528 Dealing With Pricing Objections in an Accounting Firm

It's gonna happen. It should happen. They don't like your price. In fact, like, like if everybody's saying yes to your price, then we're probably not pricing aggressively enough. But what do you do when they do say no? This is too much for me. What are the leading causes of this? That's what we're gonna get into right now. It's actually a bunch of things that I was very blind to when I was running my firm, where if we put a little more thought into each of these things, you greatly increase the likelihood that people will say yes. Today's episode, buddy, my hope is actually it makes you some money. Who else going to promise that 30 minutes from now you'll be in a better spot to put more money in your pocket? Let's do it. Okay. This was a question from a listener trying to scale up over the next couple of years seeking advice on how to deal with objections in my sales meetings with new clients. Any resources on how to navigate this would be greatly appreciated. There's so many different flavors of like trying to quote unquote, sell clients. In fact, I would, I would say I worked with some folks that were kind of the older, more traditional accounting firm guard that prided themselves and always getting a yes. Like I one time I had somebody tell me that they had never sat across from a client in a discovery meeting and the client not said yes to whatever price they'd put in front of them. And they prided themselves on that, like being the rainmaker, like closing every single sale. And hopefully you see how problematic that is. The world where every single sit down ends in a yes probably means you're given a lot away. And I think we are better off positioning ourselves to be a, a premium option for a specific type of person than the option that every single person will say yes to. Because giving away more than anybody else is willing to doing more for less. That that's not a strategy, that's self sabotage. Think about that. Like if we are competing on doing more than less, what if we are competing on doing more for less, then aren't we kind of the suckers? We got to either do more or we can charge less, but we can't do both. That's just a race to the bottom man. So four really common traps here. Four things that cause people to say no that sometimes we are blind to. Number one is leading with on services rather than a limited scope project. We got to recognize that every time somebody comes to us to potentially work with us, they are factoring in the Risk of working with someone they've never worked with before, they have no idea what it looks like on the other side of working with you. They don't know if the sales experience is representative of the experience they'll get on an ongoing basis. And that is for them inherently risky. And if there's risk involved, that means it reduces their willingness to pay. Risk is always factored into what we are willing to pay. If something feels like there's no risk involved versus it is extremely risky, that influences how big of a check you're willing to write. And this is where an initial project, a one off thing, a limited scope project to solve some sort of problem they have or unlock some sort of opportunity for them, this serves to overcome a lot of those sources of price resistance. Because if they have a positive experience with you getting them over that hump doing an initial project with them, you can tell them you don't even have to divorce your current provider yet. We're going to do this project for you and then you can decide do you think we're better or not? And then when you dazzle them over the course of that limited scope project, when it comes time to put the engagement in front of them for ongoing services, there's an entire different willingness and readiness to plunk down the big check because you've de risked it for them. They know what it's like working for you, working, working with you. And if you really dazzle them, if you really go above and beyond, they're now willing to pay much more than they would have otherwise because I can't imagine going back to the old provider once they've tasted the rainbow. And so we really got to think about this as you're putting a proposal in front of somebody for the first time that they are scared, that they have very limited information and then that's factoring into the likelihood that they will say yes. So consideration number one here. Know that if you go straight in with this permanent marriage, this ongoing proposal, it is going to face some resistance or there's at least enough risk baked in there that it's going to reduce how much they're willing to pay. Second, consideration is very often we will come in and we will sell them more than what they need now. This is particularly problematic for someone that's still getting up to speed with working with an accounting professional. They're going to have sticker shock almost no matter what. And you can pretty accurately predict where they're going to be a year from now, two years from now, three years from now you've seen the progression, the education of the client from here's what they think their problems are right now. But I can tell you right now what your problems are going to be. In six months, there will be new problems that are higher level problems and higher value problems, better problems to have. But if we try to sell them all the solutions right now to the problems they don't even know they have yet, they're going to be like, hang on, cool it, dude. I just came for this. I just came for this one thing. And we do this out of a place of wanting to help people. We're like, no, I know this better than you do. I know that you're going to need this. I know that you will have this problem. But then if they're saying no, like, what's the point? What did we achieve? We don't have to be sneaky about this. It doesn't have to be a bait and switch to be like, oh yeah, come buy this. Oops, doesn't actually work because you need this other thing too. That's not what I'm talking about. Everybody that has a problem today, when you solve that problem, they have the next problem. You go to the barber