You rarely hear the other side...

..of the story.

A couple of years ago one of my clients was going through a particularly hard time; they needed to reduce costs. They called in all their suppliers including their consultants-including me-and made a simple proposal:

'reduce your fees for a year to help us out and we'll remember you when things get better'

I asked: are there any guarantees?
They said: no.
I said: to help you out we'll look at how we can do fewer days, but as we consider ourselves exceptional value, we will not reduce our daily fee.

I have to say, it was a tough meeting. The purchasing guys really wanted our fees down. That was the one thing I would not move on.

I left the meeting not knowing whether we would get any more work from them.

We did and we do.

Interestingly a couple of weeks ago I was introduced to a person who told the tale from the client side. He said we were the only supplier of 263 not to reduce our fees. And we were the only supplier not to lose business.

It's never easy when negotiating as we rarely know the full range of consequences of aour actions, but in general:

-make excellence your minimum standard
-deliver and believe in your value
-help the client keep costs down by looking at the overall process, not just their easy perspective of reducing your fees.
-believe in yourself