Many of your proposals fail because the client isn’t sure what they would be buying. One of the first pricing principles I address in Pricing Creativity: A Guide to Profit Beyond the Billable Hour is the idea that there are three things you can sell and price: inputs, outputs or value.
At the highest level of pricing centralization and, I believe, value-and-profit creation, here’s how account leaders and a value council should work together
The goal of value-based pricing is not to charge more—that’s merely a beneficial consequence. The goal of value-based pricing is to create an organization that is intently focused on creating extraordinary customer value.
It’s early January. My phone rings. It’s Sue, a former client I spoke with two weeks earlier. She had called to share she was leading a new firm and they were growing like mad. She needed our help again. I had always liked Sue. We did really good work for her and she’s a straight
I’m pretty sure I can show you the levels of financial success you’ll move through in your career. I can’t predict how far you will go, but by reading the descriptions of the levels you’ll be able to see where you are on the journey and what lays ahead.
The value conversation is where value pricing theory goes to die. The difficulty in mastering this conversation is what causes most people to give up on value-based pricing completely and revert back to selling time and materials. It needn’t be so difficult, though.
It takes a lot of work in fact to generate a steady stream of good referrals and it’s no surprise that very few firms ever get to this place where the business is sustained and growing entirely by doing great work for good clients and systematically asking for and following up on referrals. It is however the highest form of “marketing” that we should all aspire to.
When selling time you tend to strive to a consistent level of profitability across every project. When selling value, your profit measurement focus should broaden out to make sure the entire relationship is profitable, accepting that some projects will be wildly profitable and others less so, even allowing some smaller projects to be unprofitable.
We’ve gone from an era where creative firms never published their pricing on their website to one where, while it’s not common, there’s a bit of a trend toward it among certain types of firms.
There are right and wrong reasons to disclose your pricing on your website and right and wrong methods of doing so.
Money, money, money. Most of us, I believe, have poor relationships with money. Another belief of mine is that some of us have warped or skewed views on the topic that we think are universally shared by others when they are not.
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