because your hair is too long, they give you a haircut. I don't know about you. Every time I get haircut at the barber, my hair looks super stupid. Afterwards, they've washed everything out of it, doesn't have any product, and then they're like, hey, let me sell you some product and I'll show you how to style it. You came in with one problem. They ended up selling you a solution to a problem that you didn't know you were going to have until they'd solved the first first one. This is common in every single service that we sell. And it happens over a longer time horizon. Where you now are doing their bookkeeping, but they don't know how to read the financials. Where you are now completing their tax return, but they don't know how to plan strategically around it. Where they want someone to help them set goals. But like, they don't even have a set of KPIs internally or quarterly rocks or anything like that that you can anchor goals around. When you're putting that proposal in front of the client, the more you can strip it back to the problems they have today, the more likely they will say yes. This is not a commitment to the work you're going to do for them forever. The goal in that first proposal, all that goal should be, is to get them over the threshold to get them starting to work with you and have a positive experience from there. The world is your oyster. They can buy way more services. And here's a, here's actually a really valuable mental shift. Always think of what they're saying yes to as the new floor, the new minimum. It doesn't mean that you can't sell them more things. All it means is like, here's the floor of what they're going to buy from you today. And that even applies to folks that are on a monthly recurring fee. Nobody likes to be to like come upon out of scope stuff. But when an engagement is going well, they want to pull you into more and that can't happen if they don't start somewhere. So you get them over the threshold, you start with them and the sky is the limit. After that, you give them a good experience, they're going to pull you in for more and more and have a greater and greater willingness to pay you to do additional things. But it's not reasonable to expect that they're going to be willing to pay you for all of that stuff up front. And this is where like downselling comes in. A sales tactic that basically is when you're faced with an objection, you sell them down to something that is more stripped back. And sometimes you can even put all this stuff in front of them to say like, hey, here's what we normally do for everybody. But you don't need X, Y and Z. So I'm just going to give you this. And then there's like this reciprocity where they're like, they're like, oh, you're doing me a favor. Like, yeah, I'll totally say yes to that. But I would argue what accountants do more often as we try to layer in more stuff because we're like, well, in six months you're going to have this problem, in 18 months you're going to have that problem. And the client's like, I don't understand what those words mean. And so it's hard for me to agree to pay for that right now. So trap number one, recognizing that starting with ongoing services comes with some risk and if there's a way we can grease skids, do a limited scope project upfront, there's a little less risk. So they're willing to pay more for your ongoing services. Number two, overselling with solutions to problems they haven't yet felt. Third trap here, serving clients in a general way so that our prices and solutions can be easily benchmarked against other providers. So if you Put that price in front of them and what you're offering is the exact same as everybody else. They're going to go look at everybody else and just shop based on price. Right. Like if somebody asks your hourly rate and then asks everybody else's hourly rate. We did a YouTube video recently where we broke down a bunch of accounting firm websites. And almost every accounting firm website these days has a list of services that they offer. And that list of services looks almost identical site to site. And we may know that. No, we do things different, man. Like our delivery. It's totally different than other people's. And here's what makes us unique. But the person visiting your website doesn't understand that then they're going to buy on price and that, like, are there people that are smarter than, like, oh, you get what you pay for? Like, there's people that will feel that way. They can't tell from what they can see externally what's ultimately going to be the superior, like, experience. So we have to somehow escape this generalized approach, generalized delivery. And this is the power of serving rare pains, rare expensive pains. If it is a rare pain that I can provide a solution for, I've eliminated a ton of substitutes. Right. So does every Realtor need a tax return? Yes. But is needing a tax return a rare pain? It isn't. And so every other accounting firm will be like, of course we can do your tax return. You're a realtor. Is Realtor specificity better than no specificity? For sure. But is this compliance form or being familiar with all the information that you get specifically from Coldwell Banker or, you know, some sort of real estate agency, are the pains specific to those agents more rare? Yes, they are. And if we can find an entrepreneur where those pains are costing them money like they are expensive pains, like they own airplanes and those airplanes get chartered to go and do different stuff. But unless the compliance stuff is top notch, the planes could be grounded. And that's costing them a tremendous amount of money if that happens. Right. That is a rare pain. That is an expensive pain where when we put that proposal in front of them, it's not going to be a lot of other providers, maybe no other providers they're aware of that can solve that problem. And because it is such an expensive pain, our fees are then viewed relative to the cost of not finding a solution. So that is. That is the end of the spectrum that we're looking for. Those are those gold nugget problems that we want to find that are both rare and expensive. Full other end of the spectrum is