AI-Driven Pricing Systems: The Future of Value Pricing for Accountants

Let's dive in to today's session. So let's talk about AI driven pricing systems. I've called it the future of Value pricing. And because value pricing is really, really important, more important now than ever before, I'll explain soon the reason why that's the case.

Why it's more important than ever before. But I want to go through some of the foundations of value pricing. I was asked just before, just a few months back, I was asked, people said to me, mark, you seem to have stopped doing value pricing sessions on your podcasts and your live streams and doing a lot of AI stuff. And that's true because AI is a really big thing in the profession right now. So because people asked, I thought I'd do an update on some value pricing stuff and particularly in this AI world that we are in. So we're going to talk about some of the, I'll talk about some of the foundations of value pricing, just remind you of some key things. And then we'll look at why value pricing is more important today than it ever has been. And then we'll look at how can we take those foundations of value pricing, those principles of value pricing, and then use AI to help us with our pricing. And I'll talk a bit about how we can use tools like ChatGPT, we, or if you prefer tools like Claude or Google's Gemini, whatever, we can use these tools to help us create value pricing systems. I'm going to go through the sorts of things that you can do to really help you with value pricing. So let's start with some value pricing foundations first. And let's start with a real, let's start the right to beginning, which is what is value pricing? So what is value pricing? Well, essentially there are really only two ways to price. That's it, just two ways to price. It's really, really simple. There is cost plus pricing and there's value pricing. That's it. Anything else you hear of is simply a pricing methodology. It's a way of coming up with a price. So that would include, for example, time based billing, menu pricing, fixed pricing, flat fees, dynamic pricing, demand based pricing, whether it's contingent pricing, percentage pricing, are lots of different pricing models, lots of different ways of coming up with a price. But all of those pricing methodologies are all either a form of time based billing or a form of value pricing or sometimes a hybrid, a combination of the two. So we only have two ways to price. Time based billing and value pricing. And traditionally in the accounting profession and in many professions, we've historically used time based billing using timesheets. Time based billing, which is a form of cost plus pricing. Cost plus pricing simply means we work out the costs of providing a product or solution, we add on our hoped for profit margin and magically there's our price. Hourly rates. Time based billing is a form of that. It's a crazy way to price for all sorts of reasons, one of which is customers hate time based billing and another is because it ignores what they want. Customers don't care about our internal costs. What value pricing does is it flips it on its head. Basically, we start with the customer first. What is the customer? What do they value? And actually more specifically, what's their perception of the value, what do they value? And then we price based upon that value. So that's value pricing. It means though that we have to figure out, well, what do people value? And the problem is the downside and the reason why people struggle to move to value pricing is, is because it's difficult. It's hard. And it's hard for a number of reasons, one of which is that value itself is subjective. You can't touch, feel or measure value. And as my friend Ron Baker says, value is in the hearts and minds of customers. And what that means is everybody values things differently. So if we can't touch it, we can't feel it, we can't measure it. Everybody values things differently. How on earth do we do value pricing? And I think this is the reason why in the accounting profession and the legal profession, we tend to stick with hourly rates and timesheets because we feel that we can, because we can measure it, because it's more objective. We can measure hours spent. It feels like it's an easy way of pricing, but it's a crazy way to price. It's crazy because clients hate it. They want to price upfront. It's crazy as well, because in the 25 years now I've been teaching value pricing to the accounting profession and my own experience running my accounting firm before that is that when you price based on value, with value pricing, firms that move to value pricing get better prices. They make more money, they have more successful firms. So we must switch from time based to value pricing because A, our customers hate it and B, we make less money. So it is difficult. It's difficult because it's subjective. But nevertheless, we have to figure out how to do it. And it's more important today that than ever before. And the reason for that is because one of the things we've seen over the years is that as technology comes in, there are things that we used to charge for that we give away for free now because the technology does it automatically. I think of, for example, in the UK we have something called abbreviated financial statements. In other words, for small companies, most companies, they don't have to file their profit and loss account and other sensitive information on public record. They can file abbreviated accounts. It's not called that anymore. I forget the name. I've not practiced now in practice since I sold my accounting firm 20 years ago. They changed the name of it from abbreviated, but that's what I grew up with anyway, in the old days, I remember back in 1988, when I entered the profession, it was a very manual process. I worked for a large eight partner firm and they had no computers. Everything was word processed. And because it took time to create the abbreviated financial statements, they would charge for doing exactly that. And every limited company, every corporate, would get a bill at the end of the job that would list as a separate line item abbreviated financial statements. And back in Those days, in 1988, the firm I work for would typically charge 300 pounds, $450 for doing exactly that. And then of course, a few years later, in the early 1990s, all accounting firms in the UK used software to create annual financial statements. And within that software was a button that you pressed that says, do you want abbreviated financial statements? And you would press that and it would come out as in seconds. And back in the early 2000s, I did some benchmarking studies to ask how much firms of accountants charge for various services. And one of the questions I asked is, how much do you charge for doing abbreviated financial statements? And everybody said, zero. Firms don't charge for that anymore. And here's the interesting thing. It's a valuable service because it means companies don't have to disclose as much information on public record. It was a valuable service in 1988, so much so they're willing to pay £300 for doing that. And so the question is, well, how much has the value changed since? Well, it hasn't. It's just as valuable today. And so adjusting for inflation, we should arguably charge £500, £600 for doing that service. But all accounting firms do it work for free because technology has reduced it to the press of a button. Okay, so why is value pricing more important than ever before? Well, as you know, we're in this increasing AI world. The things that have happened in the last two and a bit years since ChatGPT version 3 was released to the public in November 2022 is extraordinary. Some of the things that we can do today with technology, with AI are things that three years ago we just