Effective Pricing with Kimme Lafayette: Foundations and First Steps

So today is the brand new start again to the effective pricing course. Today we're going to be talking about foundations and first steps. We did do this session last year, but like all of the content through Mark's programs, we do repeat it for new people that have joined the program. I have added a bit more content. And also last year we only did the course for half the year. And, and this year I am doing it every month, so I'm adding more content. I'm going to be able to slow down a little bit and go through some things in a bit more detail and, and yeah, so that's why we're starting over. So today will be 90 minutes instead of 60. I've added some more content. I'm really excited that we're running the course again. It's. It's probably. Mark knows, Sarah knows. It's probably one of my most favorite parts of being part of the Value Pricing Academy. But for anybody that doesn't know me, I'm a certified professional bookkeeper. I'm in southern Ontario in wine region in Niagara, where we have a lot of wineries around here. I have a boutique firm, meaning that I'm. I'm fairly small, both in regards to. To the number of team members that I have, but as well as the number of clients that I have. Even though I do keep a small client list, I do do large volumes of work for them. So it keeps my firm busy still. And that's just part about who my ideal client is, which we'll talk about a few times throughout the course. My firm's won a platinum award three consecutive years in a row for the region where we're located. And I've also been elected or voted one of the top 21 bookkeeping influencers in Canada. I've been a member of Mark's Value Pricing Academy for several years. It's changed my life not only because of the knowledge Mark shares with us, but also in my case, I really, really believe that effective pricing is what tipped me over the edge and has had made the biggest impact to my business. You definitely need the value pricing knowledge that you get from all the other sessions because you can't just jump in and use the software without understanding the concepts behind it. But I often refer to effective pricing as the wrapping paper on the outside of a gift that you're giving to somebody. And for me, the gift that Mark gave me was a more profitable business, and I unwrapped that gift when I started to use effective pricing.

All right, so I'd like To quickly share with you some success that my business has had from using effective pricing. And this is why I get so excited about the program.

Oops, I hit the pause button. So the very first time that I used effective pricing was previously doing hourly or fixed. And I'll talk about that a bit later about the difference. But when I was quoting the client for the first time in my previous hourly method for the amount of work that they needed, my annual price for them would have worked out to approximately $4,200 a year.

When I used effective pricing, the quote that I got from the software came out to $18,000 a year. So I know we're all accounting professionals in the room, but let me just quickly do that math for you. That was an increase of $13,800 a year. That was more than 3. Now, we each may be paying different things for the software depending on what access level you have and stuff, but that was more in that one quote. That was more than three times what I pay for being a member of the value pricing academy and the effective pricing software. I made it all back in one quote with lots of extra. I'm going to talk about this number a little bit later, too, but this was a huge confidence booster. When I did, it took me some time. I was really nervous to use effective pricing the first first time. But when I got this result on my very first use, I was right away like, hey, let's go. I want to do this again. Give me another new client that I can use effective pricing with. I'm gonna do this. So it really got me pumped up. I couldn't wait for that next person to come in. So then the second time I'm using effective pricing, it gave me an over 200% increase of what my previous hourly rates would have been for that client.

My third time, the quote that I did was $22,000 a year more than what my previous method would have been. So I've grown from almost 14,000 a year on my first quote to Now I'm at 22,000 a year more on my third quote. But the interesting thing about this one, on the third quote.

It was 30. My quote was $30,000 a year more than what they had paid their previous bookkeeper. So you'll hear Mark and some trainers say that people are price sensitive. That is not true. They are value sensitive. This customer paid me $30,000 a year more than what he was paying his previous bookkeeper. I think that bears repeating because they were not price sensitive. I was able to demonstrate to them, the value and the benefit of using my services compared to their previous person and they were willing to pay for that.

To date. This is a stat from my live version of the software. I'm going to be using demo version with you guys, but my live version overall, there's, there's a spot where you can do a price success metric. Every time you do a quote. My average price success increase is just under that 200% mark. So that is all going to my revenue and increasing my profits.

Okay, later in this session, as I said, we're going to see how to use that price success metric.

I want to. I'll quickly check for questions here. So Julie says tried the effective pricing on a couple of existing clients and it quoted them way lower. That is actually something we're going to cover. Not in today's session, Julie, but in another session. There's a few reasons that that might have been. So I urge you to keep coming to the sessions. I think it's going to be session three or four. I'd have to look at the schedule to be sure. But it is definitely in the first half of the course that we're going to be look at reasons why that might happen and we will definitely help you fix what you're doing wrong.

Okay. So speaking of the future sessions, though, like I said, the majority of the course is going to be sent in the software this session, a little bit next session and a little bit in the third session. There's going to be some slides that I'm going to share with you because it's important to understand the concepts, the core concepts as well. When we get talking about the math and the calculations behind the scenes, I'm going to be showing you some slides for that.

My typing was way off when I did this because my next note literally says before fast food effectively.

So I know I do refer to fast food at some places. So I must have had my cursor in the wrong place at some point.

So one of the things about using the software, like I said, is understanding the core concepts first. So research shows that customers want two things. They want certainty. They want to know the price up front before they commit to something they don't want to commit to. Oh, well, your price might be this. I'll tell you when it's done. So I'm going to bill you hourly and when you get my bill at the end of the month, you'll know how many hours I spent doing your work. Customers don't want that. The other thing that they do want is choice. They would like to be able to choose the exact package that suits their needs. It makes them feel special. That's some of the feedback that I've had from customers that I've used the software with. It's very customizable, and it allows customers to feel like they have chosen exactly what they need without paying for ribbons and whistles and bells that they don't need.

