Vanilla or chocolate?
Inside or outdoors?
High deductible or low?
You could make a mile long list of places in daily life where you have choices.
So why, when you are offering your professional or B2B services, do you not give choices to prospects and clients?
Lack of choice sounds like this:
- Our hourly rate is $xxx.xx
- The fee for X is $yyyy.yy
- Our program costs $xxxxx.xx
This newsletter is not about your pricing model.
It is about helping people buy. Which you have to do to grow revenue!
The benefits of choices:
- Average 70% acceptance of one of the options
- Buyer confidence in the choice since they did their own price-to-value assessment
- The opportunity to demonstrate your firm’s full range of IMPACTs.
Buying research concludes repeatedly that when people have options or choices, they react differently than when they’re given only one take-it-or-leave-it option.
The buyer’s thoughts when given one option:
- Do I want this or not?
- If I want it, how do I feel about the price compared to the value I’ll get from it?
- I wonder what others have to offer.
- I’ll have to think about it.
Your work, about 99% of the time, is not a strict necessity. Buyers have time to think it over, comparison shop, and weigh the value to them compared to the price.
They suspect that a take-it-or-leave-it option is better for you than for them.
Choices make buying easier not harder
I hear three major objections to offering options.
First (and the loudest) is that “I know best” what the client needs. “I’m the expert, I’ve been doing this work for years, I’ll tell them just what it is they need.”
Second, it takes too much time for us to design options for every client. We would lose money doing this.
Third, we’d have to divulge our best practices in options, and we don’t want them to show our options to our competitors.
Let’s look at these objections.
“I know best.”
The problem is that you say this with one specific outcome in mind. There’s no allowance for a client who wants other outcomes or to choose their own outcome.
Consider an M&A lawyer. He or she is focused on completing the deal. The fee they quote (usually an hourly rate times hundreds of hours) is for completing the sale or acquisition of the business.
Perhaps that is the end goal of the client. But the experienced M&A lawyer knows that there’s a lot that can go sideways that prevents the completion of the deal.
If the lawyer gives the client options, such as a valuation, LOI based on the results of the valuation, due diligence if warranted, and so on, the client can choose to take it one step at a time or go all in towards the one goal.
The same is true of a web/digital design company. If the buyer is only offered one option, a full-scale program of web and digital design, they will give that a lot of thought. If they are given options to do the work in pieces, or on a smaller scale, they will make the determination of what’s best for them.
Imagine being the business owner facing a take-it-or-leave-it web design project of $35,000. Or having three options, one of which is the full design and the other two are smaller chunks. The buyer is more likely to say yes to one of the smaller chunks which means revenue for the provider, compared to saying no to the whole thing, and no revenue at all.
Options take too much of our time
Too much compared to what? In other words, if 75% of prospects buy one of the options when you give them choices and only 40% or fewer buy the take-it-or-leave-it option, you make more money spending the time to customize the options.
Customization always deserves higher prices and buyers know this. Any professional or B2B services firm who wants to productize is losing the leverage that their knowledge and expertise gives them.
Take the time to design three options and reap the rewards.
We’d have to divulge our best practices.
This objection reflects that the firm thinks their value is in their tasks. It is not. Their value to clients is in how they change people’s lives, the outcomes or impacts or end points.
When you design three options with three different end points, you aren’t divulging any of your best practices. You’re making offers to the clients about the life changing differences they’ll enjoy after the work is complete.
Your fees should not correlate to the number or extent of the tasks you do, they should be calibrated according to the life changing differences you deliver. Prospects and clients don’t take those kinds of options to someone else. They look at them and make their own private value assessment and choose one. You simply can’t lose.
Take a look, right now, at the Choice Framework graphic here.
I’ll soon be publishing a short e-book about how to write proposals using the Choice Framework. Stay tuned for the official launch.
Have any questions? Text CHOICE to 703-801-0345.
