In this episode, I discuss the irresistible package matrix strategy and the seven components of profitable web design packages.
The top takeaways:
- The irresistible package matrix empowers web designers to set boundaries, prevent scope creep, and position themselves as collaborative consultants.
- Pre-framing the value is crucial in attracting clients who understand the worth of your services and are willing to pay higher prices.
- Messaging, mindset, level of service, customization, boundaries, and pricing are all important factors in creating successful web design packages.
I also talk about:
- The common problems faced by web designers, such as struggling to charge higher prices and attracting expense-minded clients.
- The importance of positioning yourself as a consultant rather than just a service provider.
- How to create packages that cater to the specific needs and budgets of your clients.
Episode Transcript
Shannon Mattern: Welcome to the Profitable Web Designer, a podcast for web designers who want to work less and make more money. I'm your host Shannon Mattern, founder of the Web Designer Academy, where we've helped hundreds of web designers stop under charging, overworking and create profitable sustainable web design businesses.
Shannon Mattern: Well, hey there, welcome back to the Profitable Web Designer Podcast. And today I am talking about a topic that I have never taught publicly before. This is a really juicy episode. You might actually wanna take notes for this one because today I'm talking about our irresistible package matrix strategy and the seven components of profitable web design packages. And this is hands down, one of the most valuable assets our students create in their web design businesses when they come to work with us inside the Web Designer Academy. And so this strategy is just responsible for so much of the success that you hear from our students when it comes to them raising their prices, taking back their time, and just the freedom and the flexibility and the fulfillment that they create in their web design businesses really all comes down to this strategy that we teach inside our of our program that literally no one else is teaching.
Shannon Mattern: And so I wanna share with you today like what this is. I talk about like packages, pricing, positioning, all of the things, but nobody else talks about web design packages the way that we teach them inside of the Web Designer Academy. And so you're just not gonna wanna miss this episode. This episode is really kind of the key to unlock your web design business. So to understand why this piece of your web design business is so critical to your ability to create a profitable, sustainable business, first I wanna walk you through just what we see most web designers doing that makes it really, really hard for them to charge more. And then I'm gonna share with you what our irresistible package matrix strategy is, how it solves those problems. And like the seven parts to look for in your own web design packages to make sure that you're like taking full advantage of how to structure your packages in a way that's really gonna create more time, more money, and just more peace and ease in your web design business.
Shannon Mattern: So I have the opportunity to get to look at thousands and thousands of web designers businesses behind the scenes, their websites, because when they come to work with us, they apply, they fill out an application
Shannon Mattern: And I look at their website and I see their per package pricing, but still their business isn't where they want it to be. They aren't reaching their revenue goals, they're burnt out, they don't really know how to fix it, and they think that they need to like change niches or rebrand or work with a whole different type of client. And they ask me things like, how do I find investment minded clients, Shannon
Shannon Mattern: Meaning you hire me, I'll make you a website with this number of pages, this number of revisions. Maybe it includes a logo and branding, maybe it doesn't. So they list out those things and then they're like, here's my process. And they say like, we'll do a strategy. Then we go through a, like, we'll do a a design phase and then a development phase. And like they lay it all out and it all looks awesome, it looks fantastic, right? But they're struggling on the backend. And so we see people pulling all of that together and then they're like figuring out a price. Maybe it's like how much they wanna make an hour and that's how they determine the price. Or maybe they're trying to like, I don't even wanna get into people like trying to underprice based on day rates. So it's like a whole nother
Shannon Mattern: So they choose a price that like maybe has to do with how much they wanna make an hour. Maybe it has to do with how much they think they can charge for a website. Maybe they'll choose a price that they think, you know, I can only charge this much because I'm new. Or I would never pay more than that. So why would like, there's 17,000 different reasons why people choose the pricing that they choose. Because you see prices all across the board and then everybody has the same package, the same process. And now for in the same niche, everybody wants to work with female entrepreneurs, which is amazing. Like
Shannon Mattern: It comes down to price the lowest price. All of these people have beautiful websites, gorgeous branding, the exact same packages, the exact same process, but their price is all over the board. The exact same deliverables, their price is all over the board and it's unintentionally. So what happens is
Shannon Mattern: It's okay, please don't beat yourself up. It almost feels like a rite of passage for web designers who are just getting started, right? They're like, oh, this must be how you sell web design
Shannon Mattern: And I can promise you it takes just as much effort to sell a $10,000 website as it does to sell a $2,000 website when you use our strategies
Shannon Mattern: So we see the mistake all the time of people being like, oh, choose me because you get more for less money. And I, we wanna flip that on its head. We're gonna talk more about how we do that in this podcast episode. The other thing that I see when I'm looking at people's websites is that you're trying to sell your clients on you and your skillset or why WordPress or Webflow or Squarespace or show it or Shopify or whatever is the right platform for them. And you're spending all this time trying to get them to buy you or you're spending all this time trying to convince them that this is the right platform or that they need this service. Or like even trying to convince them that they need a website. Like they already know that's why they're there.
