A System for Communicating Your Value

In my last blog post, I shared 5 powerful strategies for communicating your value. Number 5 of those strategies emphasised how important creating a system for the value conversation is. In this blog post, I’ll share with you how to create that system for communicating your value.

Check out the full video on this topic here.

The value conversation is essentially the structured process or system that we go through when we have a price conversation as part of the sales process. When we talk about price, we are in a sales conversation.

There are 3 broad types of systems that you should be considering when you’re communicating the value of what you do. In this blog post, I’ll take you through all 3.

Number 1 – Uncover the value

Firstly, you need to have a system for uncovering the value, because we need to make sure that we understand what is important to the client. When we better understand what’s valuable to the client, then we can come up with a better solution for them, and we can charge a higher price for that bespoke solution.

How do we uncover what’s valuable to the client? We need to have a process for asking questions – sometimes I call this the fact find.  

The idea of the fact find is to start to understand what’s important to the client. What do they want out of life? What are their goals? What is their vision? What are the problems they are facing right now? What are the challenges and obstacles in their way?

We find this out by asking questions. And this is something we are reasonably good at when we acquire a new client. Unfortunately, what we often then do is forget that process. We don’t have that same conversation every year, we assume that we know the client well enough. But businesses and business owners change their wants, needs, goals, vision, and pains.

What we need to do is systemise the process of uncovering the value, not just in that very first conversation with a prospective client, but every single year with our existing clients.

Standard questions

As part of that system, we need to have some standard questions as part of our agenda. Having an agenda demonstrates to your clients that you care enough about them to do some advanced preparation for your meeting, and it keeps you on track during your meeting.

Your standard questions should include some background questions. For example, why did they go into business in the first place? What are their goals in life?

Even more importantly, we need to uncover the pain and problems they’re facing. When I was in practice many years ago and I built a system for the fact find process, my favourite question was, “What are your three biggest challenges right now?” That’s a fascinating question because it gets business owners thinking about their challenges.

Number 2 – Build up the value

Once we have uncovered the value, stage 2 of the value conversation is to build up the value of what we do. Part of this includes giving the client the right solution by offering a series of choices using menu pricing.

Another part means systemising the process of communicating value. What do we say to the client? And in what order? We need to understand the structure of that conversation for building the value.

This means creating a set of scripts of what we will say. One way to present this is in a professional-looking brochure. When you package your service beautifully in this way, it increases the client’s perception of the quality of what you do. But, more importantly, you can use your brochure as your script or agenda for the meeting.

Overview of the meeting

Let’s go through an overview of the pricing conversation meeting. You’ll go through stage 1, uncovering the value through the fact find. You now understand the client better, what’s important to them, what their challenges are etc. Now you’re starting to better understand what the solution will be. Now you’ve got to communicate the value of that solution.

Build the pain

The first thing you want to do is build up the pain in their mind. What’s the problem in their business right now? What’s going wrong? And what will the problems be in the future if they don’t take action now? What’s the worst-case scenario? You’ll have uncovered some of these in your fact find, but you can now use your brochure to remind yourself to go deeper into those now. Think about all the different pain points to do with your service, the pain that that service takes away.

Ideally, you will also have quantifiable examples as part of your script. How big are the fines and penalties that they risk incurring? Do you have a story of somebody who has had these same problems and not taken action and suffered because of that? Think of examples and numbers.

Talk about outcomes

Next, we need to talk about the outcomes and end results as part of our script. If they buy your service, what will things look like for them down the line? How will you have helped them?

Remember, clients aren’t buying what you do, they’re not interested in buying your time, they’re only interested in the end result.

Again, use quantification wherever possible to put numbers and examples on these results. How much money can you save them? How much can you help improve their income? How many hours of their time will you save them?

The price question

Next, your client will likely say, “That all sounds great, how much will it cost?” You need to have a script for how you will answer that question.

Very often clients have a habit of asking the price question early on in the price conversation, and you haven’t finished building up the value. You should never give a price until you have fully communicated the value.

What you need to do if they ask the price question too early is have a script or process that explains why you can’t give a price yet as you still have things to talk about.

When you are ready to talk about the price, this is where you need to give the client options. Everybody is different and values things differently. Give the client choices with menu pricing. Offer them Bronze, Silver or Gold packages. Some clients will really see the value in that and will pay you higher prices.

In your brochure, you need a system to communicate those different choices and the benefits of the different options. Help the client to identify which one is right for them.

Remember to turn the features of each package into benefits. Why do you do each of the things that you do? What problem does it solve? How does the client benefit?

Number 3 – Demonstrate the value

Finally, we need a system for demonstrating the value of what we do.

The first part of this means using our skills with numbers. Use numbers to show the impact on their business in the future. If you don’t know exactly, use estimates.

Secondly, we need to use examples to demonstrate the value. Share some ideas and examples of what you will do.

And thirdly, we can demonstrate with stories. You should have systems in place for collecting success stories and case studies from your clients when you help them to get great results. Use these real-life stories to demonstrate the value of what you do.

Those are 3 systems you can use to communicate your value effectively:

• Uncover the value
• Build up the value
• Demonstrate the value

You can watch the full video on this topic here.

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”