Do You Give Guarantees For Your Offline Services!

If you're doing offline consulting, always set up your pricing as a one time + recurring (or recurring only if the prospect has less budget or you feel you need a portfolio). One-time payments = job. You have to constantly prospect.

I agree with you but by offering a bundled services I am establishing myself as the expert & more of the reliability is falling on my shoulders.
I also know I won't be able to control outside circumstances that my client might have on their own such as doing illegal things within their business.
It seems I am a lot more safe with just offering rec curing services

Wow What an eye opener!

That's a great example of selling results. You can do this very easily without guaranteeing these results.

What I often do is ask the prospect if they have a calculator. After they pull one out, I have them add up the monthly impact of all of the "what if's" we talk about.

If you do this right, they get excited enough about the results that you just have to be the guy who can make it happen. You're really not selling your services at all.

That's also when it's super simple to quote a monthly recurring charge to manage the marketing plan.

Obviously, an exceptional circumstance as this is less likely to happen. But things DO happen. You can guarantee the work you propose to do. You just can't guarantee the outcome.

I could charge you a penny to tell 100 people that your product is the best. I can put your name out there. I can promise that your product beats all others. The bottom line, if they don't like you, or your product, then you're still out a dollar!!

I did what I guaranteed I would do, but they didn't bite...

Tony

Speaking of guarantees on offline services and other offline considerations, does anyone know of a kind of definitive guide to going the offline consultantcy route?

Nic - I'm unclear on what you are stating here. Can you give me a couple of examples? Thanks

Awesome link. Thanks DogScout.

Here are some basic guidelines that might answer your question:

# 1: Establish the approximate dollar value of your service for your client by going through a process of getting him to estimate the extra sales and profits a strategy might make him.

# 2: Be genuinely committed to helping your clients make more in real profits than you charge them for your services. If a service you provide hasn't done that and the client has done everything you asked seriously consider doing some more for them without charge until they get some real results.

# 3: Charge at least 50% upfront for any service you offer (if someone wants to pay you for the results you get ADD that onto the deal...they still have to pay you upfront).

# 4: Make sure that if all you ever get paid is your 50% upfront you're happy.

# 5: Don't guarantee anything except that you'll deliver the service you say you'll deliver on time.

When you establish the estimated dollar value of your service don't leave that in writing anywhere with your client.

The reason for this is that the variation can be huge.

You can make a business a lot of profits very quickly or it might take months for them to see a profit over what they pay you.

Also some clients are better to work with than others and in many cases new clients make it painfully slow for you to help them get results.

Guarantees are unnecessary.

Establishing value and being genuinely committed to helping a business make real profits over what they pay you are the real keys.

Kindest regards,
Andrew Cavanagh

I'm going to take a completely different side to it.

I don't take straight SEO clients any more, but when I did I ALWAYS guaranteed top 3 placement for any keyword they decided.

I mean we are talking offline local businesses here, it's not like it's that hard to get someone to the first page. Most of them only have a few dozen "real competitors". If you believe in what you can do, there shouldn't be a problem making a guarantee. You just price it accordingly.

I think it comes from experience though, plus if you have a decent team and a decent infrastructure, it's not that hard to get them to rank pretty well. I never failed to get them ranked. Not once. I charged anywhere from $3k to $30k.

This stuff just isn't that hard. If I didn't believe I could do it, then why bother.

Just my experience.

Marcos

Yes exactly, although I usually include provision within each milestone to act upon feedback from the client. That way a money back scenario is a rare event, as if the client is not satisfied there is a plan in place to bring the work to their satisfaction.

I've found the only time money back is required is when for some reason there is a strong communication barrier with the client. Sometimes communication styles just don't work well together, and on the very few occasions that I've seen a project is not going to get anywhere for that reason, it's been the only time it seemed like the best course to offer a client a refund. Other than that, planning a revision/addition process for each milestone has made everything run very smoothly in my experience.

Ideally, allowance for revision/addition to the work for each milestone should also be something that is scoped and agreed upon, i.e. the amount you are willing to do without extra payment, so that your good intentions don't get taken advantage of.

The other big advantage I have found from breaking projects into individually paid milestones is it creates flexibility. Often once the first milestone is complete, the client might decide they actually want to expand the project. If this happens, you can revise the quotation for the subsequent milestones to accommodate new requests.

Always get money up front and deliver max value.

If you can't guarantee what you do or sell you shouldn't be in business. When I work with clients I guarantee my marketing consulting, SEO, and Writing services.

Now you can guarantee anything it doesn't have to be price or result based.

Get creative and you may be able to produce extra value by telling people you guarantee x and you automatically position yourself as the unique one.

It could be something you already do but don't really express or speak about that much.