Shannon Mattern: They're not buying the platform that they're using. They're not like you have nothing to do with it. They are making an investment in themselves and in their businesses through you. So your own mindset and your belief in the value of what you can deliver at a premium price at a profitable, sustainable price has to be what you build all of your messaging on, right? That has to be at the core of what you're selling. It is a key piece of the puzzle. And it's something that we spend a lot of time on with our clients because you aren't selling you or your skills or the platform or why they need a website versus social media. What you are selling is here's what you are able to create when you have this tool that I built for you that you were would not be able to create otherwise without it.
Shannon Mattern: It's helping your client understand the value of the outcome of working with someone like you. It's helping them think about return on investment rather than money gone forever, right? And so we walk our Web Designer Academy students through a process of what we call pre-framing the value. What I always, I always talk about we help our students package, price, position and sell profitable premium websites, right? Pre-Framing is a huge piece of that. And that means from the very first interaction with the client, you're getting them thinking in a completely different way than everyone else is talking about value. So that by the time you even get to your pricing, they don't have that like knee jerk sticker shock, I can't afford it. That's too expensive reaction. They're thinking like, oh yeah, I totally see why like that it's worth it and that I can actually go onto make that backend thenum.
Shannon Mattern: So that's another thing that we often see is missing from websites that we look at when people apply to work with us. The other thing that we hear anecdotally from our clients, well I wouldn't say like directly from them in their application, is that they're massively over-delivering. Like they say things like, you know, I'll say, how many clients have you had in the last six months? And they're like, well, you know, I've had 10, but like four of them, I still haven't been able to launch their project because you know, they had this happen in their life and this happened and this person signed a contract but they didn't pay and this project's dragging on and on. 'cause The client just keeps adding more stuff and they just keep doing it. They just keep acting like they have to say yes to all of these things.
Shannon Mattern: And they are massively overdelivering. They're saying yes to every client request. They're waiting on contracts and payments and their projects are at a standstill. And what ends up happening is all of this over delivering and overworking actually prevents you from raising your prices because you feel like if you were going to charge more, you're gonna have to give more and you don't have anything left to give because you've really given all your power away and you've, you're overworking and you're burnt out. So those are like the common, common, common things that we see with web designers who have applied to work with us and before they come to work with us. And these are like the core things that we really help our clients solve. And one of the biggest ways, aside from like mindset, I talk tons about mindset on this podcast. This is straight up strategy.
Shannon Mattern: And the way we help our clients solve these problems is our irresistible package matrix. It is the most valuable asset our clients create. It is responsible for all the success stories you've seen. You've heard on the podcast that you see on our sales page. Like when people come to talk about our program, it's because of the irresistible package matrix. That's why our clients are still booking five figure web design projects. Even when everyone's saying the economy is iffy, which by the way, the future is never certain
Shannon Mattern: But that's again, a whole nother podcast episode that your irresistible package matrix is how we help our clients solve 90% of these problems in their web design business. So it really empowers our clients to safely raise their prices confidently, set boundaries, prevent scope, creep position themselves as a collaborative consultant, stay out of their client's wallets and allow them to make an empowered decision about pricing. It helps them save time, it helps them confidently make offers for only services that they feel comfortable and confident providing. It helps them speak to investment minded clients, hybrid minded clients and expense minded clients all at the same time without excluding any of them, right? And so, so many people come to me and they say, how do I only work with investment minded clients? I'm like, you don't know who is on the other side of that zoom screen.