couldn't have imagined. It is extraordinary. And those of you that follow me regularly will know exactly what I'm talking about. All forms of AI has changed significantly and we've heard all the news that jobs are going to be replaced. Lots of jobs are going to disappear. That's happening, that's happening. I keep hearing news stories of large companies making large SC redundancies because AI can do the task of humans much more accurately and much faster. So how does that affect us in the profession? Well, we are near the top of the list and a lot of compliance work as we know it today will soon be automated. Bookkeeping work will be automated definitely by the end of the decade and I think within two to three years because the AI is getting so sophisticated that you won't need people to do data entry. The bookkeeping will just happen automatically. And while some of you might say that'll never happen, you just have to look at the progress that's been made just in last year or two. So that raises a question, actually raises a lot of questions about the future of the profession. But essentially bookkeepers and accountants will still be needed. We will still have a role, we will still create value, partly because as the world moves to AI, people will more and more value and crave human connections. And so that's going to be a key part of what we do going forward, is build those human connections with our clients. And so there will always be value with accountants and bookkeepers, that's not going to go away. You will always be valuable. But what will happen is as things like the bookkeeping, the time to do it reduces to zero, just like accounts production software did in the early 1990s. What we will see is firms that cling to time based billing will find that they'll be increasing or decreasing their prices. And eventually things like doing tax returns and, and doing bookkeeping will be done almost for free. And so we mustn't price based on time, we've got to price based on value. Value pricing is more important than ever before. So with that said, what are some of the foundations of value pricing? Some of the foundations are firstly, and this is really important, as I said, my friend Ron Baker says value is in the hearts and minds of customers. Everybody values things differently and only the customer can determine value. It's not for us to determine the value of what we do, it's for our customers. And every Customer values things differently. So we have to figure out how do we charge different customers different prices? We have to charge different customers different prices, even if the time it takes to do the work is the same for different customers. It doesn't matter about time. They're not buying hours from us, they're buying a result, they're buying knowledge, they're buying solutions, they're buying value, ultimately. So we have to figure out what each customer values and charge different prices. There are many ways to do that, but the simplest one, the easiest place to start, which also happens to be one of the most powerful things we can do, is to use menu pricing. You probably now know what this is because it's everywhere. But when I first started teaching the profession in February 2000, almost nobody had heard of it. Menu pricing is simply where we give people a range of a choice of different packages. Think of it, if you like, as the bronze, silver, gold. Pretty much every SaaS business software company does this. Now, every successful business offers different choices, and you should too. And that's for every single service. If it's bookkeeping, you should give the client a choice of different bookkeeping packages. If it's tax returns, give them a choice of different packages. Whatever the service is, however small it is, give them choices. Because customers love choice. So give them a choice. If you go to Apple's website to look for an imac computer, you will see when you go there, they give you three choices. There's three versions of an imac computer that you can buy right now. Why do they do that? They do it because there's a lot of powerful psychology built into menu pricing giving people different choices. Partly, customers love choice, but actually what happens is very often when people see the value in higher options, they will choose to pay you more money and buy those bigger options. If you only offered a single tax return preparation service, then you're leaving money on the table because some of your customers will see value in you doing more and they will choose to buy a more expensive package. And I see this all the time. I've been teaching this for over 20 years. And I often get firms in the value pricing academy telling me, mark, I've started to give people three choices. And interestingly, I have lots of clients and sometimes I say most clients choose the premium option, the most expensive one, and that's great. That's what happens. Some people do want more from you when they understand that they're getting more. So foundation number one, we must charge different customers different prices. And one of the ways to do that and get started is to give people a choice. Three packages. If you want to find out more about that, then come along to our profitable Bookkeeping conference and we'll go deeper on that. Okay. That's the first. Second Foundation. Second foundation is with every service that we offer, we must figure out how to create more value. We must add more value. Not just once every year, we should ask this question. Take bookkeeping. Every year, you should ask yourself the question, how can we make our bookkeeping more valuable? What more could we do this year to make it more valuable? This should be. This should be an annual thing that you do, add more value. Why? Well, firstly, because I think it's the right thing to do. As professionals, I believe our role, our core focus, our primary goal should not be to make more profit. Our primary goal should be always as professionals, how can we better serve our clients? How can we change their lives? How can we do more for them? And when we do that, they will pay us more money. So don't focus on the money. Don't focus on the profit. Focus on doing more for your clients, because that's the right thing to do. And when you do that really well and you use value pricing, you will be richly rewarded, and you deserve to be. When you change people's lives, also when you create more value, you differentiate yourselves from your competitors, those cheap accountants, those cheap bookkeepers that just do the basics. So you need to add more value because it's the right thing to do. You differentiate yourself and you'll get better prices. You will make more money. So that's the second thing. You have to create more value for your clients. And the third foundation I want to cover, which I think is the most important skill when it comes to value pricing. Many people think that value pricing is just about coming up with a number. And that's not the case. The number almost doesn't matter. It does, but the number is based on pricing, based on the customer's value. And we do that by using techniques like menu pricing, by giving people a choice of different options, giving different options. Those people that see more value, those people with a higher willingness to pay, they will opt in and choose to pay your more expensive version. And those that don't will choose something cheaper. So menu pricing is a great way of getting priced, getting the best prices. And what I love about menu techniques like menu pricing, it's a system. It's a system. And systems are testable and measurable. So let's say you offer three tax returns and you decide that you want to. And I know you're from different countries to the uk, so, but I'll use GBP for my example. You decide to offer.

