Thanks, this is all valuable and my own experience bears this out. People looking to take the next step up should pay attention to this wisdom. You say you usually charge $3K-$5K per day, what do you use to determine your rate? That's quite a large spread, so I assume you have some metrics that you use to determine this.
so I assume you have some metrics that you use to determine this
Nope. Sales is human. If it were a codec it would be non-deterministic and lossy.
I quote whatever the market will bear. I try to quote $5k and often get negotiated down to $3k by procurement/vendor mgmt. dept. There's been plenty written about how this works by folks smarter and more experienced at sales than myself.