Speaker 1: How do you negotiate when you don't have a lot of experience, don't have a lot of money, and you really, really need this project? Stay tuned. Hey, everybody, what is up? When I was just starting my journey as a freelancer, most of my negotiations sounded like this. I want $1,000 for this project. And the client would say, no, I only got $200. Okay, so I'm willing to do it for $700. No, I only have $200. All right, you know what? I'll do it for $500. Client, no, I only have $200. All right, I'll do it for $200. And that would be very, very frustrating. Obviously, I was trying to get work, I needed to pay my bills, and so I didn't have a lot of leverage as a negotiator, and I didn't know anything about this. Coming back to these days, it usually sounds something like this. Client comes to me, hi, we have $5,000 for the project. I'm like, sorry, I only charge at least $10,000. All right, can we pay you $7,000? Sorry, I only work with $10,000 clients. All right, we'll pay $10,000. So what changed? How did that switch? The only negotiation tactic is never change your price? No, obviously, that's totally wrong, and that's really not helpful for you if you're a designer starting out and you really need this project. Now, I just finished reading a really, really amazing book. It's called Getting to Yes About Negotiation, and it really opened my mind about the things that I didn't do correctly when I just started out in explaining how I can do better, even today, how I can improve my negotiation. And I wanna share some of these concepts with you. I think it's gonna be very, very useful for you, especially if you're just starting out and you don't have a lot of leverage and you feel like all the power is with the client. So here's the first and most important concept that you need to understand for any negotiation. This can be for a client project, but also when you're renting an apartment or when you're arguing with your wife. Okay, so the first concept is called BATNA, and BATNA stands for Best Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement. Basically, what that means is what's going to happen if there's no deal? What are you going to do? What's your second best alternative? So think about this. If a client comes to you for a project and says, right, we only have $500 or we're willing to pay $500 for this, what are your alternatives? And there's always something else that you can do, right? You can take this project for $500, but maybe you have another project with a client that's willing to pay you $1,000. So obviously, in that case, you have a better alternative, so you're not gonna work with them. And you might even tell them, look, I have a client right now willing to pay me $1,000, so I'm not gonna do this. So if you have a very good BATNA, if you have a very good better alternative, you have a lot of leverage, right? If you don't have, but you can also be creative about this, right? Because not doing anything or not taking this project doesn't mean not doing anything, right? You can do some volunteer work, maybe you can be with your family, maybe you can develop your own skills. So you have other alternatives, but you need to put value on them to understand where you stand. This will help you to understand if this project is even worth your time or not. Now, remember, the client, from their perspective, has their own BATNA, right? They have their own alternative. They might say something like, well, if this guy doesn't do it for $500, I'll go to the other person who can do it for $5,000. At least that's what you think, but the reality might be something like, well, I hope he agrees to do this for $500. Otherwise, I'm gonna have to go and look for somebody else, and that's gonna take me so much time. I'd rather just pay him like $1,000 instead of just going for the hustle of finding someone else, right? So you don't really know what their BATNA is. So now that you understand this concept of BATNA, this gives you a lot of power because the first thing that you can do is put in some work to improve your own BATNA. As I said in the beginning, if you have a better alternative than taking this project, you have a lot of leverage that you can, you don't have to take this, or you can tell them why they need to pay you more because you have a better alternative at the moment, right? So be creative and start thinking about how can you develop better BATNA. Maybe you can keep reaching out to some other clients so that you have multiple projects to choose from. That is the best option in the world. If you have few clients wanting to work with you and they all wanna work with you and you have to pick between them, obviously they can bid and you can start raising your price until you see who says no, but you have options to choose from. So start putting in time and effort and being creative about how you can improve your BATNA. So maybe that's finding other clients, maybe that's creating content to promote yourself, maybe that's working to develop yourself, but understand how to build better alternatives for you. Maybe, by the way, is getting some part-time job so that you know you have some money coming in and you don't really have to take on this project if it's not profitable