How to Show Your Clients You Care About Them

As a professional, it is your responsibility to help your clients in as many ways as you can and deliver as much value as possible. You do that by spending time thinking about them.

Imagine you’ve already done all your thinking and you’ve come up with 5 great ideas to help your client – let’s call them Mary. What do you do now…

You can watch the video here.

Quantify

Which of your ideas is the best? What could it be worth to the client? Can you put a number on it? 

Perhaps you can help save them $50,000 in tax, or you might be able to help them get an extra $20,000 in their overdraft if they are struggling for cash. It could be you implement some technology that helps save 30 hours of admin work a week…

Contact the client

Once you have your top ideas ready, contact Mary. 

You could email, but a phone call would work better. Here’s what you might say…

“Hi Mary! I’ve been thinking about you and your business and I’ve come up with a number of ideas that I think will make a big difference. I’ve got 5 ideas I’d like to go over with you. One of them is so good I believe it could [save you $20,000 in tax]!”

This is great – it shows that you care and are dedicating a lot of time ensuring that Mary gets the best possible service she can get from you. It shows how much value you are delivering.

Quantifying that benefit will really demonstrate the potential and inspire Mary to take action.

You should also make it clear…

“Just to be clear Mary – we aren’t charging you for this meeting. It’s on us! One of the things we do in our firm is spend time thinking about how we can make our clients’ lives better, how we can improve their businesses and help them achieve their dreams. This is something we always do for our clients, so we want to sit down with you and share these ideas.”

Here you are making it very clear to the client that you aren’t charging them, you are just delivering immense value by being really client-focused.

Give Options

Inform Mary that at the end of your meeting you will give her 3 options…

1. You might decide none of these ideas are right for you at this moment and do nothing. That’s fine! Though I do think this idea in particular is going to have a massive effect on your business…
2. You could take the ideas and go away and implement them yourself in your own time.
3. You might like us to do the implementation for you. We are very happy to do that! We will go through exactly what it is we will do for you and we will discuss the price at that point as well.

With this script you are telling the client you are thinking of them, you have some great ideas for their business, you’ve quantified the best idea, you’ve made it clear you are not charging for this meeting, and you are explaining that should they want you to go ahead and implement those ideas there will be a price for that.

So, how do you come up with that price…

The 2 Meeting Approach

If they do want you to take on the work, you can then arrange a second meeting.

The first meeting will just be a short 15-minute call, perhaps an online meeting, simply going over those ideas. The second meeting will be much more in-depth. You can go into more detail on the service that you can offer to Mary.

When you split the meetings up like this, it gives you a chance to go away and think about how to deliver your service. It may be that more information was revealed in the first meeting and you can think of a few more ways to better help Mary. You also get the chance to think about how you are going to price.

Draft Proposal

Set out the pains that you are taking away, the benefits and the outcomes.

Then give Mary some choices – ideally 3 options: the entry-level, full and premium. 

You want to aim to make the middle option the most appealing by putting in the things you know Mary really wants. The entry-level will remove all the frills and have the bare essential service, whilst the premium incorporates all sorts of extra bonuses.

You then give a value-based price, which will be a high price if there is a lot of value. If your middle price is too expensive, you have the entry-level as a cheaper option. 

It’s almost certain Mary will choose one of your options because you have inspired her with the possibilities to improve her business. And if you are value pricing, this will be very profitable work for you.

If you found this valuable and would like to learn more about value pricing, I run a free live online training session every month with a topic chosen by you. Attend live and you can ask me any questions you have. Click here to register and I will send you an invitation to the next session.

Wishing you every success on your pricing journey

Mark Wickersham

Chartered Accountant, Public Speaker and Author of Amazon No.1 Best Seller “Effective Pricing for Accountants”