Clients three choices and it may be typically you offer clients a choice based on a price, based on the entry level. And then you offer every client another price for the middle option, which is always 20% more. And the top option is, let's say, 50% more. And then you, you start talking to clients and they pick a choice, they pick one of the options and they buy your tax return preparation service. And what happens is over a few months, you'll start to collect data and you'll start to see patterns emerging. As to is everybody choosing the cheapest one or the middle option or the top one? What's the distribution? What are people choosing? And that's the marketplace's way of telling you whether what they value and what are the right prices. So, for example, if you are using menu pricing and you're finding most people are choosing your premium option, great. That's telling you that the market values what you do and you're too cheap because you don't want everyone buying your premium. If everyone's buying your premium, that means everyone is probably willing to pay you even more money. But there isn't a more expensive option. You want most people to be choosing the middle one. So we. So coming up with the price is about just having systems in place. Let's just go back to where I was. So we've talked about two things so far. Charging different customers different prices and adding more value. Number three, the most important thing of all, and this is key to value pricing, it's not coming up with the number, it's how we communicate the value, how we communicate. This is so important. If you've ever presented a price to somebody, and you probably have at some point, and you've heard those words that we all hate, we dread. We present the price and they say, that's a bit expensive. That's more than I was expecting. We hate that. We hate rejection. We hate people saying no.

And so we then have to ask ourselves the question, though. Well, why do they say that? Why do people say that's expensive? And I know for a fact that that's not because you're expensive. I know you're not. You are too cheap. I haven't yet outside the Big Four met an expensive accountant or an expensive bookkeeper. You need to put your prices up. So why do people say that's expensive? The reason they say that's expensive is because it's an automatic thing we say as customers when we see a price and we just don't understand the value, we don't understand what we're getting. And so we have to be better as a profession at communicating value, at using the right words. And those of you in the value pricing academy will know that I'm a big fan of systems. We need to systemize the words. And we can do that through pricing brochures that we use when we meet the client to walk them through a process of saying the right words in the right order, of talking about the pain, of talking about the end result that they'll get the afters of, talking through why we have different options and going through those options and building up the value of those options. Words are so important, it's critical. So they are the core foundations of value pricing. There is so much more I could teach you. I've been teaching it for over 20 years. But that's really at the heart of it, the core. So let's now start to think about how can we use AI to help us? Because AI is extraordinary now, what it can do. And I know that some of those things we've talked about, many people struggle with those they don't know, for example, how to create three packages. A common question I get is as soon as I mention tax returns, I get, people say, yes, but it's just a tax return. How can I create different options of tax returns? Well, you can. With creative thinking, you can create different packages for anything, for anything. The trouble is, as a profession, we're great with numbers. We're not always great with creativity. That doesn't matter because we now have our AI assistants to help us with this. So let's talk a little bit about what can we use AI for when it comes to pricing. And there are many different things that we can do that we can do with pricing. I know some of you are in the value pricing academy, so if you follow me a lot, you'll know I'm a big fan of creating standard prompts and creating a prompt library of great prompts that we can just cut and paste and use whenever we want to do something. And that includes pricing prompts to help us with value pricing. So I'm going to go through some of these pricing prompts, give you some ideas of what you can do. I'm going to walk through and talk about different things we can do, and then I'll pick one of them and we'll do a practical example and go a little bit deeper. Let's Start with just talking about some of the things we can do with.

