Did you ever carefully paint a room and then feel disappointed?
It really doesn’t look much better.
Something’s missing.
The furniture is outdated, the window treatments need replacing, and the floor is scratched and scuffed.
It’s not until you finish the job that the paint reaches its full impact.
The same is true when you update your Pricing Strategy and your Pricing Model.
These are the first critical steps to increasing your fees and total revenue.
But you can’t stop with them.
Your firm has to update the rest of the “room” if you’re going to maximize the impact to your firm.
Start with marketing
I define marketing for professional and services firms as all your activities that work to attract great fit prospects to the firm.
The key word is “attract.”
You attract prospects—especially great fit prospects—with the language you use, where you distribute that language, and how you talk with people.
Pricing Strategy->Pricing Model->Marketing
To quickly review, the pricing strategy is your rule. The pricing model is how you apply the rule.
Pricing Strategy: “Our fees and prices reflect the IMPACT (life changing differences) we deliver to our clients.”
The pricing model is IMPACT Based Pricing
Marketing Language for IMPACT Based pricing
Your firm’s two most obvious pieces of marketing collateral are your website and your LinkedIn profile.
Once you “renovate” the website you can easily renovate your LI profile.
What We Do, Who We Are, Our Story, Our Services
Every professional and business services firm has some tabs like these.
The content tells readers about your firm.
But… you’re missing the ways you’ve changed your client’s lives.
You can deliver services or benefits, but until you describe life changing differences clients have experienced because of those services or benefits, the marketing doesn’t attract great fit clients.
An integral part of adopting IMPACT Based Pricing is creating the vocabulary to describe the life changing differences your firm delivers to clients.
Where does this vocabulary come from?
From clients!
You do not make it up. No marketing expert or copy writer or brand guru is as meaningful as the clients themselves.
So get comfortable asking questions about life changing differences.
Ask these open ended questions:
“What’s important to you about X?”
“How do you imagine your life/career/the company changing in the coming months or years?”
“What would it mean to you to have more money in the bank?”
“What would be different if you had X?”
Let your clients write your marketing collateral
Once you’ve recorded the answers to these questions from a representative sample of clients, you have the vocabulary you need to upgrade your website and LI profile.
One CPA client followed my advice and talked to 10 clients for whom he completed and filed annual business and personal tax returns.
Beforehand he told me he didn’t expect much depth in the responses. “They’ll all just say they’re glad it’s over until next year” he surmised.
Well, he was mistaken!
Seven out of ten said they felt relief knowing that the IRS was very unlikely to find any problems with their tax returns.
That relief manifested itself in confidence about building their business in the current year. And that their personal finances were also safe from surprises.
They all had heard horror stories about terrible experiences with the IRS because of poorly done tax returns.
This confidence and the ability to move forward with their plans is the IMPACT this CPA delivered to his clients. It is so much more than the fact of completing the returns.
The CPA asked his web designer to change the marketing language on the firm’s website to reflect these IMPACTs.
They also did a thorough update of the “back end” of the website with different key words and long tail keyword searches.
They noticed pretty quickly that they were getting inquires asking about the IMPACTs rather than the inputs like tax returns. There are hundreds of CPA firms that do tax returns.
Only his firm changes peoples lives!
Renovate piece by piece
All the elements of your business will be affected by adopting IMPACT Based Pricing.
Instead of trying to renovate the whole house all at once, I urge you to take it “room by room.”
The first room is, as we’ve just described, the Marketing room.
Next will be the Sales room.
Followed by Client/Customer Services, Retention, and Referrals.
Are you thinking about renovating?
Adopting IMPACT Based pricing is a significant change for a professional or business services firm. And it’s eminently doable with the right beliefs and an experienced advisor like me.
Text READY to 703-801-0345 if you’re ready to explore how it IMPACT Based Pricing would work for your firm.