Shannon Mattern: So why not have something for everybody
Shannon Mattern: So the first component of our packages is messaging. So this is where we pre-frame the value in our packages. We, this is just a simple sentence that talks about who this package is perfect for and we speak to investment minded, hybrid minded and expense minded clients in that messaging layer. So if you have seen the profitable pricing training at https://webdesigneracademy.com/pricing, you've heard me talk about the concept of pricing paradigms. And a paradigm is simply a standard perspective or set of ideas. It's a way of looking at something. And my pricing paradigm is unique to me and how I was raised and my life experiences and my business experiences, yours is unique to you and how you were raised in your life and business experiences. And there are three pricing paradigms that I've identified after my own experience working with clients for almost 10 years now, my own business journey from zero to half a million dollars in revenue.
Shannon Mattern: The paradigm shifts that I've seen our students come into our program with the shifts that they've made during our program and just all of the people I've met along the way, there are three common pricing paradigms and you fall into one of these expense minded, hybrid minded and investment minded. You operate from one of these paradigms by default. And so do your clients. So expense minded people just really quickly would value money more than time. They would rather hang onto their money and spend more of their time, right? So they tend to want to save money. Like if you're a web designer who has an expense mindset, you likely keep your prices low because you're trying to save your clients money because you also assume that everyone has an expense mindset. Like you
Shannon Mattern: You, you think of when money leaves your bank account as gone forever as an expense rather than an investment where you've just parted with it for a period of time and it's on its way back to you. So, so many, I would say like seven out of 10 people whose websites I look at who have applied for the Web Designer Academy, I can tell just by looking at their website that they are operating through the lens of an expense mindset that they're trying to protect their clients, they're trying to save their clients' money. All of those things. If you have an expense mindset, you're assuming everyone else does too. And I'm here to tell you, not everybody does, not everybody does. There are clients out there, there are people out there and there, the web designers out there who are making like way more money, booking high paying clients, they are operating from an investment mindset.
Shannon Mattern: That mindset is money is renewable, there's always more on the way, it'll never run out. I can always create more, I think of every dollar that leaves my bank account as an investment rather than an expense because it's going to allow me to create more money. It's leaving, but it's on its way back. And I make decisions based on what is possible for me in the future, not the money that's leaving today. When I make a decision, I fully commit no getting distracted by shiny objects and I am patient for the return and I do my part to create it at an investment mindset. You're much more protective of how you're spending your time. You wanna maximize it, you wanna pay for the shortcuts you wanna spend, put your time into mentorship and people who have done what you've already wanna do so that you don't waste time making mistakes.
Shannon Mattern: And you look at the future and what's possible when you spend your time in the right places and you look at what it's costing you when you spend it in the wrong places. Some people are just inherently like born with an investment mindset. They live in an environment with people that have an investment mindset. I was not
Shannon Mattern: And only then can they speak to their clients through that lens, right? So that messaging layer are, the messaging layer component of profitable packages speaks to each one of these mindsets, right? Investment expense and hybrid. And like I said, hybrid is like really a blend of the two. It's like, you know, you want to have the investment minded paradigm but it doesn't quite feel safe yet. You still think that the money that leaves your account right now might not come back. But you're also starting to think in terms of like return on investment. Like, oh wait, it's within my control. Like if I invest in this and I do my part and I don't quit until like create the result that I want, you start to build that belief, you start valuing your time more. You start seeing what it's costing you to spend your time in the wrong places.
