How Professionals Negotiate Price
By Maria Piscopo

Pricing is one of the most complex and grueling aspects of the design and illustration business. You can read the books and go to the seminars, but at some point you have to talk to clients. We asked creative professionals what price-negotiating techniques work for them and how they find common ground with clients and agree to a price. Whether you are an experienced professional or just starting out, these tips and techniques will give you a much better grip on pricing and the negotiation process.

"Perhaps the best pricing technique we've discovered is to write a good proposal," says Ed Brodsky, a partner at Lubell Brodsky Inc., a past president of the Art Directors Club, and a faculty member at School of Visual Arts, NY, "We start a proposal by restating the criteria for the project. This reminds everyone—including ourselves—what it was we agreed to try to accomplish. Next we explain what we plan to do in broad, general terms. This is followed by a more specific list of the work we intend to do, a price for each of these procedures, and a total. We almost always end the proposal by telling the client how excited we are to be considered for this interesting project and some of the benefits we expect the client to realize from our efforts. Perhaps the biggest advantage of writing a good proposal is that after we write it we often realize that the project can command a much larger fee than we initially thought. This alone covers the cost and time of writing the proposal and also has become the main reason we have successfully been able to raise our fees." More...

Maria Piscopo is the author of The Graphic Designer's & Illustrator's Guide to Marketing and Promotion (Allworth Press, www.allworth.com). She also teaches the Managing Creative Services course for design professionals for Dynamic Graphics Training (www.dgusa.com/training).

Reprinted with permission of STEP inside design (www.stepinsidedesign.com). Click here for a free trial issue.

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