I’m a terrible negotiator.
Either I give away the farm (“Why Yes, I’d love to fly red-eye to North Dakota and speak for free to 80 dairy farmers.”)
or stick to my guns and end up with nothing.
But other times, and with a bit of creative negotiation, there’s an opportunity to make it work for both you and the client.
In my BOSS (Business Of Speaking School) speaker training program I cover 8 ways to negotiate with your client. Some simple, some require you to have product – all possible.
Before I get to those, let’s have a look at mindset.
Either way, I win
My father used to say the best time to buy a house is when you don’t need it. At the time, that made about as much sense as “The rain in Spain falls mainly on the plains.”
What he meant was a desperate buyer (or seller) is a poor negotiator. On the other hand, if you believe whether you get the deal, or don’t, you win, you’re likely to negotiate harder.
Enter the empty calendar syndrome.
Empty calendar syndrome
In BOSS we talk about the “empty calendar syndrome.” It goes like this…
Your prospect is asking for a deal. You’re looking at an empty calendar and thinking how amazing it would be to, say, eat three meals a day.
So you take whatever their offer.
But, let’s be clear – it might be that was the best deal possible. Certainly, I’ve spoken many times for free or for a nominal amount, simply because the client didn’t have a bigger budget and I wanted to speak to that audience (see below how to make up your fee with book and handout sales.)
The trick to avoiding the empty calendar syndrome is to create a campaign calendar, complete with time blocked for travel and holidays, attending conferences, and campaigns to promote your business (I’ll cover that strategy in a future post.)
For now, let’s talk about your fees and fee integrity.
Fee integrity
Imagine you really need a new car. You’ve decided the model and head to the showroom. After listening to how wonderful it is (“It has real, fake leather seats!”), the salesperson announces the price.
You love the car, but not the thought of Ramen noodles for the next 3 years, so you grimace and start to walk away.
“Okay, okay,” sales the now-desperate salesperson, “let’s take $3,000 off that price—will that work for you?”
Suddenly, the sticker price is meaningless–”the price” is now an over-inflated, artificial amount open for negotiation. That’s what happens when you mess with your fees.
Fee integrity means you don’t mess with your fee, but if push-comes-to-shove and you need to drop your fee, you get something in return.
With fee integrity and your “Either way I win” mindset firmly locked in, let’s look at 8 ways to negotiate your fees (in each case I’m assuming a $3,500 fee.)
8 ways to negotiate your fees
- Multiple bookings
Perhaps the easiest negotiation is a volume discount on multiple bookings. Like most businesses, it’s to our advantage to get more sales from one client, so we discount the additional bookings.
For example, if you discount your second presentation (on Day 2 of the same event, or for some future date) by 20%, your overall discount is just 9% (Ah, the magic of percentages.)
- Include a breakout
One strategy I use frequently is to include a breakout (or “concurrent”) session. Clients love this option – they don’t have to hire and pay travel for an additional speaker and delegates get to go “deeper” on your content.
I only do this if the keynote and breakout are on the same day – if on the next day, I charge my full fee again, or, if necessary, offer a discount à la #1, above.
- “Sponsor” the event
Here’s an odd one. A prospect wanted me to keynote at their conference and over a period of some 4 months she would call with an update. Finally, the client called to confirm the booking but added she would have to find another sponsor to cover part of my cost. If she could do that, we were good to go.
I know how hard it can be to find sponsors and I didn’t want another month to go by only to discover she’d been unsuccessful and I lost the booking.
So I called her back to announce I would be her “sponsor”! I would agree to pay $1,000 to sponsor the convention, I get paid my full fee (remember fee integrity?) and all the ducks are happy.
At that event, I sold enough books and licenses to my Time Freedom Formula course that I made up double the sponsorship amount.
- Shared travel
Travel is expensive. Even though I slum along in economy (unlike colleagues who insist on business class), a typical bill comes in at $800-$1,000. When I get push-back from a client on fees I sometimes offer to “share” travel expenses – often to the tune of 50% shared – I might justify it by saying I have other clients I can work with in the area.
While it won’t be a deal breaker for their overall budget, it’s one way to give up a little without losing much.
- Sell books in advance
I know most audiences will buy my book, but what if everyone walked away with a book? On a couple of occasions I have pre-sold books for all the delegates in lieu of a fee. I still charge travel, shipping and taxes, but no fee. Here’s how it works.
Assuming you did a typical self-published book printing, your cost per book is about $1.50 to $2.50 per book. Let’s assume 200 delegates, that’s a cost of $500 at $2.50/for everyone to go home with your book.
Retail on those books is, say $20, so their cost, before shipping and taxes, is $4,000 (clients always think of book prices at list price, never as the cost of manufacturing: if it’s priced at $20, they’re prepared to pay $20.)
Voila! I get paid $4,000 for the books, all the delegates go home with a book to remember me by, and, after the cost of printing, I net $3,500 – my original fee.
- Emcee and keynote
Similar to including the breakout, you can also volunteer to emcee the event. I think it’s a rare breed who has the combination of humour, attention to detail, and spontaneity to pull off that gig, but if you can, the event planner will love you.
- BOR sales
Perhaps the most obvious way to negotiate your fee is to simply drop it in return for permission to sell back-of-room or gain referrals for future work in the room. For example, if your goal is long-term consulting contracts, you may want to trade fees for a chance to present to the right audience of decision-makers.
In the example I show here, the speaker agrees to drop the fee to $3,000 and makes up the difference by selling 30% of the room (200 delegates X 30% = 60 books) their book with a margin per book of $17.50 and nets $1,050 (60 books X $17.50 = $1,050).
- Handout sales
And finally, my favourite way to negotiate your fee – sell handouts. I’ve been doing this for many years and for the right client it’s a real win/win. Here’s how it works.
When my client asks about handouts (note this mostly applies for seminars, for keynotes I might supply a simple 2-page guide to take notes on) I remind them that far too often delegates don’t take handouts with them. That’s not helpful for their learning or transferring the lessons learned to their work or life.
I then suggest that I supply high-quality, coil-bound, colour handouts for a nominal cost. “Wouldn’t you prefer,” I ask my client “to see delegates value the lessons learned and take their handouts with them when the seminar is over?” Here’s how the math could play out.
Assuming your handouts cost $6 (obviously you might get yours cheaper) and you charge $12, with 200 delegates you have a margin of $1,200 you can use to negotiate with.
At the end of the day, if you want to be in front of audiences you need to know how to negotiate. Some clients have tight budgets and need your help making it all work, others simply like to get a deal.
Remember, you always have permission to accept their offer, negotiate or walk away – either way you win.