your website says you do bookkeeping, tax advisory, maybe you list some tax forms. We do some payroll as well. But then the three other accounting firm websites they're looking at, they all have services pages that say the same things, right? If that's what your proposal looks like and those are the problems that you're solving, you will always be competing against those other providers and those folks will be to some degree like shopping who's offering me what for what price? Have you heard the news from one of this episode's sponsors? Keyper Introducing Keeper Scale. It is a whole new package of cool razzle dazzle stuff including automated accruals automatically tying out like what that schedule ought to be to the books rolling that forward month over month. AI journal entries hold up. It'll take complex source docs like payroll reports, alta settlement statements, I don't know what that is, and POS exports and turn them into review ready entries you can post straight to the ledger. Buddy, I like what you're cooking. Keeper smells nice. Keeper. It is a month in automation platform for bookkeeping firms. It is like a task management had a baby with a ledger. Got a deep integration there. You can see all transactions inside of Keeper. Sort of one place to manage all of your month end closes and they've been working working on some pretty cool new stuff. If you're a bookkeeping practice worth learning more about Keeper, check out the link down in the show notes. Can I just air a grievance with you right now? We are in peak tech selection season and your most important tool in your firm it is your practice management system. But when you go to these providers and you ask them what firms are you great for? You know what pretty much all of them say? Accounting firms, everyone. Our tool's the best for everyone. Buddy, that just ain't true. And one platform that is being built for a very specific type of firm. It is Client Hub. They know who they're great for and it is cast and outsourced bookkeeping practices like accounting department in a box. Is that what you're doing for your clients? If so buddy, look at Client Hub. They are building for that very specific type of firm. Good example. They have like a arguably a deeper integration into the ledger than maybe any other practice management system because they give you like an entire way to manage the month end close inside of Client Hub. It's the sort of functionality that with most other people practice management platforms you would have to pull in a separate month end close automation tool to get that functionality. But it's all happening inside of Client Hub because they know exactly what the firms who are a great fit for them need, buddy. It is no different than what we talk about in accounting firms where it's way easier to serve a specific type of client at a very high level. That's what Client Hub's doing, man. They're building a platform for a very specific type of accounting firm. And if that is you, they really ought to be on your short list of practice management management systems that you're considering rolling into 2026. So to learn more about Client Hub and actually some really cool new AI workflow stuff they've got going as well, check out the link down in the show notes. Okay, last consideration here. Number four is people are genuinely less likely to say yes if you only give them one option. Only give them one path forward. Another upside of using three tier proposals is there's an element of identity in which tier is being chosen. If somebody wants to be the VIP and you don't give them an option that is the VIP option, they will think that you're not a firm that serves people like them. The opposite end of the spectrum is also true. If someone is always looking for the deal for the lowest cost option, then literally giving them three options simply so they can pick the bottom option will make them feel better than if all you offered was the bottom option. There's a greater likelihood they will say yes if they can see the higher priced options because they can self select into the one that feels right to them. And that's, that feels. I mean it's dumb. I don't like that. That's how it works, but that is, that's buying behavior. If you give them more options, not only is there the opportunity that they will upsell themselves into more expensive options, but they will feel they were given more control over the process and able to select an option that that aligns with their identity, the type of buyer they see themselves as. So things to consider here. Number one, leading straight in with ongoing services comes at the trade off of some risk. In a perfect world, you sell them a one off project upfront. Number two, be careful not to oversell them on problems they're not yet feeling. You can always sell them more down the road. Start today with the problems they feel today. Number three, as long as you're serving people in a generalized way, solving general problems, there's gonna be a lot of substitutes for that buyer. It'll feel to them like they can go get an equal solution for less money elsewhere. Last number Four, if you give them multiple options to choose from, it'll feel like they have more control over the process rather than you forcing them down a single path. None of those things were things that I was doing well, had my head around even five years ago. I can tell you those are some of the biggest impact things I've pulled from other folks as I've learned more about like seeing the numbers behind the scenes of people that run insanely profitable firms and what the common threads are that specialization is always a factor there. These are some of the common themes that I've seen across a lot of those conversations. Count and support operators are standing by. New podcast segment alert. How'd you like that? Okay, Accountant support where you leave me a voicemail and we air out your problems publicly on the podcast for all to hear. You want to do it? Give me a call. 516-980-4968 I guess the pre the country prefix is 1 so 1516-980-4968 as God is my witness, that is my cell phone just silenced a call moments ago. Okay, here's Brandon.