Time billing does not give the customer certainty, and it will almost always sound like your price is more expensive. So quoting an hourly rate price, such as $100 an hour, is going to sound like a lot of money to them. They'll have no point of reference of the value that they're going to receive behind that. So they'll subconsciously start comparing it to other numbers in their head, such as hiring an employee. Instead of subcontracting to you, maybe they can hire an employee for 30 or $40 an hour. So they're automatically going to assume that your rate is high. Also, remember that people are not buying your time. They're buying the results that you give them. They don't care whether it takes you 2 hours or 10 hours to do the work. They care that they're going to get accurate financial statements that they can use to run their business. They're not concerned with how long it takes you. They're concerned of the benefit that they're going to get from those. Again, the financial statements or whatever it may be that you're doing for them.

One of the things that I get asked a lot or see posted on social media a lot is the difference in menu pricing, fixed pricing, value pricing. Different people explain it different ways. Sometimes one person's definition may resonate with you. Another person's definition may resonate with you. I'll tell you how I like to define it. Fixed pricing is having a set price in exchange for a task. So the task is reconciling a bank account. The fixed price is that it's going to cost $100. You're no longer charging for the time. You're no longer charging an hourly rate that it takes to do the bank reconciliation. But instead you've probably figured out over time that it usually takes you this long to do a bank reconciliation. So you're going to charge a flat rate or otherwise a fixed price for that service.

Menu pricing then becomes a combination of a bunch of fixed prices together. It's still a flat rate price, but for a multiple or series of fixed items. So let's say you have a menu list of items that the customer chooses from. And then you add up the price at the end. So you might have a fixed price for reconciling the bank account, that's $100. And then you might have a fixed price for filing a sales tax return, that's $200. And then you have a fixed price for running payroll, that's $50. And you might have a bunch of fixed prices for all of the services that are in your menu that customers can choose from that they need. So let's say customer picks those three items. You say, okay, your price is going to be $350. Don't get me wrong. These are definitely the beginning stages of what you need to do for value pricing. But it's not the end of your value pricing journey. In actuality, it's still just menu pricing. A customer is presented with a menu in front of them of items that have a fixed price. There's lots of examples about this. This is where I'm going to talk about the fast food that was somewhere previous in my notes. You go into a fast food restaurant, you see cheeseburger A is this price. French fries medium size is this price. And drink large size is that price. You add it all up, you get a price of $20.

These types of options will actually have prices displayed, right available. Because customer Charlie and customer Heather are going, if they choose the same package of menu items, they're going to have the exact same price for that item. But where value pricing comes in is what if Charlie and Heather are both buying the exact same food, but Charlie is in a hurry and therefore he is willing to pay extra to receive his food faster because he values the faster service. Right. Heather's not going to pay that extra price, but Charlie will. So if you don't give customers these value options, you're leaving money on the table. Because I promise you, customers are willing to pay more for things that they value. Think about it yourself. Do you like having air conditioning in your car? Would you pay more for a car that has air conditioning or GPS or leather seats or whatever it may be than you would for a car that doesn't have those things? Of course you would. It's the same thing with pricing our services. Let me put this into accounting terms for you. No more fast food or. Or cars. We're going to use Charlie and Heather again. This time there are accounting clients, and for lesson purposes, we're going to pretend that their businesses are identical. So we're comparing apples with apples. I understand. No two clients are ever going to be exactly the same. But for today, we're going to pretend they are. So they both have a business doing a million a year in revenue. They both have two bank accounts, two credit cards, approximately 500 transactions per month. You can very easily fixed price, menu price that their businesses are basically identical. They're both looking for the exact same services from your list, your menu list. They want weekly bookkeeping, BI weekly payroll, AP&AR reconciliation, sales tax filing, and a monthly review meeting. That is the package that they are choosing. And, and they'd both be willing to pay the same price if you're doing menu pricing. Right. In a value pricing though model, though, that's where we start to tap into the things they want rather than those compliance type things that they need. So I use the example that Charlie might want faster service, Heather might want more frequent meetings. So this is where effective pricing helps. You use some of those value questions with a price attached in the background that they don't see when just a simple yes or no question. Hey, Charlie, do you want your financial reports provided by the 5th of the month instead? Charlie says yes. Boom, there goes your price. It's just been bumped up a little bit. Heather, would you like to meet twice a month instead of once a month? You do, you do have that option if you'd like. Heather says yes, there goes more money that you're lifting off the table, you're not leaving it on the table, and it's going straight to your books. A last example before I move on is who likes to travel? Would you pay extra for an oceanfront room instead of a garden room? Or to have concierge service that turns your bed down for you at night? Or to have extra a la carte dinners instead of buffet dinners every night. So these are just examples, guys, of how value pricing, even though it's not necessarily called that, but it's around us everywhere.

Remember another core concept. Remember to price each customer individually and not have that fixed price for the services you provide. In our world, this could mean things like having those faster response times, offering a support plan that somebody may want to have access to you for support if it's, if they purchase like a d you do it yourself package, you might want to upsell them a support package that they have access to you for questions. It might be important to one person, not to another, but offering them that choice makes them feel special, makes them feel like they're getting exactly what they want. And then also the part about value pricing is focused on the end benefit, which I mentioned More than the actual service itself. Yes, the customer needs their bank accounts reconciled. They need payroll run, but they have pain points. Throughout our pricing process, we will have discovered what those pain points are. We're going to offer to solve those pain points for them and look after them. Charlie, Heather, don't worry about that. I'm going to look after it for you. How much are you going to pay me to do it? Let's talk about the price.