Shannon Mattern: So in the messaging layer, you, your clients are operating from one of these places too. And if you wanna have a profitable, sustainable web design business, the way you describe your web design packages in the messaging layer needs to speak to investment minded clients, right? It needs to speak to what they want and they're not looking for the cheapest price. They are looking for the most value in the least amount of time, right? Value equals emotional outcomes plus personal outcomes plus business outcomes minus the price, right? So I'm gonna pay a certain price, but I'm going to get way more in terms of emotional outcomes, personal outcomes and business outcomes than I ever paid. The value of a website is many, many times more than the price. And if you are still thinking about it in terms of like deliverables and what they get and the time it takes them, and that's what you're selling, that's why you are having a hard time selling at higher prices because you don't have that messaging layer that speaks to clients at every price point, especially the investment minded price point.
Shannon Mattern: So that's the first component. So the second component of profitable web design package is return on investment. So instead of just listing out all of the deliverables like brand strategy and branding and a 10 page website, we help our students paint the picture of what is possible for their clients when they actually have the deliverables. We go beyond the deliverables and get them thinking about how the website will help them create a return on their investment. You cannot just expect your clients to already know. They don't already know. They're like, oh, I need a website so that I can be credible or I need a website so that people can find me online. Like they have very basic expectations of what their website can do for them. And you know, as the designer, it can do so much more and you have to show them, you have to paint the picture, you have to tell the story.
Shannon Mattern: But not only that, you have to believe on a deep level that they aren't just buying the deliverables, they're buying what they can create with those things. And we walk our students through a process to help them figure out exactly what that looks like for their clients. So you need to have messaging that speaks to the different pricing paradigms. You need to be able to talk about your deliverables in terms of results, not just what they're going to get the next component of your packages as mindset. And you're like, what? How is mindset a component of my packages? And when I say mindset, I don't mean that our students do like mindset work with their clients, but what I mean is that they are creating deliverables and results for the packages. They're keeping the pricing paradigms of their clients in mind, right? They're tapping into an investment minded client has this type of a mindset.
Shannon Mattern: So when I talk about the deliverables and the results, this is what they value. A hybrid minded client has this type of mindset around their business. So when I talk about deliverables and results, I am putting it through this lens of these things that they value. And an expense minded client has this type of thoughts about deliverables and results. And so I'm speaking to what they value, right? Because you don't know who you're getting when you're on a consultation. And if you're like, I exclusively only speak to investment minded clients, I don't talk to anybody else. And you literally have never like really done consultations before, you just
Shannon Mattern: They're gonna look at your irresistible package matrix and they're gonna be like, oh, that's me. I see myself in this package. This aligns with me in who I am. I want that. And the secret to that is you have designed a package and priced it at a way that's sustainable for you with what they're getting in that package. So we help our clients create sustainable packages that align with each type of mindset, each type of pricing paradigm, and give their clients empowering options and teach them how to present that to their clients so that they can make an empowered choice based on which option is most aligned with our pricing. One of the biggest, I don't wanna say mistakes because I don't wanna say that other people are doing it wrong, missed opportunities. One of the biggest missed opportunities, and it was so fascinating, I recently read this book on neuroeconomics and it was talking about how the brain works and how when presented with one choice, our perception of risk is really, really high.
Shannon Mattern: Like it's either yes or no, right or wrong. Our perception of risk is really, really high. And so we're most likely to make the safe choice, right? And the safe choice is inertia, right? The safe choice is to do nothing. So to maintain the status quo when you give multiple options, now I have less risk, I've spread my risk out. So now it becomes safer to make a choice because I have multiple choices. If you give too many choices, then you get into analysis paralysis and decision fatigue, right? So there is a sweet spot and that's what we teach our clients how to like how to set this up in a way that like reduces the risk for your clients of making the wrong decision, what feels like a wrong decision. So that's the mindset component of packages. The fourth component is a level of service.
Shannon Mattern: So what I see so many people doing is like selling these super low priced packages that have like so much service in them, like your time, your time like attached to them, right? Your web design packages aren't just like the deliverables that you build and it's not just like the time that it takes to do that. There are also so many places that involved you, there are surfaces attached to that, right? There's just the management of the project, how involved you are and all of that. There's so many little touch points all along the way. And the level of service you provide is higher at a higher price and lower at a lower price.
