A regular part of The Raging Nerds’ consultancy life has been negotiating our rates with prospective clients. Like most such consultants, we have “usual rates” for our standard areas of work. These rates are derived not only from an evaluation of our skill sets and how they fit the task at hand, but the standard rates in whatever market we’re bidding in.

For most of our careers, the negotiation conversation has gone like this:

Prospective Client: What is your rate for work like this?

Raging Nerd: Our usual rate is Z.

At this point, Prospective Client either says, “Sounds great; sign here,” or “That doesn’t fit our budget. How about Y?”

And we either say, “Sure, sounds good,” or we keep the ball rolling.

In other words, we do this thing we like to call negotiating.

Recently, however, we’ve run into what is for us a new phenomenon. Twice now the conversation has gone like this:

Prospective Client: What is your rate for work like this?

Raging Nerd: Our usual rate is Z.

Prospective Client: That’s not in our budget. Goodbye!

Both times, we have been left rather stunned. Does no one negotiate any more? Do people not realize that “usual” doesn’t mean “always”? We feel as though what Prospective Client actually said was, “You guessed wrong! Go directly to jail; do not pass Go; do not collect $200.”

Has anyone else run into a situation like this? Is this the new normal?

We are thinking that our new approach will look more like this:

Prospective Client: What is your rate for work like this?

Raging Nerd: Well, that depends. What sort of budget constraints are you under? We can work together to make this happen.

Any advice left in Comments would be greatly appreciated! (And meanwhile, in both cases, we were able to contact the prospective clients and work things out. Still, it was very strange.)