Value. Pricing is challenging, guys. Don't. Let me. Don't. It's not easy, okay? It takes time. When I used effective pricing for the very first time, we've even seen some message in the chat that people are beginners. They've done the course already, but there's. They still consider themselves a beginner. I know so many people like that, and I see it all the time in the academy. It takes time, guys, and it takes a little boost of confidence to get over that hurdle of using it the first time. When I used effective pricing for the first time, it took me about eight hours to set up my first model the way that I wanted. And that's taking into account that I started with one of Mark's templates, but I tweaked it and tested it. Tweaked it and tested it. But if you recall those numbers that I gave you, that first quote that earned me almost 14,000 extra. I think it was 13,800 or something extra. It took me eight hours to just set up that model and practice and rehearse of going through a pricing meeting with that client. If I do that math, mind you, I don't bill hourly, but a lot of people do. If I do that math, that's almost eighteen hundred dollars an hour. For the time it took me to set up my effective pricing, I would happily spend that time over and over and over again to get those kind of results. Value pricing is also a journey, guys, that never ends. Although I'm getting great results, and I have been for several years, I still learn something. Every single quote that I do for a client, every session I attend, every trainer that I watch, every time Mark gives new information, everybody does something a little bit differently. Everybody has different ways of tweaking things for their business. And I get ideas and I get inspiration. I am tweaking my models all, all the time. Okay? So it's never an end result where I'm like, okay, I've reached the top of the mountain. I'm here now. Great view. Okay, let's just hang out. No, I am always, always, always Climbing and growing.

So in a nutshell, the concept of optimal pricing is finding out how to determine what is the optimal price or the highest price that a client is willing to pay. We can't just ask them. They're not going to tell us, you know, we can't say, hey, what, how much are you going to pay us for our services? They're, they're going to lowball the number that actually is probably in their head. We have to figure out a way to get that number and draw it out of them. And effective pricing is how we do that. We're going to talk about this a bit more in future sessions, especially when we get into looking at the models and building your models and doing some calculations. But there's also lots of sessions that Mark and some other trainers have done dedicated to this core concept that has nothing to do with the software. But you can, you can watch those videos and do that training so that you better understand all of those core principles. Because remember, the better that you understand those core concepts, the better the icing on the cake is going to taste. I'm going to do a quick check for questions. I'm not seeing any. Let's keep going.

My.

Okay.

Quickly I'm going to run through my pricing process. Just so you know, effective pricing meeting is kind of right at the very end. There are several steps that I do first that help me get the results that I get. Number one, start with an ideal client or a niche. Not everybody has to niche. I am a fan of niching, but not everybody has to. Some people like being a generalist and that is okay. However, you do want to definitely start with an ideal client. So there's other exercises that you can do and other training about that. I won't go into it in detail today. I want to have time to get into the software. The next thing that I do is when someone contacts me from my ideal client niche area, I do a quick discovery type call with them. It's usually a 15 minute video meeting and I just chat with them. I find out some real basic stuff about their business. I outline for them how my pricing process works because inevitably people always ask right away, how much do you charge? That question will typically come up in that 15 minute phone call. So I outlined to them how my pricing works. I tell them I'm going to do a diagnostic review of your current books and guys charge for this. It's okay if you're a beginner and you don't charge for it right away. I didn't, I went from not charging at all to charging $250 but then you would get that back if you became a credit. If you became a client. Then I was charging 500 and you would get half back. Now I charge $1,000 and up for a diagnostic review and they don't get any of it back. Whether they become a client or not. They are paying for my time to do the review and the reports that I am going to give them at the end of the review. That's, that's the benefit that they are getting from hiring me to do this diagnostic review. I'm going to tell them the next thing we're going to do is have a meeting, a longer meeting, more than just 15 minutes. I don't call it a fact find meeting with them, but that's what I call it internally. But this is the meeting. I usually allow about 60 to 90 minutes. I ask them to allow about the same and this is where I'm going to find out about their pain points. I'll have most of the information about compliance type things that I need from having done the diagnostic review already. But I may have some follow up questions from them. I'm going to want to find out what motivates them. I want to find out what their goals are. I want to find out if there's any upcoming changes from their business that I may not have seen in a diagnostic review which will only obviously show me historical information, so on and so forth. So I explained to them we're going to have a longer meeting. I also will take some time to either here or in my effective pricing meeting. It depends on how the timing goes. But I also use a brochure. Now this is one of the things guys that not everybody in the, in the meeting today may have access to. It's only available for value pricing Academy members I believe, level 2 and above. But there are brochure templates that Mark gives us. Think of it like a little digital magazine, if you will, that I go through with a customer. Very similar again to the car example. You go in and it has all the options that you can purchase on a car and the colors you can get and stuff like that. So this is something that I go through either during the fact find meeting or in my last step at my effective pricing menu. I will refer to it in both of those meetings. It's just in one of the meetings I go through it in a lot more depth because I, I really, really spend some time emphasizing. There's a page where it talks about the benefits of using my services. And I really go through that part and highlight that and make that stand out to them a lot. And so then the last part is the, obviously the effective pricing meeting. That's when I'm doing a screen share with them, going through the software, asking them all the questions, letting them pick their answers and then revealing the price at the end.