Shannon Mattern: That is just one example of what it could be. And we help our clients figure out like what level of service at every pricing paradigm works best for them in their business, in their life, right? I want you to stop selling cheap packages with a high level of service that's over-delivering and burnout. Okay? So when you have differentiated levels of service tied to pricing paradigms, and I have a, it's hard to explain this on a podcast without a diagram 'cause I do have a diagram for this, but that's what helps you stop over delivering because you stop providing v i p level service at bargain basement prices.
Shannon Mattern: So the next component, the fifth component of profitable packages is level of customization. This is another like lever to pull. That is how our clients are able to charge five to 10 times more be like after coming to work with us, right? So when I say customization, I do not mean coded from scratch. I just wanna be so clear about that. I mean customized, customized to the pricing paradigm, customized to the pricing paradigms of wants, needs, desires, and not talking about the actual method of construction. So many of you use WordPress page builders or Squarespace or show IT or Shopify or Webflow or Wix. And touching a line of code is a rare and an exception to the norm to be able to build a great website for a client. It is not worth more money to your client if you coded it from scratch unless they require like special features for you to like solution architect that you coding from scratch and spending more time on a website does not make it worth more.
Shannon Mattern: When I say level of customization,
Shannon Mattern: And that's how we structure our irresistible package matrix. So the next component of a profitable web design package is boundaries. Because our students give their clients choices on their level of service and level of customization. Their clients are also implicitly choosing what they are not getting. When they make that choice, they present the irresistible package matrix, the client chooses a package. And when they choose that package, that means that they didn't choose the other ones
Shannon Mattern: And it just makes it harder. It makes it harder to communicate than you feel like, oh, well I didn't tell them upfront so I have to do it. All of these things, like when you include boundaries in your packages, then it makes it so much easier to communicate and hold them through your projects. I see so many people
Shannon Mattern: That's because your boundaries are broken, okay? Like you're trying to cut down on the amount of time you interact with your clients to as small as possible to solve the problem of not having boundaries. And you're leaving tens of thousands of dollars on the table when you do that. So if you can learn the skill of setting, communicating, and confidently holding boundaries in your business, it is one of the most valuable skills you can learn. I mean, this skill will save you so much time and make you so much more money and turn everything in your business around. And guess what? Our irresistible package matrix sets boundaries without you having to be like a punitive parent and setting boundaries with your clients
Shannon Mattern: And it's our job in the Web Designer Academy to have them pull all these layers together and define them and confidently put that five figure price tag on it. And when they do that, that's when they
Shannon Mattern: They are investing in themselves and their future. And that is a huge mindset error, thought error that we tend to make with our pricing is thinking, who would ever pay me that much for this? Truly the question is, who would invest that much in themselves and their business and their future and their family? And our students are working every single day with clients that invest that much in themselves and their businesses. I personally have literally invested 10 times more than our Web Designer Academy students would ever invest to work with us annually.
Shannon Mattern: I'm investing in myself. I know that I'm just parting with that money for a short period of time to learn the things that I need to learn to make it back and then multiply it, right? That is an investment in me and I believe I'm worth that investment. We want your clients to think the same way about you. That they're not investing in you, they're not giving you money, they're not paying you to build something for them. They are investing in themselves and the tool that's going to allow them to create the life and business of their dreams. And it is so hard to explain in words the transformation that happens inside your client when they make a decision to move forward at that level. Our students experience that shift when they join our program. I've experienced that shift many times over every time I've leveled up in my coaching.
Shannon Mattern: Our students report that their clients experience that shift where they are more committed to the project and their business and their future than ever. Your price creates commitment to the work required for the transformation, right? And that's how you go from clients who don't get you content on time and drag things out forever to clients who are on time and on top of things. Your price is just as much for them as it is for you. Your price doesn't harm people. It doesn't take money from them. It is not your job to save your clients money. You have got to start thinking of your clients as grown adults who are fully capable of making their own financial decisions. And it is not your job to save them money. It's your job to empower them to create more money. So the price component of profitable packages creates commitment and your price reflects the level of service and level of customization and the pricing paradigm.