One of our firm's biggest challenges is billing. We have switched to ignition but because we are all always over 100% capacity, we fall we've fallen behind on billing before we switched to ignition. And so the question has been do we have to bill everything before we can send out proposals next year for all of the previous work we've done?

Oh, if.

And one of the things that also slows us down is everything has been very much billed by focusing on individual client rates. Do you think with this three tier proposal what we should do is have standardized flat fees going forward. Say okay everyone, you will be charged at minimum this at bronze tier, then it's silver tier at minimum this, gold tier at minimum this and not focus on the complexity of the work as much but our expertise instead. I hope that question was clear. Love all the content you make. Been a tremendous help to our firm modernizing our stack, our tech stack. And thank you for providing your number.

Thank you for the question Brandon, but gang listeners leave me a voicemail. Man just feels so much more real when you can hear the question from some from folks. Okay, a few things to unpack there. They switched to ignition. Ignition is a proposal platform where you can do three tier proposals. Brandon asks we're behind on billing. Do we have to be caught up before sending proposals? It's really easy to throw shade here. I've been in this exact situation myself where I'm like I see the value of sending out proposals. I'm so excited to do it. But we haven't even billed everybody for all the work that we've already done. I can tell you, Brandon, something that I did in transition. I don't know if this is a good idea or not. I built into proposals what, what their current balance was so that when they accepted it, they paid off the current balance. And so we just use that as kind of a way to collect on the stuff that was already outstanding. And at the same time, we got their payment method in there so that we can auto bill it down the road according to the proposal. So the right answer here, do you have to catch up before sending proposals, yes or no? It kind of depends on the timing of when they will pay you in the new proposals. If they're paying when work is completed, then I think you can kill two birds with one stone here. You can pull the money for services you've done so far in that proposal and it won't feel like they're taking a double whammy because they're not billed for the new services in the proposal until it's done. This is what I did. I didn't take deposits up front on our work. The only thing I mandated was they had to give me a payment method and then we would pull the money when the work was done. This is for like once a year, say tax work, cast work was on a monthly recurring. On the one hand, you also don't want to the proposal building process to hold up on collecting what you're already owed. So whatever the fastest way is to get paid, I would do that. The one argument for building that into the proposal is you can say, hey, we're invoicing you from this system. Go in and put your payment method in. So now we have that payment method on file in Ignition, which makes the new proposal easier. So do you have to get caught up before sending proposals? Yes and no. I would boil it down to the behavior, how it's going to feel to them. If you're asking for an upfront deposit, they're not going to like paying twice. Especially not if that upfront deposit's being paid for the first time. But if they're not paying till the end, actually putting the balance owed into ignition may be a good way to jumpstart their comfort with using Ignition to accept proposals and manage their payment methods. And then kind of two other questions there. The next was for three tier proposals, is it worth moving towards flat fees? And then I'll, I'LL roll in. The other question too. Should it be tied to the complexity of the work or time or something else? This is a really big mental shift. But as much as possible, we need to think about what they're willing to pay through the lens of exclusively what they're willing to pay. When we talk about the time that goes into a project. And I don't think Brandon even brought up time here, but this is a common trap when you think about the time that goes into a project. Oftentimes we let that lead. What the price ought to be when those two things are completely disconnected, what someone's willing to pay has nothing to do with how much time it will take you. If you don't believe me, if there's a tax pro, if there's a bookkeeper across the street that takes five times as long to do the same work, is that fair to you? You're going to say no, right? So that's good for you. That their willingness to pay is disconnected from the inputs from how much time it takes you to do the work. And even leading the conversation with here's our hourly rate or any discussion with clients around how long it takes you to do kind of works against you because