Okay, I'm going to do a quick check for questions. So Rochelle says, happy to hear I'm not a rarity with the dia. Oh, so Rochelle, I, I'm assuming that means you're charging a fair amount for your diagnostic review. So I am so thrilled to hear that. I cringe when I hear about people doing it for free. People don't give your services away for free. There is so much value in the knowledge that we've done. If you went to school to learn accounting, did you have to pay your instructor or your professor or your teacher? Of course you did because they were giving knowledge to you. It's no different than what we're doing for our clients. Guys, let them pay you for the knowledge that we are sharing with them. So Jim is saying three meetings. Yes, the first one, the first one is really short, 15 minutes. But then my fact find meeting in my effective pricing meeting, I do ask them for both of those to allow 60 to 90 minutes reserved in their calendar. It's usually about 60, but sometimes it can be a little bit longer. So I do allow them to reserve or ask them to reserve 90 minutes just in case.

Christina, Julie says only charging 500, that's no problem. Julie, I'm just so glad that you're charging. I, like I said, I progressed to the price that I'm at now. And in the progression of what I charge, the report that I give to them at the end has progressed as well. The report that I used to give to them was about six or seven pages. Now it's like between 20 to 30 pages depending on the review that I'm doing. So. So as I've started charging higher prices, the value that I'm giving to them for those higher prices has also increased. Christina asks, do I ask for statements for the diagnostic review? Absolutely. Minimum three months worth of their, if they're seasonal based business, I want to see three months worth of their busy season and three months worth of their not busy season. So I would require six months total for that. If they're not a seasonal business and their business is approximately the same every month, then I just ask for three months worth of statements. Kate says, hi Kate, how are you? Sorry, everybody. Kate's somebody I know. Kate says, do I offer a bundled discount on diagnostic pricing if a client has multiple entities? That is a great question that I have not come across. But my answer would be, set up a pricing model for it. If a customer has multiple entities and they want you to price on all of them, My, my initial result thinking is, whoops, sorry, guys, I forgot to close my Microsoft Teams. And it. My phone just rang. Sorry. If you heard that phone ring, my initial thought is, no. If I'm doing a diagnostic review for each entity and I'm providing a report for each entity, no, I'm not going to offer a discount. But that's me. You could very well do that. But my, my answer to that question would be, set up a model. If you have a client that's coming to you that has multiple entities, set up a multiple entity model and ask them questions. And that could be one of your behavior rewards at the end. So you may not necessarily need to offer a discount. For anybody that hasn't seen the software, there is what we call a behavior reward at the end where you can offer discounted prices. But if you go through the model with them and they're happy with the price, you don't need to offer a bundle discount. Julie says, are there points you have that guide your diagnostics? Yes, there is, but that's not part of this course, Julie. That's actually proprietary stuff that I paid for on my own from somebody else initially and then have built out on my own as well. Rochelle says I don't give the entire report to them. I summarize the report, high level, and my team keeps the complete reports. Good, good, good. Okay. All right, let's move on. We've got about 50 minutes left and. Okay, so we're going to get into the actual software. Before we do that, I'm just going to quickly show you the handouts that you're going to get today. I won't go through them in too deep, too much detail. I just want to show them to you. So this is a getting started checklist that you'll get if you don't have the software already. Here is the link of where you can get it from.

And I will just quickly show you. This is the page that it will take you to. These are the different plans that are available. If you are a member of Mark's Value Pricing Academy, you will obviously get a different deal. So if you're in level one, level two, or level three, you'll get access to different levels of the plan. So this is where I was saying I'm part of the pro plan. So where I may have a, or I do have access to unlimited models, some of you other people that are in the course with us this week may only have Access to do 10 models or three models. So that's where I was saying, if you're trying to do something and you can't do it, just reach out to Sarah and she will help you upgrade your software. And then the other handout that you're going to get is this onboarding guide. I won't go through it in too much detail. It's 26 pages. You're going to get this. But what I do want to show you. Can everybody read that? Let me make it a bit bigger. I feel like maybe everybody can't read it.

So what I do want to show you because this is something that I can't replicate today. But when you are first setting up the software, you're going to get this sort of onboarding checklist. And as you do each step it will get checked off. So because I have already used the software and have already done each of these steps, when I log into the software, this doesn't show up for me anymore. So if you are seeing this screen when you're logging into the software the first time and I'm not demoing it today, this is the reason why. But this onboarding guide will help you. And even we're going to go through each of these steps. I'm going to show you how to customize the software, how to add your settings. So even though I'm going to be showing each of these things, I just can't show the actual checklist itself.

I hope that makes sense. Okay, so I am going to turn my camera off. I guarantee I'm not going anywhere. I'll still be here. And we are going to get in to the demo.

Let me just.

Make sure that I'm still logged in. Hope I'm still logged in.

Okay, so everybody should be seeing my software right now. This is effective pricing. Before I get too into this and, and I want to know where to spend time versus not to spend time. So I'm going to ask everybody to use that sort of thumbs up button. I know we had some people that were beginners. Is there anybody here thumbs up or chat? Is there anybody here that has not used the software at all?

I see Rochelle has a question. I've had the stuff for a long time. Can someone point me in the direction of the calendar in Trello? I haven't been in Trello for a long time. I think I have Trello Open.

Yeah. Here is the Trello board, Rochelle. Now this is mine may look a little different than yours again because I'm in the Value Pricing Academy. If you are an effective pricing customer only you would not see all of these other sessions. So everybody may have different views in here as well. But here in the first column is the effective pricing course and all the dates are here. All of the sessions. I'm going to talk about this a bit later. All of the session topics say tbc. That's because I'm still working on the curriculum because we're doing things spread out over 12 months this year and I'm adding in some new content and stuff. So I'm still finalizing that curriculum. But that's where you would find the, the Trello information. If you need help accessing it, reach out to Sarah and then. Yeah, Sherry, I, I don't think it looks the same for everybody because not everybody is in the Value Pricing academy. So that's why I didn't share the link because you are in the Value Pricing Academy. So you see everything. We have people in the session today that yeah, you're in level one, but there's people here that purchase the software individually that aren't in the academy at all. So they wouldn't even see any of the level one.