AI when it comes to pricing. So the first thing we can do is I talked about we need to add more value. We have to add more value and we should do it every single year. Well, one of the things we can do is we could create a prompt, especially designed prompt, that's there to analyze what you currently do for a particular service and then identify ways that we can create more value. AI is great for that, for crafting a prompt for adding more value. So you can apply that to existing services. And you could take, if you have a standard prompt in your prompt library, then every year, once a year, you could run that prompt and you could run it for each of your existing services. You could take your bookkeeping, you could put a copy of all the things you do of bookkeeping into ChatGPT or your large language model of choice, run the prompt and it will tell you what more you could possibly do. You could then put in your cleanup service, your tax turn preparation service. You could run that prompt multiple times and in the space of just a few minutes, you'll get so many great ideas of how you could add more value. What if it's not an existing service? What if you're thinking of designing a brand new service? You want to, you've decided by, you've been listening to clients and you've realized that a lot of your best clients have all got a particular challenge, a problem. And you've realized perhaps you could have a create a solution for that challenge. You could create a new service offering, for example, business advisory. And you're not thought, you're not really sure what you could do. What could you do as part of that service? And how could you create more value? Well, we could create a prompt that will help us design services to tell us what we should build into a service. And I'll probably pick that one and show you exactly how that would work. But let me give you some more ideas. I want to give you some ideas first to get your brain thinking about possibilities of what you could do using chat, GPT or whatever large language model you prefer to help you with these AI with these value pricing tasks. So there's a couple of ideas to help you either add value or create services. What about this idea of charging different customers different prices? Well, we want to come up with different options. It may be that you've got a tax turn preparation service and you're not sure how to build it into a bronze, silver, gold. Well, we could do a Number of different prompts. I teach in the Value Pricing Academy. This seven step framework for doing menu pricing, been teaching it for years. And what we could do with each of those seven steps, we could use AI. So one of the things that I talk about is the fact that we should, when we are, when we build our packages, we want to think carefully about the name of those packages and the description. Because I refer to bronze, silver, gold only. Because when I say that, you know exactly what I mean. But bronze, silver, gold isn't very good language. Who. Nobody values bronze. And yet it's probably a great service. We need to name our packages a little bit more creatively. We need some creativity. We want package names that really highlight what's this package all about? And we need to describe them as well. We need to be able to describe in just a few words who is this package ideal for and what's the big benefit of that package? And the reason we want to do that is because we want to make it easy for our clients to understand which one is just right for them. This is particularly important if you want to put your package on a website. One of the mistakes I see with a lot of accounting firms is they put their packages on a website. And I teach the power of the, what I call the tick list technique of having a list of what you do with ticks and crosses. And that's great in a face to face meeting because we can have a conversation and guide the client. But when I see it on people's websites, it sometimes creates so much complexity and confusion, it puts people off. And so the most important thing to have on your website with your packages is a really good name and a really good description of what it is, the detail you can cover in a meeting, how to do that. Again, you could use a prompt that does that really well. Then of course, you want to build your packages. What do you put in them? What goes in the entry level package or the bronze package? What goes in the silver package? What goes in the gold package? Well, what you want to do is decide, well, what will you do? What will be the things you do as part of bookkeeping or tax returns? And then start to allocate it to those packages. But there's a right way of doing it and a wrong way of doing it. The right way is when we're building packages, a mistake I see is that people think, you know what, I want to create loads of value, I'm going to put everything I can think of into those packages. And the trouble is if you don't give some thought to that. If you put too much into a package, then you put people off. Because it's a fact of life that as customers, we don't like to feel, we don't want to feel like we're paying for things we don't need. And so if you have 20 things in your tax return package and half those things a client doesn't value, they're not going to buy that package. Even though they love the other 10, they're not going to buy it. So what we do is we have to think about who are the different types of customer that we have the different types of clients, who are the different types of clients that might buy a tax return service. And we create an avatar, a customer avatar. We create three customer avatars. If we're going to have three packages, we create three customer avatars. And having got three customer avatars where we know for each one what's important to them, what are they looking for with the tax turn service, what's really important, what they want to avoid. When we have those different avatars, then we can start to allocate more sensibly the things we're going to do to those packages. Now, that might sound difficult. I know when I've been teaching in the past, menu pricing, some people struggle with this concept of thinking about a custom avatar for each package. It's so powerful. It's the most important part of menu pricing. Because when you're clear on that, it then makes it much easier to decide and know what are the best things to build into each of those three packages. Because you want to make sure that each package, a set of things you do that's going to appeal to a particular type of person, that's how you sell more stuff. So how do you do that? Again, we can do that with prompting. We can do that with a great prompt for. With chatgpt. Or I say chatgpt. When I say that, I mean whatever your large language model is. But Most people use ChatGPT, so I'll stick with that. Okay, what else could we do? Well, I said to you that communication is really powerful. And so what that means is that when you are communicating, when you're having a pricing conversation or you're thinking of the words on your website, or you're building a pricing brochure, then.