then the client keeps. Starts keeping score. We would get this in our cast practice when we're doing managed accounting, like sort of accounting department in a box for people, we would be like, you know, I think it makes more sense for your team to take on task X, Y and Z because they're closer to the information. And if you do, if you have that conversation wrong, the client will be like, okay, what does that save you? An hour, two hours a month? So then that should change your fee X amount. And we're like, yeah, no, we like, we also just installed this new system for you that's saving your team 10 hours a month. Like, did you pay us more when we did that? So, so you get, you want to avoid like the swapping hours, splitting hairs over that stuff. But the source of truth for what we should charge people, it's not complexity, it's not how much time goes into it. I still tracked time because we use time as like a floor. Like we, we had to make more than some factor on our time for that project to make sense. And that was really just like to define the minimum. It wasn't to define the ultimate price. But beyond that, the pricing that we're putting in front of people, like, that's just a product of what they're willing to pay. Now from a logistics standpoint should you use the same price for everybody in three tier proposals, I will tell you where I did this and where I didn't do this. We had 1700, 1040s or once a year individual tax returns that we did for people. And for me to go through an individually price, every single one of those things would have been an astronomical amount of time. So when we first transitioned those 1040s from hourly billing to three tier proposals for most of those we did do flat fees. We basically organized them into like six tranches. One through five were simply bracketed ranges of what their fees were last year. And then the six group that was open ended, we did those manually. Oftentimes we proposed a range because there were bigger numbers and we priced those in a more bespoke way. But because those 1040s were volume work, like anywhere from $200 to, I think 2 grand was the top of that set of kind of five brackets, those we did, we did a fixed fee and we would do one offs and hop in and adjust this or that. But just because on a volume basis it didn't make sense to do do all that work. Those ones we handled on fixed fee in my cast practice fees, monthly fees there range from a thousand dollars a month to 50 or 60 thousand dollars a month. Every single one of those, like we value price. Like we worked out what these people were willing to pay by having conversations and understanding how much work we were taking off the plate of their internal staff and how real was this pain. And so that was. It was disconnected from the complexity of the work, the number of people doing it. As long as we could do it profitably, that is, it didn't take us more time than we wanted to spend on the project for the money. Then the price was really led by what made sense to them. And in the cast practice, like doing the managed accounting, that was most often what is the replacement cost of doing this work. So do they have to go out and hire, you know, a controller for 130 grand a year to do this? Do they have to add another staff accountant and they really don't want to do that? Did they come to us because a $70,000 a year accountant left and they didn't want to have to rehire for it, or they weren't able to find somebody to do it? Well, they already have a number in their head of what that work is worth if they come to us and ask us to do it. But are we better than that $70,000 person? Absolutely. Because we're a collection of A bunch of different people. That person doesn't have to manage us and have to give us an office. So should we be charging 70 grand for that or something more? Those were some of the tactics we did to kind of back into what is their perceived value of this thing that we're doing for them. But in higher volume situations like 1099s, we would do 1099s for, you know, I don't know, 400 small businesses each year that I'm not going to value price. You know, the CAST clients where we're doing everything for them, we just took care of the 1099s. But the once a year tax clients, we're going to do a bunch of 1099s for them. We just sent out a boilerplate proposal where it was like based on volume. And so those were not value priced. Those were like the client needs to get them done. We were happy to help them out. We would give them some DIY resources, kind of try to encourage them to do them themselves because we really didn't like doing them. Also, I think if you give people a DIY path, it gives you more permission to charge more for the assisted paths. That's a great hack. Learned that one during COVID Give people tremendously useful DIY resources and it will give you much greater confidence to charge premium rates for the versions where you do it for them. But 1099s, we did fixed pricing like based