The bigger the client the cheaper the process

Posted: August 17th, 2009 | Author: Saleh Esmaeili | Filed under: Business, UAE, Web-Design | Tags: advertising, business model, client servicing, pricing, UAE | Comments Off

At d&l we’ve had 91% of business coming from references and the rest from only networking, directories, n’ search engines. So what I hear most of the time is hey bro, we ain’t as big as company X that referred you, so be gentle with invoices “you know what I mean”. It is not shocking anymore to me, but I keep on getting this assumption from prospects n’ clients that Agencies n’ Design Boutiques quote/invoice based on the size of their clients’ pockets n’ not the size of the job. But the Irony lies in the fact that it is cheaper to work with bigger clients.

You usually do less “unbilled” work for Bigger clients.

Bigger clients mean bigger personnel count and departments which also means lots o’ hands that could brief you and get you most of your needs and answers on a timely manner, thus saving your schedules from tangling up.

Department, not a one-man marketer. You get lots o’ input and more questions and the more you interact the clearer the goal and creative needs are.

Bigger clients usually have their branding done professionally.

That means you come to receive a proper Branding guidelines that help you understand the visual/feel of the brand. Print marketing collateral to give you insight of what has been working for the client offline. And, that could be a good platform to start understanding what the client has been approving and liking from the work done for them on traditional medium.

While with smaller ones, you gotta’ first find where the source of that Logo is or you might end up scanning and redrawing the logo not understanding a damn thing about the concept behind it, nor how it’s supposed to be used. And then comes content, smaller companies usually expect to receive copy writing for free, imagery, and the whole thing for free. While at bigger clients you have these mostly ready with little adjustments and tweaking to fit with the concept of the website, need you some more copy, they’re ready to pay.

Big sharks know how to take care of smaller fishes, they grow’em

Yes, irony, but that’s true. Bigger clients tend to be a little more with moralities regarding treating a bunch of young kids doing some artwork for their brand online. Because they usually know how important their opinions are and how effective they could be. While at smaller companies the stress is on squeezing the budget-spent and crunching those kids for some extra saving.

Sure at bigger organizations the amount of work might be a lot more and the expectations are higher as they hold a bigger stake in the market. And yes, the work is usually required faster and with really sharper presentations and prompt feedback, which translate in more resources to allocate to their projects, which means more cost. But from bottom up, it is cheaper to work with bigger clients thus more profiting than working with smaller ones, because:

Smaller clients expect you to do it all from A-Z as in even their part
Usually have no offline collateral and branding guidelines
Unbilled work means collaboration for them
Consultancy? You can’t bill that!
You keep on hearing can you let my daughter give you a design idea? She’s graduating this year
Website is a one time thing

The point, I don’t know how accounting goes right when pricing is different for bigger & smaller companies, I mean how would the product pricing be on the books? Crazy! You just don’t bill some stuff to smaller clients because they won’t understand it nor pay it but you do it just for the ethics of the business? Is that it?

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