When you, if you simply tell people about or list the things that you do, we know from marketing, for example, that people don't buy features, they buy benefits. So when you say as part of let's say bookkeeping as one of the features. If you say, we will reconcile your bank account, I know you know, that's really critically important. It's really valuable. But only the customer can determine value. I said that earlier. Only the customer determines value. And so when you say to a client, if you ever say to a client, as part of this bookkeeping service, we will reconcile your bank account, I can guarantee you've never had this reaction. You've never had, oh, wow, that's amazing. I've always wanted a bookkeeper who will reconcile my bank account. That's extraordinary. When can we start? That happens never. It happens never. Why? Because nobody values a bank reconciliation. Why? Because your clients have no idea what that means and what it does for them. So what we have to do when we're communicating value is make sure that anytime we talk about a feature, we turn it into a benefit. That's one of the techniques we can use in communication. Words are so important. So how can we do that really easily. Again, ChatGPT is really good. We could have a prompt where we feed it all the features, all the things that we're going to do, which we could have got from one of those earlier ones I mentioned, Product Value Adder, Service Designer. We give it a list of what we're going to do, and then the prompt is designed to come up with a better form of words that communicates the benefit of all of those things. Now, those ideas I've given you so far are great ideas for dealing with the foundations of value pricing. And I've written many different prompts for doing doing those sorts of things. But we can then go to a more advanced level. There are many other amazing things that we could do. So I've talked about the power of having a brochure, a pricing brochure that becomes a system. It's a script. It's the words that you say. So how do we build pricing brochures? Well, we could create a series of prompts to do exactly that. We could have prompts that help us write amazing brochures that gives the scripts the words to use so we build up the value properly. That would be a great thing to do. Another thing that we could do, I taught this in the value pricing academy just a few weeks back, is.

A brochure is great for your existing services that you do frequently. If you're a bookkeeper and your core service is bookkeeping, then of course you'll need a system for communicating the value of bookkeeping. But what if you meet a client or Potential client. And what they want is something a little bit unusual that you don't normally do. Perhaps they want you to do CFO work and you don't do a lot of CFO work. Or perhaps they want you to help them get their business ready for a business sale, or they want an exit strategy. Well, what we could then go away and do is we could go and think about that and we could craft a proposal and put the price in the proposal. But to write an effective proposal can take two, three, four hours. There's a skill to writing proposals because we have to use the right words in the right order. When we write proposals, we need to talk about the pain, we need to talk about the solutions. We need to make sure we're clear on the scope of the work, what's outside the scope of the work, what are your responsibilities, the client's responsibilities. There are key elements to build into proposals. So if you want to write effective proposals, you need to learn how to do it. And they can take three or four hours to write a great proposal, or we could create a little workflow with AI to do exactly that. I was teaching in the Value Price Academy just in February. I was teaching how we can run a series of three prompts inside a ChatGPT canvas and create a really impressive, effective proposal in less than 25 minutes. It's really powerful stuff. What else could we do? Another thing that we need to be better at with value pricing, this is a key skill with value pricing is when we have the value conversation, when we meet with a potential client or an existing client that's got some problems. There are three phases that we should go through in the conversation. The first phase I call uncover the value. That's about asking the right questions to make sure we understand exactly what their pain points are, what are the problems, the challenges. And we want to start to uncover what it is they really value. Because the better we do that, the better we do that, the better the solutions that we can provide. So we must ask the right questions. That's the starting point of every value conversation. Then when we've done that, we build the value. That's when we then start to use the right words, perhaps with a brochure, to then communicate the value of our proposed solution. And then in step three, we then use price to capture the value. We want a system for pricing. I teach those three steps. That's the three steps of every conversation where there's a pricing conversation. And one of the things that people find challenging there is what are the Right questions to ask to uncover value. Because this is a skill, we need to ask the right questions so that we properly uncover all the pain points and we drill down to all the consequences. So how do we do that? Again, AI is really good at this. We can get AI to help us develop questions for a meeting that we can then use that help to uncover the value.