or if it's not super good for you. That being said, remember, if you're just starting out, maybe you're also be willing to do the project for free because you're looking for some experience or for your portfolio work. So be honest with yourself. Maybe your BATNA is, you know what, I'd be willing to do this project even if for free, it's still a good alternative for me. So be honest with yourself to know what your true BATNA is, but put some work in trying to improve it so you have more leverage. Now, the second thing that you can do is to try to understand what the other side, what your client's BATNA is, and try to explain that maybe it's not as good as they think it is. Because maybe they might think like, yeah, if this guy doesn't do it, I have 10 other people who can do this for $500. But maybe while you're in a conversation with them, you can actually debunk this. And you can do this by asking them a question. So you can ask, look, like what happens if we don't have a deal? Like, what do you think? Or if they tell you, you know, oh, but there's this other guy who's willing to do this for $500. So you can start asking question, are they really going to do what I'm going to do? Are you gonna get this good service? Are they experts? Are they gonna do this? Are they gonna do this? And while you ask question, you're actually helping them to understand that they are not comparing the right thing. So they might think they have a good alternative at $500, but really that's not comparable. And really they're not gonna get what you're offering to them. And so you help them realize that they didn't compare correctly and their BATNA is not as good as they think it is, which will help them to come to an agreement to pay you more for your project. So that's the first concept that you need to understand. BATNA, you need to improve yours and you need to try to debunk their belief about the fact that they have good alternatives when they're not working with you. Now, the second concept that I want you to understand is a lot of times, when you're a high value designer, you can start, you don't have to take the project, you can use tactics as pushing them away. I don't wanna work, if you don't wanna work with me, I'm not pushing, I'm not doing anything. It's my price, it's my way or the highway, right? That's when you're a high level designer and everybody's coming your way and you have an amazing BATNA, you can behave that way. But when you're just starting out, that might not be the case. And so you might need to kind of explain why you deserve more money than they're currently offering you. And the way to do this is to try to think about this from kind of an objective standpoint, okay? So if they're coming to you, you're saying, I think I deserve $3,000 for this web design project. And they're like, no, we think you should be paid $500. Then you can start, you can start first of all, looking for kind of an objective measure for your price, right? So what is the average price point for these project? If you look on the internet and there's a lot of things like average hourly rate, average project for different types of projects. If you will go on Upwork or a different website where you can see the prices for each project, you can find kind of objective criteria as what is normal in the marketplace. Now note, this is not how you're gonna make a lot of money, but this is how you're gonna make sure you're not being taken advantage of. And that's what you want when you're starting out. You're not trying to think about how to increase or maximize your value. You're trying to make sure that you're getting exactly what you're worth. And you can do that by looking at some kind of objective data that's out there and saying, look, how did you come up with this price? I mean, we both want the price to be fair. I don't wanna charge you something that's too much. So let's look at kind of objective criteria, such as prices that we can see there, average prices, average salaries, that kind of stuff, and try to base our price based on these objective criteria. That's how we take ourselves kind of out of the equation, because I can think it's worth $10,000 and you think it's worth $50. That's not gonna help us get anywhere. But if we try to look at some objective third-party criteria, maybe we can find what's really fair in the marketplace for these kinds of projects. So again, as I said, this is an advice that's valid when you're just starting out. As you're trying to grow, of course, you don't want to be paid exactly what the average is, of course, right? You wanna make more than the average and you want to increase your prices and so forth. But this is a tactic when you're just starting out to validate and explain why you want to make this kind of fee for a project and why, and how to make sure that you are not being taken advantage of. I hope this was helpful. I think a lot of the advice out there is kind of oriented to more pros and not so much as people just starting out. So I hope you found this helpful. If you want more information about freelancing or going full-time freelancing, make sure you check out our program, The Six Figure Freelance Designer below, and I will see you on the next video. Bye-bye.