Transcript: I teach a lot of courses on pricing to firm owners, and everybody’s interested in pricing, value pricing. And one particular aspect of pricing is that it’s very collaborative process with a client. So if you can do a lot of work upfront to prepare a client, prepare them as a good lead and they trust you and they come really into a conversation with you as a firm, you get to ask them a whole bunch of questions and they’re there trusting you knowing you’re the expert that’s going to lead them through some kind of solution to change their company, your client that you serve.

And as you’re asking them questions, then what you get to do as a firm owner is you get to go, all right, I’m going to give you some options, that’s what you do in pricing, you give three options. We always give a high, middle, low. But then you go back to the client and you say, “Here’s what we came up with. Is our best assessment of what we’ve heard and we’re going to wheel this down to three options we think would really change you.”

A lot of those options have a lot of solutions they didn’t ask for and that’s collaborative. It’s because they’re going, hey expert, just kind of walk me through this process, if they trust you. That’s why it’s important to vet that lead appropriately, put up some walls so the right lead comes in that trusts you. And then they’ll let you pitch ideas to them and they’ll think about it. And then they’ll ask you a bunch of questions and then you can go, that makes sense. And then you go back and make a couple more options and you bring it to the client and they go, okay, now we’ve settled on one. And then you’re all pretty excited.

And actually the process of going through that is really enjoyable. And even the process of collaborative pricing drives such trust. And it really begins a relationship really well. My partner and I are going through that now. And it’s important that a lot of firms understand that pricing is very collaborative. It is not here it is, take it or leave it client. It is listening to them, spending time, then going back and spending time crafting things for them, then sharing with it them and then listening to them again. And then they say, give me this. And then you go back and you re-craft some options.

And so the process of onboarding a client through value pricing can take a month or two months depending on the complexity of the company. So I just wanted to throw that out. It’s actually a pretty enjoyable process. And your client really trusts you when they come in with some prices that they know you have worked really hard to collaborate on building with them. They feel heard, and the pricing is way better when the client’s being collaborative with you. So just keep that in mind.

If you’re interested in pricing, it is a very slow collaborative process. And again, what we’re not talking about right now is billing. Billing is a completely different thing. That’s billing by the hour and just sending a bill after you’ve done something from a client. Pricing is that upfront wall you can’t get over and start serving people unless you figure out what that price is. So that time period before you begin serving is that collaborative pricing process. And you really come to a joy when you have the right lead.

So if you need help doing that, we have courses, we have videos on pricing, I do webinars on pricing. Just hit us up and we’ll help you, [email protected]. We’ll be glad to hook you up with any kind of pricing, content and resources that we make. Thanks so much for watching. We’ll see you.