Newsletter

Write your quote so the client feels confident saying yes

Imagine Dorthe, marketing manager at a medium-sized company, with two quotes for an autoresponder sequence in front of her.

One is priced at $2,000, the other at $4.000. Both copywriters have attractive websites, both have a couple of good case studies, and both claim they can ‘write a sequence that sells’.

Dorthe chooses the more expensive option, not because she wants to spend more money, but because the cheaper quote makes her feel uneasy. What is it they’re not telling her? And who’s going to explain it to the managing director if it goes wrong?

That scene highlights something many self-employed people overlook: your client is afraid. Not of you, but of making the wrong choice. And both your price and your words have one job, to ease that fear.

Price is the first sign of quality

When you’re selling a service, the client can’t see what they’re getting until they’ve paid. They can’t turn it over and examine it like a jacket in a shop. So they latch onto the only concrete thing they have to go on, and that’s the price. It’s not particularly rational, but that’s how we humans assess something we can’t see.

This is particularly true of larger clients. For them, the amount paid is rarely the biggest risk, it’s making the wrong choice and having to take responsibility for it afterwards. A low price is therefore not a relief for them, but a red flag. Cheap prices scare away precisely the people you’d most like to work with.

I’ve doubted my own prices many times. Looking back, the doubt was almost always my own, it was rarely something my clients had said.

Your most important job is to remove the fear

If the client is afraid, your job changes. You shouldn’t try to sound like a genius. You need to make the client feel at ease. Yet most quotes and sales emails spend the bulk of their space telling the reader just how skilled the sender is.

Take a quote for an autoresponder sequence, for example. It can be written in two ways:

Before: ‘I’ll write an autoresponder sequence for you that turns new subscribers into customers.’

After: ‘First, we’ll have a one-hour meeting where I’ll get to know your customers, and find out what they’re typically unsure about before they buy. Then I’ll send you a plan for the sequence, e.g. six emails over three weeks, with the purpose of each individual email, so you can see the whole process before I write a single word. Then I’ll write the emails, and you’ll get them to review before anything goes live. Once the sequence is running, I’ll monitor it continuously, open rates, clicks and sales, if the sequence leads to a purchase — and tweak any emails that aren’t working.’

The first one promises. The second one shows. It’s the second one that puts the client at ease, because they can see themselves in the process — and because it answers the question ‘what happens if it goes wrong?’ before they’ve even asked it.

The final step isn’t something I’ve made up just to sound reassuring. I’ve written many autoresponder sequences, both for my own business and for clients, and of course I’ve also written some that didn’t work.

That’s why I always measure performance using every metric I can get my hands on, and I continuously refine the sequence. When I include this in a quote, I don’t promise that everything will go to plan first time round. I promise that I’ll spot it when it doesn’t, and that’s the promise that puts the client at ease.

Clarity is the key word. And it’s also that clarity that makes a higher price easy to say yes to. When the client knows exactly what’s going to happen, the amount feels like an investment in a process they can understand — not a leap into the unknown.