And then another challenge that I know people have is, okay, they know this idea of asking questions, I call it the fact find. But one of the key things about that is this concept of drilling down. Whenever you ask a client what their challenges are, their problems, we need to ask follow up questions to really get granular and work out exactly what the underlying problem is. Because the more we can drill down deep, the better the solution that we create, the more we can build the value. For example, if, if someone says they want a cash flow forecast, that's not what they want. Nobody ever wants a cash flow forecast. Nobody's interested in a cash flow forecast. They're interested in what it does for them. And we have to ask questions to find out why do they want a cash flow forecast. And we have to keep asking questions over and over again to find out what is the real reason, what's the real problem they're uncovering they want to solve. And this is a skill and we can use AI to help us with this. So one of the things that we can do with AI is we can use it for role playing. We can create a prompt that then does a role play of how that conversation would go. We could also do a role play for the next stage of the conversation, the pricing conversation. We could do a role play to have a conversation with ChatGPT where we go through the conversation of talking about price. And then if another thing that we sometimes struggle with is how do we deal with objections when we reveal the price and the client says that's way too expensive, what do we say? How do we react to that? Again, ChatGPT can help us with this because we can have role playing built in, which is really powerful. I'll be teaching this very soon, the Value Pricing Academy and showing you the exact prompts. So with all that said, let me now show a practical example. Let's go back to one of those ideas I've given you. Hopefully lots of ideas of different ways that you, you could use ChatGPT to help you with the foundations of value pricing, but also the more advanced skills you need, like creating brochures, creating proposals, or developing the questions to ask, or using it for Things like role playing, some really powerful stuff. What I'm going to do is pick one of these and I'm going to go with service designer. I'm going to take this prompt and put it into ChatGPT. In fact, I did it earlier, so I just want to demonstrate the sorts of things that we can do now. I know some people are listening on the podcast and I'm going to try and explain it very clearly, but you can always hop across to my YouTube channel if you are more visual. So I'm in ChatGPT right now and I cut and pasted this standard prompt that I would use for designing a brand new service. And what I have in mind right now, imagine you're a small accounting firm. Imagine that you've just noticed recently, perhaps with the cost of living crisis, a lot of clients are saying to you, I'm having problems with debt. And perhaps you're thinking, I could probably build a service to help people get clear of debt quicker and then start building wealth. So one of the things we could do is we could run a prompt. And let me just tell you how we might structure that prompt. So we might say something like this. We might say, you are a product manager specializing in service design with expertise in customer centric product development and feature prioritization. So that's giving ChatGPT a role. If you understand prompt engineering, giving it a role is really powerful because we get a better result when we give it a role to play. If we ask ChatGPT to analyze some financial data and we say you are an expert, you are a financial accountant skilled in analyzing financial data, the response it will give will be the sort of response you'd expect from a financial accountant. It will be a better response, more nuanced, more detailed. So a role is a really important thing to give. And every prompt I ever write, the prompts I write for people in the value pricing academy, I've written over 100 prompts. Now, everyone has a role because that's really important. Give ChatGPT a role to play. Then we have a task. And it says here, your task is to design a service offering for a business type. That service outcome provide detailed features and things the business type can do as part of this new service offering to service outcome. Now that might sound like gobbledygook, what I just said there. That's because I've put in the prompt in curly brackets. I put business type and service outcome in curly brackets because that's a variable. Because I'm a big fan of systems. Systemizing processes. And one of the things we can do with our prompts, any prompt that we're going to run frequently, we can build in variables. And so at the end of the prompt we can put in what is the variable. In this case, I've defined business type as a small accounting firm and the service outcome is to help a client get out of debt and build wealth. So if you want to run this prompt for a different service, all you have to do is change at the end of the prompt the variable. If you're a bookkeeping firm, just put business type equals bookkeeping firm, service outcome, helping people catch up with their bookkeeping, whatever it might well be. And then the rest of the prompt can stay as a template, as a system. So that's variables. And then I've told it to specifically write each feature in a particular format feature and then what it is. And I've also then asked it to use examples to guide its response. Examples are really powerful because all large language models are basically, they're not intelligent. They simply look for patterns, they predict the next word in the sequence. And so giving examples, really powerful. So if you want to build a prompt that you're going to use repeatedly, I call it a prompt template. Then always put some examples in for it to follow. So it knows exactly what the outcome needs to look like. So that's why this is a long prompt. It might look scary, but most of it is just I think three examples of what I'm looking for. Okay, so that's the prompt I wanted to come up with in this case, a list of things I could do if I want to do a brand new service for help helping a client get out of debt and build wealth. And when I ran this prompt, this is what it said. It said service offering, helping clients get a debt and build wealth. What we could do is comprehensive debt review. We will conduct an in depth assessment of your financial situation, identifying all outstanding debts, interest rates and payment terms to develop a personalized debt profile. Great, that's a great thing. We could do debt prioritization strategy and it goes on to say what that could be. We could do customer repayment plans and it goes on to say what that would be. We could offer negotiation with creditors. We could do budgeting and expense optimization. We could do automated payment systems. We could offer credit score monitoring and improvement. We could do wealth building roadmap. We could do financial coaching and accountability, tax efficiency planning, emergency fund planning, wealth accumulation strategies. I think that's a really good list if you want to build a new service to add value to your clients around, help them clear debt, then that would be a great list of things that we could do. Now you might not want to do all of those things. You might not want to do negotiation with creditors where it says we will liaise with lenders on your behalf, negotiate better terms, etc. You may not want to do that. That's fine. You pick the things that you would like to do. And the great thing about large language models having then put that prompt in. If you decide that's not enough, you can always then have a follow up that says give me five more things I could do. And you could keep going until you've got the list that you want for building that particular service. And a similar prompt could be used to take an existing service and add more value. And then we can use other prompts to do things like start to put that into packages. Okay, we've covered a lot of stuff. We've covered some of the foundations of value pricing, why it's more important than ever. And then we've looked at a whole bunch of ways that we can use AI to help us with value pricing. Right. We have I think about 12 minutes left. So I'm going to answer questions and see what's in the chat box. While I am doing that, let me just remind you that next week we are running the Profitable Bookkeeping conference. Sarah perhaps will put the link into the chat once more. We are giving away some free places right now. We are almost sold out. But if you want to learn more about what we talked about today, value pricing, bookkeeping services, we're going to go over three days or three half days online. We're going to go through how to build your value pricing systems for bookkeeping and we'll also talk a little bit more about AI because it's so powerful. Right, let's see what I have in the chat and let's see what questions I've got. If you haven't done a question yet, now would be a great time to put it in. I'm not seeing questions jumping out at me, but I'm just going through SUS here. I can see that Brian's here again. Lots of people from the uk. Hi Brian, great to see you. I know you come to these sessions regularly. Affiliated accounts, that's abbreviated financial accounts, filtered accounts. I think it's another name as well. It's just gone out of my head. Okay.

