Latest / Freelance Careers with Fexingo: Independent Work, Consulting, and Self-Employment / How a Freelance Brand Strategist Used a Pricing Ceiling to Raise Rates 30 Percent
Transcript
- Lucas: Most freelancers I know fall into one of two camps when it comes to pricing: they either anchor too low because they're scared of losing the job, or they swing too high based on a gut feeling and then wonder why their proposal conversion is stuck at thirty percent. Luna: And neither feels good. Either you're leaving money on the table, or you're not getting enough bites to fill your pipeline. Lucas: Exactly. So today I want to talk about a freelancer who found a third path — not by adding services or specialized language, but by actually looking at what her clients' budgets looked like before she even opened her proposal template. Luna: That sounds almost too practical. Who are we talking about? Lucas: Her name is Maya Chen. She's a freelance brand strategist — does positioning work for B2B SaaS companies in the twenty to fifty million revenue range. About a year ago she sat down and looked at every proposal she'd sent in the prior eighteen months. She had sixty-three proposals, and she had won twenty-five. A forty percent win rate, which is honestly not bad for a consultant. Luna: Right, but she wanted to improve both sides — win more and charge more. That's the dream combo. Lucas: Exactly. So she started categorizing each proposal by what she called the 'client budget signal.' Not the actual number the client told her — because usually they don't tell you — but everything she could infer from the RFP, from the scope, from the tone of the initial call. Luna: How do you infer a budget without asking? I've always heard you should ask early. Lucas: You should ask. And Maya did. But she found that even when clients gave a range, it was often misleading. One client said their budget was fifty to seventy thousand, but when she won the project at sixty-two, she later learned the real ceiling was ninety. So she started building a spreadsheet with three columns: the client's stated budget range if any, the actual contract value she proposed, and whether the client signed or not. Luna: And she started seeing patterns? Lucas: A very clear one. For clients who had no stated budget — they just said 'tell us your price' — her win rate was twenty-eight percent. For clients who gave a range, her win rate was fifty-three percent. But here's the key: when she bid at exactly the midpoint of their stated range, she won sixty-seven percent of the time. When she bid above the midpoint, she won only thirty-five percent. Luna: So the safe bet is to land right in the middle of whatever they say. That doesn't sound like raising rates. Lucas: Not yet. But Maya noticed something else. For clients who gave no budget, the ones who signed had a clear pattern: their project scope was almost identical to projects she'd done for fifty-five to sixty-five thousand, yet she had been bidding those at forty-eight to fifty-two thousand. She was systematically underpricing when the client didn't anchor her. Luna: Because without a number from them, she defaulted to her own low anchor. Lucas: Yes. So she decided to test a new rule: for any project where the client didn't specify a budget, she would set her price at fifty-eight thousand — that was the median price of all her won deals in the prior two years, adjusted upward by ten percent to account for inflation and her growing expertise. And she would frame it as 'this is our standard investment for a project of this scope.' Luna: Did her win rate drop? Lucas: Surprisingly, no. Over the next six months, she sent twelve proposals with no client budget projects at the new fifty-eight thousand price point. She won seven of them. Fifty-eight percent win rate — much higher than her previous twenty-eight percent on those deals, and at a higher price. Luna: So raising rates actually improved her win rate in that category. That's counterintuitive. Lucas: Maya thinks it's because the higher price signaled confidence. When she bid low, clients sometimes questioned whether she could deliver. At fifty-eight thousand, she was in the same range as bigger agencies, and the clients who could afford that price treated her more seriously. Luna: That makes sense. But what about the clients who did give a budget — did she try pricing above the midpoint? Lucas: She did. She ran a six-month experiment where for clients whose stated range was, say, forty to sixty thousand, she would bid at fifty-five thousand instead of fifty. That's still inside the range but at the seventy-fifth percentile rather than the midpoint. Her win rate on those proposals dropped from sixty-seven percent to fifty-four percent. But the average project value went up by fifteen percent, and because her overall volume stayed roughly the same, her total revenue increased. Luna: So she traded some win rate for higher per-project revenue. That's a classic trade-off, but it worked because the drop wasn't catastrophic. Lucas: Exactly. The key was that she knew her numbers. She wasn't guessing. She had data on her own win rates at different price points relative to client budget ranges. And she kept refining. For example, she discovered that for clients with a very wide budget range — like forty to eighty thousand — bidding at seventy thousand actually had a higher win rate than bidding at sixty. She thinks the wide range meant the client wasn't sure, and a higher price