When you haggle, you are hassling your future business partner.  We work with customers everyday, many of which agreed to our pricing without a problem.  So what is so valuable about your business that we should be willing to give you a discount?  You’ve already proven that you’re not as easy to work with as the clients that didn’t try to negotiate.  The bottom line here is that you want each business venture you enter to be a positive experience so unless you can bring something extra to the table, forget the price drop.

When you win a negotiation and get a lower price, you literally become a less-valuable client.  Many clients don’t see it this way, but this is exactly how companies view it.  If you put in a request at 10AM and another client puts in a request at the same time and pays 10% more, you can guess who the priority goes to.  It may not be fair, but it’s reality and something to consider when negotiating.  Can you afford to draw the short straw?

Some Rules for Negotiating:

1. Be a Repeat/Recurring Client
   • If you’re bringing us more work, we tend to be less sensitive about our pricing and more open to giving you a break.  Plus, we already know how to work with you and if you’ve proven to be an easy client, most of the time, we’ll be more likely to give you a “you make my job worth doing” discount.
2. Do not compare us to your other designers/coders/etc.
   • If they were that good for their price, we wouldn’t even be having this conversation because you’d still be using them.
3. Have a budget
   • All clients have “very tight budgets” for services.  Saying this is like telling the cop that pulled you over that you’re running late to work–join the club.  We’ll be more inclined to lower our pricing if you have something in mind that is slightly lower than we propose.  “We were hoping to only spend $2,500 as apposed to $2700″ is a lot easier to swallow than “Is that the best you can do?” We are not used car salesmen and those of us that are good, do not need to discount our pricing to get business, we do it because we want to or we want to give thanks to a good client.
4. Be a good client
   • Being nice, paying on-time, or offering to pay more than the deposit up-front will get us to realize that you’re going to be a good client, even if we haven’t worked together before.  We like good clients and we like to reward good clients.  Besides, being courteous is just good for business, regardless of who you’re dealing with.
5. Be realistic
   • We are not the housing market.  If you insult us with a suggested price, most of the time, we paint you as a bad client and not someone worth doing business with.  The perception is that you don’t value what we do and if you were to agree to our pricing, you’d expect the moon and stars beyond what was outlined in the contract.
6. Be creative
   • We may not be able to lower our package pricing, but perhaps we can throw in an extra design concept or take time off the books to show you how that content management system works.

We hope you found this article helpful.  Please feel free to share you negotiating tips with the rest of the community.

Consumers are not stupid, but they are short on time and low on patience.  Constant media exposure has forced consumers to tune out a lot of advertising and only focus on what is relevant or what catches their attention.  This doesn’t mean that your advertising can’t be clever, but it does need to be quick.  Advertising that simply dumbs down their message to make it quick are often not engaging consumers and thus get tuned out with the rest of the junk being flashed in front of our faces.  On the other hand, advertising that distills their message to communicate a core benefit in an interesting way, stays with consumers for longer.

Example:

Example of Quick & Clever Advertising

One of my all-time favorite ads uses media and message in a clever and quick way .

1. Identify Your Ideal Clients

Every small business has an idea of who their ideal clients would be.  If you don’t, you should.  This may include demographics, industry verticals, even company sizes.  Do your company a huge favor and write down the characteristics that make up your ideal clients.  Some market research might be helpful in this step.

Example:  A Gym will have several types of ideal clients depending on the services they want to promote.  If they want to push their personal trainer program, they’re ideal clients might be middle-aged men and women that are not currently in a fitness routine.

2. Target Your Recipients

Now that you know who you’re after, think about where they might be.  Do they commute? Are they homeowners? Can you utilize county or state records to determine specifically where they are located (This is a good resource for new homebuyers and new business listings)? The more specific you are in this step, the better.  The ultimate would be to have addresses, phone numbers or email address.

Example:  If you’re selling commercial insurance, one of your ideal clients might be automotive repair shops.  You can easily get a list of a few hundred of these by checking out your local yellow pages or jumping on the internet.  This should give you both address and phone number – jackpot!

3. Tailor Your Message

When thinking about what to say to your ideal clients, don’t just regurgitate your marketing materials.  Make it about them.  Put yourself into their shoes and think about how your services might be able to help them.  Keep in mind the everyday worries and issues that they deal with tap into the human truth behind them.  Note that they are getting along fine without you now, so you need to prove to them how your services or products will solve a problem, enhance their life or do more than another product they currently use.