on, you know, there's a price for the first five 1090 nines and then for every, you know, 20 after that or something like that. There were different tiers where we would track down the vendors for W9s where the, the client was responsible, tracking down vendors for W9s. But in our case, we did 1099s for one off 1099 projects at fixed rates. Just because it wasn't worth digging into, ooh, what is every single one of them worth to them? So there's going to be situations where the juice is worth the squeeze on your bigger contracts, bigger engagements to do the extra work of figuring out what is this worth worth to them for volume work not as big of a deal. You mentioned having a minimum for bronze. It is worth across the board having like minimums for what are we even willing to touch? And we handle that via like bucketing those 1040s into one of five sort of fee brackets. So we, it was literally this. It was individual tax prep 1, individual tax prep 2, individual tax prep 3, up to 5 and then 6 was the overflow where we did more Open ended billing. But one, it had a set price or a set price for bronze, silver, gold. Two, it had a set price for bronze, silver, gold. If something changed in the scope and it got more complex, we would look at, you know, what are the other clients in level three or level four, what was it most similar to? And we would bump them up to that level and that would impact their prices accordingly. Also, like, there were situations where we were solving extremely valuable pains for them. And so we would bump them up because we knew they were still getting a tremendous value if we moved them from individual tax prep 2 to individual tax prep 4. So a bit of a mix. I mean, the purest answer here, like from the value pricing nerds, is like, oh, you got a value price every single thing. But in my case, if I'm selling a $700 tax return and we're going to do a thousand of those as, like, is it, is it worth the time to be put into that? Probably not. That's my take. But for bigger projects, I do think it's worth the effort. Was that helpful? I love, like real live questions like that. I feel like they're a little bit more nuanced and it kind of, it stirs up some memories of like, how did we manage the exact same thing and what worked about that approach and what didn't work about that approach. I'd love to hear from you again. 516-980-4968. Just save that number in your phone. Jason Stats Company, the Internet. Next time you're on the train mowing the lawn. Oh, there's a fun challenge. Who can give me a call from the weirdest place? Not too weird. Not that kind of weird. Okay, stop it. Like the guy on his riding lawnmower. That's. There's a challenge. Leave me a voicemail. Because that's what, that's your great thinking time. Oftentimes, right when those ideas come up, just leave me a voicemail. I promise I won't answer the phone. I'm a millennial for goodness sakes. I would never do that. But whenever you're in that situation where, like, the ideas just start coming, please don't call me from the shower, but on the golf course when you're mowing, driving back from running the kids to school, drop me a voicemail. That'd be fun. Gang, thank you for being here. Let's. Should we do this again? Let's do this again. I'll see you there. Foreign. Hey, real quick podcast friends. I'm coming to a city near you running a bunch of live events. Before the end of the year, we're going to be at Intuit Connect in Vegas, we're going to be in Toronto, in Atlanta, Austin, Oklahoma City, Phoenix, Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Louisiana, Atlanta, Nashville, Chicago, Washington, D.C. philadelphia and Boston. If you are there or anywhere near there within a half tank, gas up there buddy. I want to see you. We put together some super cool events that I'm very excited about all around getting you and your team aligned. Heading into 2026, the biggest problem I had running a firm was I had an abundance of ideas but was always blocked by trying to get my team bought into those ideas and everybody working in the same direction. And it's why I believe the biggest way I can help you is actually getting your team inspired, getting everyone energized for the year to to come. So it's not just you, but also because these are live events, you're going to meet a whole bunch of other local practitioners as well, which can almost certainly unlock some cool things for you. I'm especially looking at you solo firm runners and side hustlers where your team effectively is the people you meet along the way, the relationships that you build, the people you can go to with questions when you get stuck on this or that. Going to be a super fun experience. Including for some of these events we're recording like a live interaction interactive version of the podcast where you'll get to be part of the conversation. Very, very excited for these. I want to see you there. To learn more, head over to jasononfirms.com events and I hope to see you there.