Negotiate like a woman

8 Mar

One day I’m totally down for celebrating is International Women’s Day.

Now, don’t get me wrong - I wish every day was International Women’s Day (and that sexism basically didn’t exist…), but we’re not living in a perfect world, so key dates like this are important. And not so we can demand flowers from the partners in our lives, but to be aware, time and time again, that women are still not valued equally to men in the workplace.

So today I’m going to be delving into the gender pay gap, providing you with some tips and tricks on negotiating, how to consider your value when you price your services. Let me start with one of my favourite quotes…

“If I do a job in 30 minutes, it’s because I spent 10 years learning how to do that in 30 minutes. You owe me for the years, not the minutes.”

In a recent blog for Harvard Law School, Katie Shonk highlights the fact that men are still achieving better economic results in their negotiations. She states:

“In many cultures, girls are encouraged and expected to be accommodating, concerned with the welfare of others, and relationship-oriented from an early age. Notably, these goals clash with the more assertive behaviours considered to be essential for negotiation success. As a result, women may be uncomfortable negotiating forcefully on their behalf, a tendency that’s supported by evidence suggesting they face a social backlash in the workplace for doing so.”

The conditioning that women (and anyone socialised as a woman) undergo from the youngest years really sets us up for failure - and it takes years and years of unlearning those messages through daily effort, to make any difference to how we see ourselves, how we behave and perceive our potential.

This then had a huge impact on how we conduct our businesses - too often have I heard ‘oh, it’s just a side hustle’ when I asked after a business… We’re taught to minimise ourselves, be humbler than our achievements dictate we should be.

I say, ENOUGH.

I’d never be where I am now in life and in business, if it wasn’t for all the women around me who supported me, championed me, and also said ENOUGH. They taught me there’s power in standing strong in your worth, and crucially, that I must believe in myself if I want others to. And on the days that self-belief feels more challenging, they’ll always have my back.

Forever learning from those lessons, I am always looking to pay them forward - and in my recent workshop for the Wild Coworking community, “Level Up From Hourly Pricing”, I talked all things money maths and stories, business positioning, proposals and negotiation.

Now, I’d like to share these tips with you - because a proposal is a powerful tool, and negotiation is key - so here’s my top 5 tips to make your proposals a success!

When pricing your services, speak to other people both in your industry and in other industries because you may find that your profession in a different industry is charged at a much higher rate!
Practice being able to articulate exactly what your skill or niche is and the value it can bring.
Make sure your client feels their needs have been heard. Words like collaboration, communication, cohesive and aligned really help with this. They need to know that you have actually listened to them!
Offer a core scope of work and an enhanced scope of work. The core scope of work will include everything discussed in the consultation call, while the enhanced scope will include an outline of the extra value (at an extra cost, of course!) you can bring to the client’s business - either now, as an alternative to the core scope, or in the future, as a growth point!
Finish the proposal by opening conversation between yourself and potential clients. Give them the opportunity to propose adjustments and offer feedback.

I shared all of these tips AND more in my workshop, and the feedback was incredible! Just shows how much we need to talk money and pricing in business…