Example:  One of our clients, an indoor inflatable park for kids based in Northern Virginia, was placing an ad in a local newspaper.  Knowing that they were targeting mothers of young children, we tapped into the motherly instinct of wanting to encourage playfulness, both mentally and physically, in their kids.  The headline read “Let Their Imagination Run Wild”.  The ad, with coupon had over a 20% return rate.

4. Build Your Relationships

This step is probably the most crucial and the most often overlooked.  Too many small business are centered on themselves, when they should be centered on their clients and customers.  Keep in mind that people are more likely to go out of their way to use your services or purchase your products if they know you, like you and trust you.  Use every opportunity you can to let your clients know who is behind the company.  As a small business, you have the unique ability that larger companies don’t, to let your clients know that when they use your company, they are supporting neighbors, communities and like-minded individuals.

Example: A boutique dog shop offers free home-made treats to any and all dogs that enter the store.  The owners of the shop make it a point to share the recipe with those interested in order to foster goodwill around their brand even though they sell the same treats in the store.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) refers to improving your ranking among the natural listings on a search engine.  Natural rankings are the listings typically found on the left side of a search result and are not based on advertising campaigns such as pay-per-click or impression-based campaigns (typically found on the right side of the page).  The main objective to SEO is to increase the rank of your company’s listing when searching for certain keywords or phrases.  Ideally you’d like to be listed first or at least on the first page of results, but how?

It first needs to be understood that SEO is more of an art that a science.  Because of the ever-changing algorithms that the search engines use, results cannot be guaranteed and methods are always changing.  However, from the majority of SEO professionals that we’ve interviewed, we’ve garnered 3 key areas that play a big part in how you rank:

1. Code. If you are looking at your website online, go to “View” and then “page source.”  This will bring up the code associated with your site.  The majority of the time it will be html based, but other programing languages are also used.  Code affects your rank in a number of ways.  First, your content should be easy to find.  If you site is coded in tables (look for the <table> tag in the page source), this makes it more difficult for site crawlers to find your content and isn’t good for your ranking.  Most web developers have transitioned into div and css based layouts which are much more search engine friendly.  Second, your code needs to be accessible.  Lots of people are online today, many of which have disabilities.  Search engines like sites that are easily accessible to everyone so make sure you have alternative tags for your images and your site is W3C compliant.
2. Content. If you want visitors to keep coming back to your site, you need relevant and up-to-date content.  If search engines see that new and returning visitors are constantly rotating through your site, it raises a flag that your site is more dynamic that other sites and should be crawled more often for relevant information.  Being crawled more means that your a higher priority which brings your rank up.
3. Links. We refer to this as online public relations.  What matters the most here is really inbound links (links from other sites to your site).  It’s important to keep in mind “you are the company you keep.” This is especially true for inbound links.  The more relevant and popular the sites that link to you, the more important you appear to the search engines.  Think of links as endorsements.  If a political person is endorsed by the President of the United States, the national and international media pays more attention than if that same person were endorsed by a Senator from Wyoming (no offense to Wyoming).  Search engines work the same way.  If a you’re a pharmaceutical consulting company and are linked to from major pharmaceutical companies, you’re seen as much more important for relevant keywords that if you were linked to from your brothers myspace page.

Hopefully you can gather from this information that SEO isn’t something that can be completed in an afternoon, but is an on-going process that requires some discipline and forsight.  Keep in mind that this is not meant to be an all-inclusive list but is here to help you understand more about SEO and how it might help your company.  We’d love to hear your feedback and ideas on other SEO tips.

We’ve just installed it and while we’re not finding a whole lot on our business name, we’re finding tons of useful tweets and status updates that have to do with SEO, web design and email marketing.  We scour through the results to looking for questions to answer or ones that invite input and thus, the relationship building begins.

Check it out for yourself here.

The main gist of Google Voice is only having one phone number that then reroutes calls to your other phones (for those of us that have two cell phones, a home phone and a voip phone).  Sure you’ll have to reprint business cards and change your facebook conact information – but this is the last time.  Other helpful features include voicemail transcription, listening in on calls, SMS, free calls, conference calls, call screening, multiple greetings, and call recording among others.

While the service is only open to former GrandCentral users currently, Google has plans to open it to the public in a few weeks.  In the meantime, check out the whole host of features here and totally geek out with us.

In all fairness, we started following them first – but who’s really counting.  The real question lies in where the potential is for following and being followed.

We’ve already realized that by following industry experts and leaders, we can gather tips and news without having to go out and gather it ourselves – thus saving valuable time.

We’re hoping that power of association will work for us – the bigger and better known those that follow us, the better our reputation in a particular industry is percieved.  We’ll have to just wait and see…