Shannon Mattern: And it allows your clients to make their own empowered choice of how much they wanna invest and how much they wanna commit and how much sweat equity they wanna put in, how much skin they wanna put in the game. And you are also taking a stand on your value when you say at this price, this is how much of me you get. And you grow into the kind of business owner who can hold that boundary. When they ask for more, you get to tell them, great, that's not what you paid for. Here's how you can get more. So those are the seven components of profitable packages. So I'm gonna recap those for you really quickly. The messaging layer, that's where you use words to speak to the three pricing paradigms, right? Expense investment in hybrid, there's the return on investment layer where you don't just talk about deliverables, you talk about the results and outcomes that those deliverables can help your clients create.
Shannon Mattern: There's the mindset layer where you are talking about your packages in a way that speaks to the mindset of investment minded, hybrid and expense minded clients. There's the level of service component where you stop providing v i p service at bargain and basement prices. You stop over delivering, you let the client choose the level of service, you let the client choose the level of customization, that's the next layer. And you set boundaries within your packages and you price the packages accordingly. So those are the seven components and we help our clients put these seven components together and then package matrix it, right? Like we have a version of that for investment minded clients. We have a version of that for hybrid, we have a version of that for expense minded. And every client that comes through the door, they get presented these three options and they get to make a choice.
Shannon Mattern: They get to make a choice from options that we already are fine with whatever they choose. And our clients get to see what they don't get when they make their decision, right? So the package matrix is such a key piece of our strategy. It's where all of the pieces come together. We teach our students how to create their package matrix, how to present their package matrix on a consultation, how to talk about just we give them word by word like word for word scripts on how to present that, how to price it, how to structure it, how to talk about it. And that's how our clients are able to charge five to 10 times more without working five to 10 times harder because no matter who is on the other side of that zoom screen, they have a profitable package to offer them. And so that's truly the secret sauce behind everything that we teach inside the Web Designer Academy.
Shannon Mattern: So if you feel like something has been missing, if you are the web designer who your business looks like, everything I described at the beginning of this episode, and you're like, and I've either plateaued in my revenue or I'm not making as much as I wanna be making, or it's hard to get clients, or you have mind trash around your pricing, let's talk about it. I would love to talk to you, learn more about you, talk to you about how we can potentially help you. Because the irresistible package matrix is the key to like it's
Shannon Mattern: So that is it for this week's episode about the seven components of profitable web design packages. I was so excited to make this episode because I feel like I dance around it all of the time and up around this strategy and I kind of like briefly touch on it. But that's like the overview, the behind the scenes of our irresistible package matrix strategy, seven components of profitable packages, audit yours, see which ones you're missing, and then come and talk to me. Let's talk about how we can help you create your irresistible package matrix and completely transform your web design business. So that's all I have for you this week. Thank you so much for listening, and I'll be right back here next week with another episode to help you create a profitable and sustainable web design business. Bye
Shannon Mattern: If you are ready to finally stop undercharging and over-delivering. If you're ready to take back control of your time and book more high paying clients you love and make more money as a web designer than you ever thought possible, then book a zero pressure discovery call with me today. All you gotta do is go to https://webdesigneracademy.com/call, choose one of the available time slots, fill out the intake form, and we'll meet on Zoom to talk about your goals and what's really in the way of you reaching them. And if it looks like I can help you inside the Web Designer Academy, we can talk more about what that looks like. It is super chill. There's zero obligation to say yes to working with us. If you book a call with me, it is simply a chance for you to learn more about how we can specifically help you, you personally, with your unique skills, personality, and experience to create a highly profitable, sustainable web design business and create the freedom, flexibility, financial independence and fulfillment that you started this business for in the first place. So just go to https://webdesigner academy.com/call and I can't wait to talk to you more about your web design business.
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