A lack of confidence is often the root cause of our problems with pricing. Therefore, confidence is one of the most important things we have to fix.

This blog post is all about building your pricing confidence. I’ll share with you the 3 big things we need to work on to increase our confidence.

You can check out the full video on this topic here.

Number 1 – Mindset

The number 1 most important thing we need to work on to build our pricing confidence is our mindset and beliefs. We cannot start to communicate to our clients the value of what we do until we internally recognise that value ourselves. We have to believe that we are worth it.

One exercise that I recommend doing is thinking about all the years that you’ve been in business and all the clients that you’ve worked with. Think about the times when you’ve done something extraordinary for a client and they’ve been so grateful. Think about the great results you’ve helped them to achieve and recognise that that’s the kind of impact that you can have.

Now, you need to start having some ‘arrogance’ if you like. Understand your worth and hold your ground on your price. When people say to you, “That’s expensive,” you need to make sure you are confident and can justify the price.

To do this, create a script that you can use when someone says, “That’s expensive. There’s a cheaper firm down the road” You should be prepared to say something along the lines of, “These are our prices, and the reason for that is that we focus on helping you to get extraordinary results. We’re different to most other firms, we help you to [insert your niche/service]. If you want a cheap firm, then by all means there are cheap firms out there. If you want the best, these are our prices.”

Collect testimonials

Another thing that I strongly recommend you do is start being obsessive about collecting feedback, success stories, case studies, testimonials etc.

You should have systems in place to regularly ask for feedback from your clients. What this does is increases your self-esteem when you have clients telling you the results they are getting thanks to you and how grateful they are. It gives you a reason to celebrate and helps you realise your worth and the difference you are making.

Number 2 – Knowledge

The second thing we must do to increase our confidence in pricing is we have to know how to price.

One of the challenges we face as accountants and bookkeepers is not being taught how to price despite this being one of the most important skills we need. We have to invest some time into learning how to price.

The question is, how do we know that we are pricing well? How can we give a fixed price upfront and know that that is a great price?

When I started my accounting firm and people would say to me, “Mark, that’s a bit expensive.” I had no idea how to respond to that, so I would crumble on price. That was absolutely wrong of me. But because we don’t have the knowledge of how to price and we don’t have the confidence to deal with objections, we keep reducing our prices to try and win business.

Knowledge is so important. When we know how to price, how to have the value conversation, how to build up the value of what we do, what words we need to use, and how we come up with our upfront price, then that gives us confidence that we’re doing things the right way.

Number 3 – Systems

The third area that helps our confidence and builds on that knowledge aspect is having pricing systems in place.

Systems are critically important in our industry. Most of the technical work we do is systemised. However, most firms don’t have systems for pricing. And yet pricing is arguably the most important thing we must get right in our firms. If we price too low, we end up working crazy long hours just to make ends meet.

We need to create systems. How do we do that? One thing we need to understand is what things will impact the amount of work involved. What are the scope factors? For example, how many bank accounts do they have, how many transactions, are they registered for sales tax, etc? Then we have to figure out how we can get that information and give a price with confidence.

We should have a system in place for the questions we need to ask clients right at the start of the value conversation. The more we can uncover their wants, needs, and pains through the right questions, the more we can build a bespoke package that delivers value to them.

We need systems for then building that value. What words and language do we need to use? One thing we can create here is written brochures to help us keep on track with what we need to communicate.

Effective Pricing as a pricing system

Having pricing software is a great system for giving a fixed price with confidence. Many of you already use Effective Pricing. What Effective Pricing does is allow you to ask the client scope questions and questions about their preferences to then give them several different packages or bundles with an upfront price for each calculated.

One of the great things about this approach is it involves the client in the pricing process. For example, if you reveal your price and they think it’s too high, you can go back through the services they have selected and tweak them till you have a bespoke package and price that suits the client. You don’t end up crashing and burning on price, because you have a transparent system that the client can interact with.

You can find out more about the Effective Pricing software here.

Those are the 3 things we need to consider to improve our pricing confidence:

• Mindset
• Knowledge
• Systems

You can watch the full video on this topic here.