signaled a more premium offering. Luna: So the pricing ceiling isn't a hard number — it's a zone that shifts depending on how the client frames their own budget. Lucas: Right. Maya calls it the 'budget ceiling zone.' For each client, she tries to identify the upper end of what they can reasonably pay for a project of that scope. Then she prices just below that ceiling — not at the floor, not at the midpoint, but near the top. And she uses her historical data to calibrate that. Luna: How did she actually get clients to reveal more about their budget without making it awkward? Lucas: She changed her discovery call script. Instead of asking 'What's your budget?' — which often makes people clam up or lowball — she asked: 'For a project like this, typical investments range from X to Y. Where does that sit relative to what you were expecting?' She filled in X and Y based on her own data for similar scopes. That gave the client a reference point and encouraged them to share their real range. Luna: That's a great way to anchor without sounding pushy. Lucas: And she kept meticulous records. After every call, she logged the client's stated range, her proposed price, whether they counteroffered, and the final contract value. Over time, she had a dataset of over a hundred proposals, which let her see patterns by industry, company size, and even by the specific decision-maker title. Luna: What was her biggest takeaway from all that data? Lucas: That most freelancers — including herself before this — leave money on the table by not pricing near the ceiling. She found that in seventy percent of her lost proposals, she had actually bid below the client's internal budget. She only learned that later when some of those clients came back and said, 'We went with someone else, but your price was actually within range.' So she was losing not because she was too expensive, but because she didn't signal the right level of expertise. Luna: That's painful to hear. So the pricing ceiling approach isn't just about raising rates — it's about understanding where you actually stand in the client's mind. Lucas: Exactly. And the results speak for themselves. Maya's average project value went from forty-nine thousand to sixty-three thousand over twelve months — a twenty-nine percent increase. And her overall win rate went from forty percent to fifty-two percent. She's now earning more per project and winning more often. Luna: If today's episode gave you a concrete way to think about your own pricing — maybe you're going to start tracking your budget ceiling data — the way this show stays ad-free and independent is through listener support. You can buy us a coffee at buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. Even a small contribution helps us keep producing episodes exactly like this one. Lucas: Yeah, it's a simple way to keep the podcast going without any sponsors. And we really appreciate it. So back to Maya's approach — she also developed a simple tool that other freelancers could use. Luna: What kind of tool? Lucas: A pricing ceiling calculator. It's just a spreadsheet where you input your last twenty won and lost proposals with three columns: client stated budget range, your proposed price, and win/loss. The spreadsheet automatically computes your win rate at different price to budget ratios. For example, it might show that when you price at eighty percent of the client's budget midpoint, you win fifty percent of the time, but at ninety percent, you win sixty percent. You find the sweet spot. Luna: So it's a way to personalize this rather than just copying Maya's numbers. Lucas: Right. Your ceiling zone will be different depending on your industry, your reputation, how you sell. But the method is the same: collect your own data, find the pattern, and then consciously price near the top of what the market will bear. Luna: One thing I wonder about — does this work for freelancers who are just starting out and don't have twenty proposals of data? Lucas: That's a great question. Maya suggests starting with an 'assumption dataset.' Look at competitor pricing if you can find it — or use public RFP databases to see what similar projects went for. Then treat your first ten proposals as a learning phase. Record everything. After ten, you'll have enough to start seeing rough patterns. And after twenty, you can start making decisions. Luna: So it's a long game, but one that pays off incrementally. Lucas: Exactly. And the beauty is that once you have the system, it keeps getting more accurate. Maya now updates her spreadsheet every quarter. She's also added a column for client company revenue, and she's found that companies with revenue above fifty million have a ceiling about twenty percent higher than those below. That lets her price differently from the start. Luna: It's like having a GPS for pricing instead of just guessing the route. Lucas: And that's really the takeaway for this episode. Whether you've been freelancing for six months or six years, you can start building your own pricing ceiling data set today. It doesn't require a degree in economics — just a spreadsheet and the willingness to test a slightly higher number on your next proposal. Luna: And if it doesn't work, you can always adjust. The data tells you what to do next. Lucas: Right. So I'd encourage everyone listening to pick one project this week where you suspect you're pricing below the ceiling — and try raising it by ten percent. Track the outcome. You might be surprised.