They, they purchase the software independently. Okay, so I see a few people have said they haven't been in the software at all. Thank you. That helps because I just wanted to know how quickly I could maybe go through some things or where I should slow things down a little bit. So let me just go back to.

My software.

Okay. So as I mentioned earlier, if you see something different, just reach out to Sarah. So the first thing we're going to do is just take a tour around the window. So if you get that check that onboarding checklist screen that comes up at first you can just exit out of it and you would then come to this main menu. So we're going to walk around this. Starting in the top right corner you have the cog wheel. That's how I'm always going to refer to it. That's where your.

Settings menu is. We're going to be going in there a lot. Clicking on your name is where you will find your sign out button.

Over on the left hand side. Clicking on the logo brings you back to the home page where we were. And also on the left hand side we have, I call it a hamburger button. That's how I've heard it referred to in the past, and some icons underneath it. This is your left menu bar. So if you've used icons. We're going to talk about the icons later. If you've used icons that you easily recognize, you don't have to expand the menu, but if you do want to expand the menu so that you see the words, you just click on the hamburger button. Over here we have our View Dashboard button. This is where you can see we're going to talk about badges. So if you can see, I just got that little, oh, you can't see me. I don't have my cam on. I just got some confetti there. That is an example of badges that we're going to talk about later. At the end of today's session, this is where you would see your price, your average price success metric. You will see one at the end of each quote that you do as well. This is where you can view basically all of your summary information. Now, this is all blank right now because I erased everything from the last training session that we did last year. So we're starting from scratch again.

And then I'm just going to go back to my home screen. Oh, I will go in here. Some people have asked before about where to access previous quotes and stuff from clients. You can do that in here from your dashboard. There's a. There's a few different things that you can go to different places and arrive at the same end result. So I'll try to make a point to demonstrate those throughout the course this year as we're looking at different things.

All right, the next thing we're going to look at today is how to customize your software.

So I'm going to go in to my settings window and I'm going to go into. We're going to be going into my profile. We're going to go into theme and design. So anything in that menu we can just click on View and edit and it will take us in to that area. So the first thing you can do is upload your logo. There's a very important note here that says the image must be one of these three file types and it cannot exceed 500 kilobytes. And a recommendation of the shape and the size. And then of course the support option if you're having any issues. If your logo does not fit into these size options, you can just Google Image resizers and there's lots of free ones available where you can input your, upload your information, tell the Program what size you need the end result to be and it will reformat it for you into that size and then you can upload it foreign.

Over here we have localization so you can use what currency symbol you want to use. So for me that's the dollar sign. You have a drop down list of the date format that you would like to use and then it gives you an example of how that will appear. And then you can see set the time zone that you're in.

Over here in our number formatting section you can put what separator you want to use for your numbers. So if it's a larger number then I can put a comma in between my decimal point. Again an example of how the numbers will appear. So there I can see my comma and then there is my decimal point. We have this little box here about client search and there's a drop down. There's a couple of different ways that you can search for customers. You can use a drop down list or you can use a search window. We will show that later in the class. I just always leave it set to both in my settings so that I have the option to use both. Whatever I'm in the mood for that day.

Down here we have this color section so you can select your base color. And over here it gives you an example as you change things. So if I were to change this base color to red, I can see that this line changed to red. And if I change that and I say save, this line up at the top of my page has changed to red. I'm just going to go back into theme and design. I can change my primary font color. Let's say I want to change it to blue.

Purple say okay, so there's different things that you can do. In here you will get this example. So you can change your primary button, it tells you here, primary button. And then you can change the background color, you can change the color of the text that's on that button. And then over here we have an action button. And again you can change the color of that. You can change the color of this top header and footer.

Or sorry, header. I said both. But if I wanted to make that red up there and click save.

And.

Sometimes things don't change for me right away, but you can change that there as well.

Your side menu is this menu over here. You can change that color and then we are going to get into looking at tables. You can change the colors of your tables. So here we have a table with a list of clients you can change the color of odd rows, even rows, these tick colors if you want, if you don't want them to be green, the cross colors if you don't want them to be red, so on and so forth. So that's where you can change all of your theme and design information.

Then the other place I'm going to go is in to my profile.

In here is where you can set up all of the information specific for your company. So on the your details tab you can see you can upload a photo that would appear up here where my initials are. You can input your email address. This is where you would change your password. We have. There's some information I'm not going to get into today. I'm going to kind of show you what you need to get up and running and get started and then we'll look at more detailed information in some later sessions. If you have a team person that does pricing for you, this is where you can add another user in here and add their information. Company details. Sorry guys, just going to take a sip of water.

This is where you can add the name of your company address. That's my address if anybody wants to come visit me. Of course you don't know what town I'm in, but some of you might know what town I'm in. But this is where you would add your address, your telephone number, your company number, so on and so forth. One thing that I want to point out on this screen that's really important guys, is it's important on this initial setup that if you're charging sales tax on your services, this is where you would enter that rate. So you would say you would either check this if you're charging and then you would enter the rate. Okay. And then you can also enter here in the program, it's called VAT here in Canada for me it's an HST number. For some people it might be a GST number, but you can go ahead and put your company sales tax number in there as well. You can choose if you want to do a pricing success metric at the end of each quote. I recommend leaving that as yes, because I like to see that at the end of each session. And then how are we doing for time? Okay, good. And then here is as well if you wanted to change your package.

