How to offer a package deal
If you’re looking for creative strategies for selling any translation project, whether small or large, without compromising your profit margin, you should consider offering package deals to your customers. The key to providing any package deal for a translation project is selling value, rather than price. It is important to build the sale for your client, so that you are offering more than just the cheapest rate for the language pair or desktop publishing service. When offering a service, you should detail what the special price includes. For example, I offer my clients a competitive rate that includes the three-step quality assurance process of translation, edition, and proofreading for the translation of the document. For a Spanish translation quote, I also mention that the package includes an industry expert for the translation of the document, as well as an experienced editor and proofreader.
In building the sale for your client via a package deal, you should also try to utilize marketing differentiation, in which you differentiate your services from your competitors. For example, at Trusted Translations, we do not impose project management fees, and our per-word rate for a language translation is based on source word count, rather than target word count.
On the other hand, if your client is unsure of what their needs would be for a particular project, you should also provide options to “tailor” the package deal. For example, many of my clients are unsure of whether they can retrieve the native files of their original texts, so that we can provide a lower rate for the desktop publishing service. Others are not sure of whether they will be needing desktop publishing services for their translations. In these cases, I try to provide alternatives, or separate quotes, so that they understand what each price entails and can judge for themselves whether they would need additional value to their projects.