Negotiating Your Price
Posted on August 6th, 2010 in Students | No Comments »
Part of freelance work is flexibility and being able to negotiate the price you charge your client will broaden your opportunities. However, when going into a price or salary negotiation, it is important to know about what you’re negotiating so you don’t get taken advantage of.
Do your market research
Finding out what the going rate for similar work or jobs should be your first task. Using the salary wizard at Salary.com, I was able to find the median salary for a junior web designer in Phoenix, AZ was $48,000. Another research tip is to find other artists and designers and ask what they charge. Ask how flexible they can be on price. Get an idea of where you can fit in the market.
Negotiating tactics
Negotiation is an art itself. Good negotiators are hard to come by so even if all you learn is how to haggle, you’ll have come away from this post with something.
Price is nothing more than a mind trick in most cases. This is articulated by the phenomenon known as the Anchoring Effect. I definitely recommend reading the article in depth, but to summarize, whoever names the first price is in the driver’s seat. No matter how much you negotiate, the first price quoted is the price both parties will subconsciously use to determine who got the better end of the bargain.
Ramit Sethi from I Will Teach You To Be Rich, has excellent posts on how to negotiate – everything from negotiating bank fees, car insurance, cell phones and most importantly – salary.
And to completely round out your negotiating skills, learn from the masters of the art, the ultimate hagglers – rickshaw drivers.
Improve your skills
Using the market research you’ve collected and the negotiating skills you’ve learned, you can increase your income, but there’s nothing like a quality education that will boost your earnings potential. Having a degree or certification is a key bargaining tool that you can use during your negotiation process and no amount of jedi mind tricks will have the same effect as a degree.