We'Ve got hi there from Vegas. The name's gone again. I'm so sorry. It'll come to me. I always have the same problem. I know on LinkedIn we've got some people Robin Joyce is here from I don't know where you're from Robin now anymore. I know you were from Moscow originally for many years. I've not seen you for many for a long time. Hope all is good with you. Robin.

Nick is here. Hi Nick, good to see you. Not seen you for many years. Nick's on LinkedIn right now. I can't see the comments on LinkedIn so Sarah's just putting them in for me. Right. I have got some questions come in. So let me get to those.

We have.

Yeah and I'm going to apologize again because I'm not quite sure whether it's Ouija or yj. I'll go with we J. I hope that's okay. Anyway, any tips where we can explore Prompt Engineering more?

There are courses now you can buy on Prompt Engineering. I've been teaching Prompt engineering for two years now in the accounting profession. Well, a bit less than that. I started learning prompt engineering two years ago in February, March of 2022 and for the last year and a half I've been teaching the profession Prompt Engineering. So there are courses out there for learning Prompt engineering. There are videos on YouTube, you can go and explore those. But if you want specific Prompt Engineering for accounting firms, then explore some of the things that we do. In fact, I might get Sarah to tell my team to put in the description underneath later some links to some stuff. We have some video training courses which include Prompt Engineering. In fact, we've just created a special bundle that we're going to go live with very soon with three AI courses, one of which is all on Prompt Engineering. Or you could join the Value Pricing and I will put that on the screen at some point probably now.

If you have not yet seen the Value Pricing Academy, Sarah will put a link in the chat. You could join the Value Pricing we have three levels I always recommend. If you're not sure where to start, start with level one. You can always upgrade and work through as you want more resources. But we have AI built into all three levels of the Value Pricing Academy. In level one I have a course which includes Prompt Engineering and my.

Colleague Emily. She does a monthly session for Academy members on Prompt Engineering and AI every month. So lots of you can get lots of help there. Where was I? Let's see, that was that question I think I've answered next question which I think was from if I remember right, I think it was was Shahad, forgive me If I got that wrong, I think it was Shahad. How do you build a library of prompts to use over and over from a menu? Okay, so the library of prompts, that's a great question. Let me just explain that. So what I've done over the years, I learned prompt engineering. I started about two years ago. I realized the importance of having standard prompts because it speeds up time. I have prompts I use for things like writing blog posts, writing social posts, blog posts, for.

Coming up with strategies for advisory. There's so many things that we could build prompts for that we could use over and over again. I have prompts for answering emails in my style. So whenever you've got a task you do frequently, you could create a prompt for that.

And to save you time, put it in a library, build a prompt library, put your prompts somewhere. Where do you put those prompts? Well, there's a number of options. I'm a big fan of Trello. What you can see now is Trello. You can get a free Trello account. I think Trello is great for building a prompt library. If you get Trello, essentially you build a Trello board. This one's called Prompt library. You create columns, which I've done for different types of prompts. So I have ideation and learning prompts, marketing prompts, content creation, writing an ebook prompt, pricing prompts. Of course, we've gone through business advisory prompts, financial data analysis, and so on and so forth. So you can categorize all your prompts with columns and then you can put a card for each prompt that you can click on. And then all you have to do is you can just copy and paste that prompt directly into your large language model and then just change the variables. So going back to the question, Shahad, Trello is a great way of doing it if you are a Trello fan. I'm a Trello fan and I know many people in the value pricing Academy also love Trello 3 for a prompt library. I know some people love Notion. I know some people build their prompt library inside Notion. If you like that particular tool, any kind of database tool could be used to build a prompt library. Or if you only got a few prompts, you could just put them in Word documents and then just think of a folder structure for your Word documents. So lots of options there for building a prompt library. Of course, it's Tracy. Apologize, Tracey. I don't know why.