So I'm just going to do a quick check for questions.

I don't see any questions. I see Marina said on her way. I'm. I'm not sure what that refers to. If it was something that I was talking about at some point. And so then there's. There's lots of other options in here, guys, that you're going to see right away. Some things that we're going to be looking at later is keywords. There isn't any in here by now. We're going to add some later integrations you can integrate with QuickBooks in Xero. Don't get too much into the weeds at this point. You really just want to focus on your for. For to get started, you really want to focus on your theme and design settings. Play around with these. Like you can see when I was changing some of the colors and stuff, I actually want to change that one back to whoops, orangey.

So that changed my line back to yellow there from the red that I had changed it to. So play around with things in here. Get your logo updated, get your photo updated, pick the colors that you want. If you know your hex code numbers for your brand, you can actually put the hex code number in directly rather than using the selector bar or the screen.

And then also get your profile settings set up, the your details, the your team, your company details with your tax information.

And then I'm just going to pop back over to the. Actually, before I do that, I see Kate has a question about keywords. So Kate, you don't need to set up keywords right in the beginning because this is one of the more advanced features of effective pricing. It is going to be in one of the other sessions that we're going to do later. But just quickly, what it is, is when you set up keywords throughout your proposal, like let's say you have a keyword for first name. When you are setting up your proposal, you can put a placeholder for first name. And when it does that proposal, it will automatically pull from the query quote that you've done for that client their first name. So you don't need to manually type it in. So it helps you copy things automatically from your quote to your proposal by using various keywords. And that way there's less manual work that you need to do when you're using the proposal side of the software. But we do get to that later and we're going to play around with keywords.

So what I am going to switch back to for a minute is the onboarding guide that you're going to get.

In your handout with today.

I'm going to make it a little bit smaller now so we can kind of see a whole page at a time. Can everybody let me know if you can read this okay. On the screen, if someone can let me know it's big enough. So still.

Yes. Custom fields. Kate, thank you. That's great wording and thank you for everybody for letting me know you can see this. So I'm going to quickly scroll through this.

And then there's a couple other things that we're going to look at today. The dates for the future sessions for the year. We're going to look at the progress tracking badges that appeared on the screen a minute ago. But then we're going to be pretty much doing some Q and A at the end. So if anybody has any questions or anything that you're going to want me to maybe show you again, let me know. Start posting those questions now and in a few minutes I'll come back to the chat box and we'll go through those. So we talked about navigating and moving around with the clicking on the icon to go home. The hamburger. Oh, okay. Maybe that's where I got the hamburger icon name from. I know I've heard it before, but it is actually right in the guide, the onboarding guide here as well. The cog wheel, of course, which we talked about. I didn't show you the notifications button. Let's just take a look at that. This is where you will find notifications and you can see there's one in here right now. If Sarah has posted something that goes out to all users of Effective Pricing. This is all users, guys, not just value pricing Academy members. If you have a subscription to Effective Pricing, Sarah will send out notifications when there's new features available, when there's a new session coming up for one of our training classes, you will get notifications personally in your software when you've done a new quote for somebody and you maybe have a new pricing success success metric available for you. So that is the notifications message or window. You can just mark something red, it'll open up, the notification will disappear, and then you can either just go back to leave it there or you can archive it and it disappears from your notifications window. But it would still. These are all old ones. I've had the software for a while, but you still can go back and see other messages even after you've archived them. So here's an example of one that I got that said I have an outstanding pricing success metric. That just means that I've done some quotes for clients, but I haven't done the pricing success metric for those quotes yet. You don't have to do it right away. You can go Back and do it later. We will look at those later. And then what other examples do we have in here?

Mostly just the points.

Oh, we earn points in the software too. That goes towards our badges. So we'll talk about that in a few minutes when I show you some more badges. Okay, so let me go back over to our onboarding guide.

So there is a lot of things that you're going to see, guys in the menu, don't worry about going anywhere except the ones that I showed you today for theme and design and my profile. We are eventually throughout this course going to get into everything else. If you do want to start playing around and you you've watched some of the effective pricing videos, by all means you can start to go into some of the other areas like your model management, your list manager, so on and so forth. But if you're really, really a beginner and you want to take your time getting it set up from the beginning, let's do it together. And that way you can not get so overwhelmed by something. If you jump ahead to something that's really advanced feature without going through some of the preliminary steps first, it might get confusing for you. It might cause your model to work incorrectly. Somebody had that problem earlier. So there could be reasons like that.

So we talked about the checklist that some of you may see when you first log in. That I don't see because I've logged in before already. So once you have gone through customizing the software, you can just click right on the configure button. You don't need to go to the gear icon. And then to customize it, you can just click on this configure button. It will take you there automatically. And once you've done that, this item on your checklist gets checked off and you would have one of five items on that initial checklist checked off. Yay. So that brings you to this customization section that I went through in detail.

