What's My Daily Rate?

A potentially attractive new opportunity has recently surfaced through one of my customers.  In the old days, we used to do a whole bunch of sales-related activities that added significant value to our clients, such as attending sales meetings and making consultant-type recommendations on how they could sell more.  We never charged for this, making it all part of the service.  As we managed to shrink-wrap our service over the years, this type of activity disappeared from our cutomer interactions.

Yet, one customer asked me whether we could do something similar, and through the discussion, I suggested it would naturally carry a charge.  They accepted this and asked what it would be.  I didn’t have a clue really, so said I’d confirm when the spec was more fully developed.

Intriguingly, I came across this advice from the UK’s chartered institute of marketing.  It suggests that as you’re likely to do on average 100 fee paying days work a year, you should charge per day 1% of what you expect to earn, or previously earnt.

In my case, the answer is made easier, as I can surely charge out for this premise, at a rate of 1% of the top-salesperson’s OTE inside my client.  The great thing then is that I can build in some kind of annuity function, so this gets presented as a monthly amount for a number of months to make the overall figure appear smaller.  All I need to do now is get the job and see about expanding the idea to provide the concept as a new product.  How exciting!

(As a postscript, talking with people inside my customers – all people that head up sales teams – it seems they feel that the current typically quoted rate for a day’s ‘sales consultancy’ is around £500-600 (which I feel is a bit low), and a day’s training part/all of your team can be upto £2,000 (which conversely is perhaps a bit high).