I sometimes forget. I apologize. Right, next question. How many of the big four fully embraced value based pricing? I don't know is the answer. I don't know. I was talking to Deloitte a few years ago. I went out to Australia to speak at some QuickBooks events out there. And I remember meeting one of the senior partners of Deloitte because they were just trying to get on board with value pricing and they were struggling with it. I suspect they're getting better. I have noticed over the years, I've occasionally gone to their websites, they've started to use menu pricing. I think I saw KPMG launch their different offerings in that way about five or six years ago. When I looked at the way they set out their options, they did it very badly. They didn't understand the psychology behind it and how to lay out the options, but at least they were trying. I think the Big Four getting better at it.

But I don't know in detail. To be honest. I'm not really interested in what the big firms do. I prefer working with small accounting firms, sole practitioners, small accounting firms, because I think today is a great time to be alive, to be a small business, because we can scale ourselves so much more with technology, with AI. Why have all the hassle of building a big firm and employing people when we can do so much more with technology? So, and I think most of the people here will relate to that, because most of you, I think, are smallish, smaller accounting firms. So I don't work with the Big four, and I don't want to work with the Big four. Right. Next question, if there is one. I can't see any more QQs.

But there was some, so Jacqueline didn't put a QQ so I nearly missed this. Sorry, my video stream cut out. Not sure if it was already asked. Can I buy prompt templates libraries rather than writing my own?

I don't know of any prompt libraries of prompts specifically for accounting firms other than the one that I've created because I just love AI. I love prompt engineering, I love systems. So the prompt library that I've mentioned a couple of times, if you do want to get access to those prompts, you get them as part of the value pricing academy. And if you join our level one, which is a great place to start, you get some great prompts to get you started. And if you want the more advanced prompts, they're ones we deliver to the higher level. So if you don't want to build this yourself, and it does take time. Each of these prompts are quite long because they do a very good job. And typically these prompts take me about an hour to write. Then I have to test them, tweak them, change them. So an average prompt is perhaps an hour to write, perhaps a bit longer. I've got over 100 prompts in the last over the course of last year and so far this year. So you can imagine it's a lot of hours of work. But I do it because it's creating. I know. I get so much feedback from Academy members saying they love using the prompts. It makes their life so much easier. So that's how you can get our prompt library. You get it as being a Value Pricing Academy member. If you want other people's prompts. There are people that do create prompts.

They. They're questionable about the quality and they're not specifically for accountants. Anyway, if you. Sarah, put a link earlier on Jacqueline as well. If you're not ready for the Value Price Academy, we do. Have I mentioned our monthly weekly newsletter Every Monday we do share in our email a prompt of the week. So if you just want to start with a few, make sure you're on our list and our VIP list and you get our prompt of the week every Monday, 4 o' clock UK time it comes out right are that we have three minutes left. I'm looking. I can't see any more people saying with QQ in front. So if you haven't put the qq, I might have missed what missed questions. So I don't know if Meryl, this is a question or not. As a member of the Mastery, the Prompt Library loan is worth a monthly subscription, not to mention effective pricing. Oh, thank you, Meryl, for that feedback. I really appreciate that. And while I remember, if you've got something of value out of today's session, if you've learned something, if it's been valuable, please give it the thumbs up. The like, whatever. Feel free to share. Share the recording. That would be awesome. Thank you, Sarah. Once again, that's the link to if you need to get on the VIP list. Yep. I can see people hitting the thumbs up button. So thank you so much for that. I really appreciate it. Right, Anything else?

Jacqueline's from Argentina.

But you're in Brazil right now. Okay. So you're probably speaking the same language as me because we're in Portugal, we speak Portuguese. I'm still learning it. Right. Any other questions? We have two minutes left and I can't see any more questions. So if there aren't any, I will shut up. But I'm just going through the comments right now to see if I've missed something. Just bear with me a second. I don't want to miss any questions.

I think they're just comments.

And lots of great comments that I will read when we play out with the music.

Okay, I can't see any questions so unless one pops in the next 10 seconds. Let me tell you about my next live stream which I think is in a few weeks time. It's in March. I can't remember the date, but if you want you'll get the email. Actually Emily's doing the next live stream in a few weeks, so check out Emily's livestream. You'll see them scheduled on my YouTube channel if you go to the live the livestream section. My next one is I'm only teaching how you can get financial data insights with AI. So I know your accounting firms financial data analysis is really powerful and I'm going to talk about some of the the best ways to do that with AI because as you probably know, if you use ChatGPT, there are lots of different models now and it's difficult sometimes to know which is the right model, which is the best thing to use for particular things. So we're going to look at that particular topic next month, which I can't wait to share with you. Okay. Thank you so much for coming along. We had a few new people as well, which is awesome. What I will do now is play out with some music for about three minutes and it gives me chances to read all the final comments. So please, if you've got any comments, let me know what was the most valuable thing out of today's session. I can put it up on the feed and I will see you all soon. Goodbye for now.