And that's what it will look like after you have completed that section. The next thing we I showed you in the software that's here in the onboarding guide is adding your company settings. So I just want to show you guys, I know I, I talk a fast as I go through this sometimes, but everything is here in the guide for you as well. This guide is pulled directly from the course as well. It's available as a download and like I said, it will be with today's materials when you get the recording as well. But the main sections that you want to focus on, this screenshot you'll notice there's some things in the software that aren't in this screenshot. That's because Mark is always updating the software, upgrading the software, adding new features. So when I showed you this in the software, there were things such as keywords, which. Which we looked at briefly when Kate asked about them. You don't see that in that screenshot here. It's because it's not one of the things that are really important for your initial setup. What is important is, as I said, is the. Your details. The my team. If you have a team that's going to be using the software, if you have a team but they don't do pricing, you don't necessarily need to add them in here. You can add them if you want them to be able to view quotes. What I do, I don't have my team set up in effective pricing. When I do a quote and then a proposal for a client, I save the proposal in my SharePoint folder and I let my team see it from there. So they will know the scope of work that we are doing for that client. But they don't actually have access to the software. Not right now. It's on my trajectory to train somebody to do my pricing, but I don't know, it's kind of one of those things that I really, really like doing myself. I really love this software. And then the company details section, which we talked about, which was where you put your tax information and stuff in.

I'm just going to scroll through the next part because we went through that in the software.

So I didn't show you too much about if you wanted to add another team member. I talked about how you can. I didn't show you the actual screen. There is a note here that the number of users you can add will depend on which level of the software that you have.

Just set up a new user. You just need to enter their email and password, set their status. You just need to enter their email and password, set their status to Active when you're ready for them to start using the software. There's a little checkbox right here for Active. You would select their role you want them to have. So owner would mean they have complete aspect to all aspects of the software, including personal details. A full user can edit and maintain pricing models and clients, while a user can simply create quotes using the pricing models that are already created. Okay.

Once you've made those changes, just click Save. That's something that you're going to hear me say so often throughout this course is if you're not hitting the orange save button or if you've changed your colors in your settings, your button might not be orange. If you are not hitting that save button or in some screens it'll say save and continue, then you will lose whatever changes you have made on that screen. So this is something that you will hear me remind you about quite often to whenever you see that save button, just hit save or Save and Continue.

It's going to talk about creating your first pricing model. I. I'm not seeing questions coming in, so I. I can go ahead and show you this quickly today, but we're going to go into it in a lot more detail. So I'm going to just scroll through this a little bit now and if I still don't see. Because we've got about 20 minutes left, so if I don't see too many more questions coming in, then we can spend the last little bit of time looking at the model management screen.

So this is all about creating your model. There's that save and continue button that I was talking about. So even if you've made changes, if you're working on a section and you want to move on to work on the next section, just go ahead and click Save and continue still. And then you can use the back button to go back to the previous screen and continue working on the next section. It's happened to me. I'm going to admit it. It's happened to me where I've done a lot of work on one section and then moved on to another section and then forgot to click save and continue. And then I've lost all the work that I've done on both of those sections. Okay, so this is all about the models.

I'm scrolling through all of this quickly. You can see once you've added the company settings that will be checked off on your checklist. When you create your first pricing model, that will get. I'm going to make this card a little bit bigger. These are the five items that are on your checklist. So creating your first pricing model, doing your first quote, and then creating your first pricing success metric. I will say, guys, what I did was I did my first quote with a test client because I did not want to do it live in front of a client for the first time. So I did a test client quote. I created a quote. This got checked off on my checklist and then I did my pricing success metric and then my checklist was done. And then I was able to start using the software. For real. For real. Okay, so I want to finish up a couple of things that I had in the slides. So I'm just going to jump over to that for a minute and then, and then if there aren't any questions, we'll spend the rest of our time today starting to look at models. So I'm going to jump back over to the PowerPoint for a minute.

Okay. So everybody saw when I went into that one screen and I got the, all of the confetti pop up and it said that I had earned some points and had gotten a new progress tracking badge. As you start using the software, you're going to earn points along the way as you complete various tasks. Once you've accumulated a certain number of points, they turn into badges at various tasks levels. Once you complete the onboarding, you'll be able to view this on your dashboard. Everybody starts with the apprentice level badge. And usually at this point people will ask me, how do I earn points?

I, I only know some of them because you, you don't really know ahead of time until you earn it. It's kind of like a surprise. It's, you know, I talked earlier about the gift that Mark gives us. It's like that gift that keeps giving. Every once in a while I get this confetti that shows up on my screen and it's like getting a present. These are some of the ways that I know for sure that you can collect points when you create a new pricing model and you make it live each time that you complete a quote, each time that you complete a proposal, every time that you get great results with a pricing success metric. And when you do a quote, we're going to show this later when we actually start doing quotes in, in one of our future training sessions. When you do a quote and you have a great success at the end, you have the option, and it is optional, guys, of sharing your success story, which Mark can then choose to use in some of his material. You've, you've probably seen him share some of these already of some of the effective pricing users that have shared their success stories. And Mark takes that information and you can, you can say whether you want it to be anonymous or not, you have a choice. And he shares that information.

So that is what your points how some of the ways that you can collect points, and I say some because they change them sometimes you get, they add new ways of receiving points just to surprise us.

So this will be in the material, the handout material that you get, all of those ways that I just suggested.

