary, because the fear is always okay. What, if I put my rate too high and this person doesn’t close so to me thresholds – are the way to go and if you look at your conversion rates right now and your lead flow right now, and you ask yourself for the amount of clients, I want A month at the rates, I’m currently charging, what’s my conversion rate and thus how many leads do I need coming in.

So, let’s say that you’re charging 500 bucks for a typical client right now and you’re converting 50 of your leads that come in into clients, and you want to make two thousand dollars a month. So you would need to get four clients, and thus you need eight leads. So if you are able to do whatever lead, gen strategies are available to you that are working and you can get that eight leads up to say 10 or 12 or 15Suddenly you have a lot more margin for error or a lot more margin for not converting rather uh, that you could instead of charging 500 bucks, you could start charging 750 as an experiment, and the cool thing is that when you are charging 750, you don’t need Four clients anymore: you only need three clients at 750.

Gets you over your two-thousand-dollar goal. So if you have 15 leads coming in and you only need to convert three of them, you can take a gigantic hit on your conversion rate and between you, and I I think at least in Maya’s case. I think Maya could stand to do a 50 increase. Like that, and probably wouldn’t even have her conversion rate affected much a lot of the conversion rate comes down to your own confidence and, as I say at least for me, confidence comes down to case studies and like really knowing that that I am providing a Super valuable service for my clients such that I can’t even doubt myself, because it’s just clear and in the numbers, so it’s been a little bit rumbly but um.

Hopefully, you got some good ideas from this and if you want to join the dye accelerator Community, you can do that at delink. Slash Dyfan you’ll get answers like this.

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