Immply.com Blog

We got this question today from an existing client we did a small project for recently. The customer came back with a larger set of requirements for a second phase but when we provided an estimated quote which was approx 3-4 x the first phase was a little surprised.

I couldn’t help but blog about this.  As I have said before, if you really value your work, name your price and stay away from bargain hunters. Now, I would not call this customer a bargain hunter but surely “price sensitive”, but more importantly, I’d say that the customer did not have a fair sense of the work involved or at least did not want to admit it.

What can you do in such a case. You really have three options.

1) You reduce your bid and loose money to get the project

2) You try to convince the customer that it really is worth the price tag.

3) You let your customer test the waters out and try to find someone else (which they will as there is always someone that will give a lower price) and see if they can do the project.

In this case, we decided to go with option 3. There are several reasons to this. The main reason is that we really believe that the work we do is fairly estimated and the effort and communication is really worth the price. So, there is no reason to sell short. If the customer is too price conscious and does not care about what you bring to the table then is this even a right relationship in the long run. We don’t think so.  Besides, you almost always get what you pay for and what seems too good to be true, most often IS too good to be true. We have had several customers that have gone through the path to find someone at a lower price, and come back to us when they get stuck - to know that if you are better than others, there is no reason to budge on price.