Okay, I'm going to just quickly show this and then I'm going to pop back over into the software and we're going to start looking at the models until we finish up today's session. So these are the dates that are currently scheduled for our sessions this year. I did talk about why on the Trello board, all of the topics currently say to be continued because I haven't finished finalizing how I'm going to divvy up the courses, but that should be there very shortly. I have asterisks beside March 13 and April 24. If you are using the Trello board, there is a way that you can sync the Trello board to your calendar. Or if you've manually added the dates to your calendar already, those two dates were just recently changed, literally I think on the weekend or on Monday. So if you had the dates from March or April in your calendar prior to a couple of days ago, the March date has actually been moved up by a week and the April date has actually been moved back by a week. And that is when I'm going to be in Mexico in between. Certainly happy to do training with you guys while I'm there, but I'm just not sure how reliable my Internet connection is going to be. So before I jump over into the software, my last slide is just a little thank you slide, but this way I don't have to come Back to the PowerPoint again. We can just finish up in the software. I do want to tell you though, the new session, even though it's not on the schedule yet, the new session. The next session. Not new session, the next session that we are going to do, we're going to be going into the models a lot deeper than when I do today. So today you may have lots of questions about the models. Just know that I may defer your questions to next month's session because we're going to talk about the numbers, the price calculations that go on behind the scenes. It's a really, really important session, guys, because it was. It really drives everything that you're going to do with effective pricing afterwards. So that session is on February 13th. If you had that date, February 13th, 11am Eastern Time. Be sure to mark your calendars for that one. You really don't want to miss that one. Okay, so let me go back into the software then. I'm just going to.

See if we have any questions.

And take some water. Okay.

So on my main screen right now, you're seeing this option that says pricing models and it's not clickable or anything. There Isn't anything there? If I did have some models in there. If I go to my gear icon and then model management, I'm going to do this a bit slower in a minute, guys, but I just want to quickly show you what that looks like.

In, in that dashboard screen at the beginning.

Gotta give the software time to catch up to me.

Okay.

So now if I go back to oh, sorry, I didn't make it live.

If I make that live.

And go back to my dashboard. You now see I have this model is showing up in my list of pricing models. So if I wanted to use this model for a new quote with somebody, I can just click right from my dashboard screen here. I can. Or my home screen, sorry, not the dashboard. I can just click on use model right from here. And when I mentioned about how there's different ways to get to different places, I can also use that model over here with the icon. If I don't remember what that icon means. If I go back to my home screen, if I don't remember what that icon means, I can open my hamburger button and I see, oh, there's my business advisory model. So clicking that will take me into the model so I can use it. The other place is in the model management screen, I can click use for quote here. So all of those methods will take me in to my quote screen with a client. So I'm just going to quickly actually delete that one because we're going to play around with that a bit more and I'm going to review this screen a little bit. I do see a question. Yui says, do you recommend we check the box that says do you have to add sales tax to your prices for us Canadians if you are charging sales tax? Ue yes, absolutely. Because as you start using more advanced features of the software and when you get to the pricing plan pages and stuff, it's going to add to that sales tax in so the customer sees it. It does break it out. Obviously it gives you your base price and then the tax price and then the total. But if you don't click on add sales tax to your prices, that is not going to show.

And if you want to see how that actually looks, I know you attended, I think all of the sessions, definitely a lot of the sessions last year. When we get to that part, if you remind me of that question again, when we're in the session doing some, when we're looking at the pricing plans at the end and revealing some prices, pop that question back to me. If you want to see an Actual demo of it. So I'm just going to. We have about six minutes left here. Five minutes left. I'm not going to get too much into the models, but I'm going to walk through this model screen. So you can see here it says because I'm on the pro plan, I have an unlimited model limit number of models available to me, which means I can create as many models as I want. So for to give you an example, I have quite a few models in my version of the software. I just mentioned this to somebody a couple days ago. I have a bookkeeping model and then I have a separate payroll model and then I have another model that's bookkeeping and payroll combined. So depending on what I have learned in my pricing process, my, my fact find meeting my diagnostic review, I've learned some, a little bit already of what services this client is going to be looking for. Would help me determine on which model I am going to use in front of the client.

So here, and this would also differ for people on these are all templates that Mark has. If you are on the starter plan only, you would have access to this one that says requires starter plan to access Everyone else that is on any of the other plans except the starter plan would not have access to this one because this is payroll starter model. Everybody that's on a different plan of the software would already have the payroll full version model. So these are all templates that Mark gives us that we can start with. You also have the option here, this button to create new and we'll review this next month in our session too. I'm going through it a little quickly because we have some extra time today, but I will show you what each of these looks like in our, in our next, next meeting. So you also have this option here where you can create new. So as you get using the software and you start looking at the different models for myself personally, I haven't ever had a situation where one of Mark's templates does not work as a starting point for what I need for my model. Is it exactly what I need? No, because I need to tweak things for my business. And that's the beauty of the software is it is really, really, really customizable. But it could be that maybe you're pricing some really, I, I can't even fathom what type of service it would be that isn't part of one of our models right now or one of our templates. But you do have the option of being able to start a model completely from scratch. Yourself if you want. Keeping in mind that means doing all of your questions from scratch, all of your price calculations from scratch, all of your model stuff, settings from scratch, everything. I would much rather prefer to start with a template, even if the template only works for 25% of what I want. I would much rather prefer to start with a template and change 75% of it than to create something from scratch. Then we have a drop down here. You can see in the models, we have these little tags where you can tag what type of service it's for. This is really helpful for if you start to create multiple models like I have, like I mentioned, I have bookkeeping, I have payroll, I have bookkeeping and payroll. I could tag those. Bookkeeping, all three of them. And then as I'm going through my list of models, because as I start to create models of my own, they're all going to appear at the top of this list. And then I'm still going to have Mark's list of all of his templates at the bottom. So you can see how this list can get quite long over time.

So if I were to say that I only want to look at bookkeeping models and I click that, that makes the list shorter for me. If I only want to look at advice, oh, none of them are tagged advisory. Apparently, if I wanted to look at ones that are tagged accounting, again, it makes my list shorter. So as you start to create models, I highly recommend using these tags in your model. And I'll show you in our next session where we put those in, because later down the road, if you're using them right off the bat, later down the road, it is going to make your life simpler.