Over To You: When DJ Price Quoting Goes Horribly Wrong…

One of our Digital DJ Tips VIP Platinum Group member shared this screenshot, writing: “I thought I’d share an enquiry I had yesterday that made me p*** myself laughing and wondered if anyone had funny incidents of their own to share on enquiries/bookings?”

Digital DJ Tips says:

This kind of thing, of course, isn’t limited to DJing: It’s any service where the expectation may be worlds apart from what is about to be asked for. This especially tends to be in creative industries (web agencies, ad agencies and so on spring to mind), in my experience.

One way to avoid this is to open the conversation with “what’s your budget?” or “what’s your price range?”, but at the same time, DJs who want to convince someone of their value before talking price often don’t want to do so early on like this.

When we want to charge top prices, everything about our service has to be professional and impressive, and we need to be worth that money in the first place… but once those things are true, learning to weed out people who aren’t ever going to pay what you ask is an art as much as a science – and can sometimes go horribly wrong, as our member discovered and was good enough to share!

So I’d like to throw this open and ask two things:

1. What is your secret to confidently ask for (and, one hopes, get) the prices you wish for your DJing services?
2. Have you got any stories (funny, tragic or otherwise) where it has gone notably wrong?

Please feel free to spill the beans below. We’d love to hear your experiences…