Does anyone happen to do consulting related to affiliate program or similar where you charge a fee + %? I’m looking for someone to brain storm with / get some tips from on my pricing model.

Hey @Adam Tal, I have worked on affiliate programs, let me know if you want us to brainstorm some ideas.

Thanks I appreciate it. Basically I’m offering a service of building an affiliate program for companies / businesses - which includes setting up the tech side, recruiting affiliates, onboarding process etc. The big money for me is in the % of the revenue/profit or payouts, but I also charge a monthly retainer. The challenge is - the most work is during the first months where rev/profits are low / zero. Also there’s always a risk of the program. not working, which depends on a lot of factors that have to do with the product/company. So on my part it’s best to charge a higher retainer, and then lower when the program stabilizes, and the retainer becomes insignificant compared to %. But for the clients it’s obviously a better deal to pay as little as possible at the beginning when they still don’t know if it’s worth the effort. I’m trying to brainstorm an attractive model that makes it a no-brainer for clients, but also good for me. What do you think? (feel free to also shoot me a DM if you prefer, just thought I’d put this here incase someone else also wants to take part in discussing this)

Got it, I like your approach, the key is to set the proper KPIs and how much time it will take you to reach them. It would be understandable for you to say to your clients that in the first few months there won't be any profits. The key is to set up proper and realistic KPIs with a realistic time frame. I believe it is better for you to charge a fix retainer price and a percentage of revenue/payouts.

Thanks Stefan! What do you think about offering two options where one is a higher retainer with lower % and the other is higher % and a lower retainer?

What would be the difference in % from the two offers?

I’m really not sure. I run an affiliate network where our standard is a 20% margin. But as a consultant I think if I take 5-10% with a program I believe in, it’s enough incentive for me, and a better offer for the client compared to working with a network.

I would say it would be better for you to charge a lower retainer price and have a higher %.

What kind of consulting do you do for SaaS companies? And what is the % from? Overall sales? Marketing budget?

I do Growth Marketing and Product Launch services, we usually don't offer a percentage we offer a fixed monthly price

Cool. What kind of product launches do you do? For apps and stuff? Or more like the Jeff Walker type launch sequence? When you say you’ve seen higher than 20% for SaaS what do you mean?

We've got an affiliate program too. When you figure out the best approach, I would love to talk to you about it, since we're experimenting with these things ourselves 🙂

@Adam Tal could you send me a message on joran@getreditus.com, we are always looking for affiliate recruiters to help us grow our platform (we are an affiliate platform for B2B SaaS companies with a marketplace). Interested to chat (once you figured out your pricing) to see if we can hire you.

Hey @Adam Tal I'm not familiar with Jeff Walker, but I just googled him and will check out his material. But to give you a brief explanation, we create a product launch strategy for our clients and execute it or help them with the execution. We have launched apps, SaaS products and other software products. I mean that most affiliate SaaS programs start with 20% or even higher 25% commission rates.

Cool. What I meant is I take 20% of the total commissions paid. So if you make $100,000,000 off of sales made by affiliates, and pay out $200,000 in commissions, we get $40,000 (20% of 200k). That’s as network. As a consultant who runs the program it’d be $10-20k.

Aha got it, that is fair % then.