Raising Your Prices - Susie Jackson

Why Your Client with the Lowest Agreed Rate Might Not Be Highest Priority for a Rate Increase

When it comes to raising your prices with existing clients, I always recommend increasing your rates with one customer at a time. This is because communicating a price increase to all your clients at once is a risky strategy. What will you do if several clients refuse your new rates, leaving you in a vulnerable position?

My advice is to choose one client to raise your rates with first. But how do you decide which customer to prioritise increasing your prices with?

The obvious approach to raising your prices is to start with the client who’s currently paying you the lowest rate. However, I'd say it's far more complex than that. The client you’ve agreed your lowest rate with might not actually be the best customer to increase your prices with first.

In this blog post, I’m sharing 4 factors for you to consider that might encourage you to prioritise raising your prices with a customer other than the one paying you your lowest agreed rate.

Factors to consider when deciding which client to increase your prices with first

1) Working speeds

You’re always going to find that you have different working speeds for different clients, and even sometimes for different projects for the same client.

If you have a customer with a low agreed rate, you might get through their work much faster than you do for a client with a higher rate. This could mean that, despite the lower rate, you’re actually earning more per hour from the former client.

Rather than looking at the prices you’ve agreed with your customers, you need to be considering your effective hourly rate. How much money are you making per hour on work for each of your clients?

To calculate this, all you have to do is divide the total amount you’ve earnt on projects for a specific client by the number of hours you’ve spent on work for them. This will give you your profitability per client, which can provide you with a clear indication of which customers you should be raising your rates with.

For example, let’s imagine you have a client who pays you £50 per deliverable. It usually takes you an hour to complete each one, meaning that you’re earning £50 per hour from this client. At the same time, you have another client who pays you £70 for a similar deliverable. You find their work more challenging and usually spend 2 hours on each of their deliverables. This means that, despite the higher agreed rate, you’re actually only earning £35 per hour from this second client.

In such instances, instead of prioritising raising your prices with the customer who is paying you the lower agreed rate, it makes sense to raise them with the one paying you the higher rate.

2) Budget expectations

Sometimes, you have a very good idea of how much a client can afford to pay you. For example, you might know that a client was already struggling to afford your previous rates, or maybe an agency you work with pays all their freelancers the same fixed fee.

If you don’t expect a certain client to be able to afford to pay you more than they currently are doing, you might prefer to leave raising your prices with them until a later date. Especially if they don’t send you much work, it might be better to approach this client about raising your rates once you’ve increased your prices with several other customers or have found new clients who are willing to pay your new rates. This way, if they do say no to your price increase, you might be in a better position to walk away, and it won’t feel like such a loss.

Instead of raising your prices with a client who doesn’t send you much work and who you don’t think can pay you much more, it might be better to target someone easier. Just as there are clients who are struggling to afford you, you might have others who you know (or suspect) could pay you more. If they’re going to be a quick win and tend to send you more work, making more of a difference to your bottom line, it’s a good idea to prioritise these clients instead.

3) Working relationship

When there’s a client you really enjoy working with, you might feel reluctant to mess with that particular relationship. In these cases, it can make sense to prioritise raising your rates with another client instead.

Perhaps there’s someone who’s paying you slightly more but whose projects you don’t really enjoy or who you simply don’t like working with as much. If so, it’s a good idea to raise your rates with this client first as you wouldn’t feel as sad to lose them. If they refuse your new prices, you’ll find it easier to negotiate objectively, and walk away if necessary, without your emotions getting in the way.

4) Frequency of rate increases

Another thing to consider is when you last negotiated a rate increase with the client. Even if they’re paying your lowest rate, if they already agreed to a higher price a few months ago, you might want to prioritise raising your prices with another customer instead.

Personally, I’d try to avoid increasing my prices with the same client more than roughly once a year. This is because if you raise your rates too often, your customer might feel taken advantage of and could grow to resent it. I go into more depth on how frequently you should be increasing your prices in this blog post.

If you have one customer you last raised your rates with 3 months ago and another you raised your rates with 3 years ago, I’d definitely recommend prioritising the latter for a rate increase!

I hope this blog post has given you some food for thought and has shown you that there isn’t a hard and fast rule when it comes to choosing which client to increase your prices with first. Rather than always targeting the client with the lowest agreed rate, who you decide to prioritise raising your prices with should depend on your unique circumstances and individual customers.

If you’d like some support to understand which of your clients you should be prioritising for a rate increase, you might be interested in my Raise and Rise offering. As part of this spreadsheet-and-call package, I’ll help you evaluate which of your clients to increase your rates with first before creating a strategy to increase your prices with all your existing customers over time. Click on the button below to find out more!

Read about my Raise and Rise package