Nobody has ever refused my clients’ price rise

There is probably a client you didn’t put the price up for last year. You’ll have had a reason. They have been with you a long time, or the quarter was looking thin, or it simply wasn’t the right moment. Underneath all of them was the same thought: they might leave.

Do that a few times across a few years and something happens that you never chose. The clients you were most careful with end up on your oldest rates. If that rate hasn’t at least kept pace with inflation, you have not been holding your price steady. You have been cutting it, quietly, and for your best clients first. Keeping pace with inflation only gets you back to level. It assumes your costs behaved themselves, which salaries alone will tell you they didn’t. It also assumes you are worth exactly what you were worth three years ago. You aren’t. You have learned as a team, improved your processes, invested in systems and honed your skills through thousands more hours of execution. You are a better agency than the one you were three years ago and your price should reflect that for long-standing clients, as well as new ones.

Nobody decided to give these clients this “discount”. There was no meeting. There was no negotiation. It is what happens when one particular conversation gets deferred, and then deferred again, until the deferring becomes the policy. So it is worth being precise about what everyone is deferring, because the reason turns out to be almost entirely imagined.

What actually happens when you put the price up

Across the agencies I have worked closely with I can recall ten rises across a whole book of existing clients. Recently one increased hosting prices by about a third. One monthly retainer package moved from £2,500 to £3,000, day rates on build work went up 12%, and a set of maintenance plans that had sat at £50 a month for years were finally brought into line with a market charging three to five times that.

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Every one of those increases landed. Nobody refused and nobody left.

Ten is a run, not a dataset, so I went looking for the opposite. I went back through every past engagement I have records for, hunting specifically for a rise to an existing client that got turned down. One would have made this a more interesting article. I couldn’t find one (and trust me… I have the notes).

I also have a wider check available, which helps, because ten of anything proves very little and I only get to count the ones I was part of the conversation for. When I put pricing to The Agency Loop panel, four out of five agencies had raised their prices in the previous twelve months. The one in five who hadn’t were the minority. That was an early round and a small one, back when the panel was a fraction of the size it is now, so treat it as a straw poll rather than a finding. For what it is worth, the same survey put the odds of a price rise costing you work at about one in ten. That question was about winning new business rather than rises to existing clients, which is genuinely different, but the pattern holds: clients are not as spooked by price rises as we fear.

Where does the fear come from?

When I ask agency founders why they avoid price increases, the response is often some version of “we can’t afford to lose clients”. Ask them which client they lost the last time they raised a price and nobody has yet been able to name one. They have never had a rise rejected either. They are frightened of something that has not happened to them and that they cannot point to happening to anybody else. We’ve come to accept that our costs rise, but assume clients don’t have the same acceptance.

Notice what that sentence is doing, though. “We can’t afford to lose clients” is about cash, offered in answer to a question about pricing. It is also usually true, which is what makes it so persuasive. The agencies most frightened of raising prices are reliably the ones whose margins most need it. Flat cash, no room to absorb anything, and a set of packages that were underpriced on the day they were written. The fear turns up dressed as caution and behaves like the opposite.

It never reaches the client

An agency I work with rebuilt its hosting/maintenance packages this year. The top tier was drafted at £495 a month. Not a cheap offering, but packed with value-adds to justify the ticket price. By launch it was £299. Nobody outside the agency even saw the £495, and certainly nobody objected to it. The price came down in a Google Doc, on the founder’s own authority, on behalf of a market that had said nothing whatsoever.

The market has never refused. The founder refuses on the market’s behalf, in advance.

That is the finding, and it was not the one I went in expecting. The refusal happens early, in private, and gets filed away afterwards as evidence that clients are difficult about money.

I should be fair to the instinct. It is the same care that keeps clients for a decade, and I would rather work with a founder who has it than one who doesn’t. But it does mean the resistance you can feel is not coming from where you think it is. It is coming from you, and it arrives before anybody has been given the chance to disagree.

Where my argument is thin

Plenty of those rises happened with me pushing, sometimes for months. Not all of them, but enough that I can’t claim founders reliably arrive here unaided. The reluctance is real and it takes a while to wear down. “Consistent gentle pressure” is part of the service… or nagging as my wife calls it.

So what I am left with is narrower than “raising prices goes fine”. It is that all the resistance often sits with us. Every bit of it happens before anything is sent. Once it goes, nothing happens. The distance between how long the fear lasts and how completely the consequence fails to arrive is the message.

I should also say that nobody has quietly left three months later, as far as I know. I haven’t tracked that formally, so take it as none recorded rather than none. It will break one day. When somebody finally does say no, I will write that up too.

Make the rise boring

If you want me to tell you how large a rise you can get away with, I can’t. I suspect it varies by what you sell and who you sell it to, and I would be sceptical of anyone who handed you a percentage.

Which is why the answer is not to find the number. It is to manage it in a way that the number never has to be tested. Raise annually. Small, dull, expected. A rise that turns up on schedule is an administrative event. A rise that turns up from nowhere after four years is a negotiation, and you will have lost that one before you open your laptop, because you will have talked yourself down first.

My favourite way to handle this is to plan ahead and to sell it as a benefit. This isn’t a price rise out of the blue. It’s the end of a beneficial price guarantee period. Tell a new client their rate is held for the next 12 months, or 24 if you are feeling both generous and confident. It sells as reassurance, they hear certainty, and you have planted the expiry date at the precise moment they are most inclined to agree with you. Nobody argues with a date they picked themselves.

One rule though… Never lock in a price you already suspect is wrong. Set the price correctly, then promise it.

Back to that client

When we get this wrong we are often convincing ourselves that we are protecting loyal customers from price rises. The reality is that we are more often just protecting ourselves from uncomfortable conversations - offering them a discount to avoid it. We fund those discounts from our margin and get nothing in return. No loyalty, no goodwill, not so much as a thank you. Not because they are ungrateful, but because they never noticed it. Nobody can be grateful for something they were never told about.