Even offering free work scares the heck out of good clients. Conversely, people who will agree to the arrangement may treat your time as if it is totally valueless, which will frequently compromise your ability to succeed at the engagement. The free engagement doesn't enhance your credibility if it ends up sucking due to lack of "client" cooperation, so that doesn't help you any.
One tactic that generally worked well for me when I was at an early point in my consulting career was roughly:
"Normally I'd charge you $x for this. I am confident that you will receive $y-$z of value from this work. Let's do the work. You decide how much I should invoice for at the end of it."
I was obviously sucking up more risk with this approach - and had to be willing to walk away with zero (and did on two occasions - one of which was justifiable). But since I had picked sane clients it mostly worked out very well (in one case they happily wrote a check for $x * 5 since we'd all radically underestimated the value of the work ;-)
I don't do this now - but it helped get over some "Can you actually do this?" hassles at the point when I didn't have a reputation.
One tactic that generally worked well for me when I was at an early point in my consulting career was roughly:
"Normally I'd charge you $x for this. I am confident that you will receive $y-$z of value from this work. Let's do the work. You decide how much I should invoice for at the end of it."
I was obviously sucking up more risk with this approach - and had to be willing to walk away with zero (and did on two occasions - one of which was justifiable). But since I had picked sane clients it mostly worked out very well (in one case they happily wrote a check for $x * 5 since we'd all radically underestimated the value of the work ;-)
I don't do this now - but it helped get over some "Can you actually do this?" hassles at the point when I didn't have a reputation.