How to Price 3 Packages When Clients Want “Extras”

We all know that in pricing it's great to give people three different options, three choices. But what do we do if somebody wants the cheapest package or the middle package, but they also want some of the things out of the more expensive package? That's what we'll look at in this video. And I got this question from Afsana from the Value Pricing Academy and she said, I'd love to learn more about creating three pricing plans. Also, what's the best way to handle it? When a prospect wants some premium features, but not all, how do you give them what they want and still price it fairly? And that's a great question and a common one that I get. So let me give you some tips on that. Number one, first thing, what you want to do is when you build your packages or your plans, you want to build them carefully. And I see so often on accounting firms websites, I go to their websites, I see their packages and it's just a complete mess, a jumbled mess with ticks, crosses everywhere in different columns. And it's so confusing. And when you create confusion, it makes it harder for people to buy. What we want to do is each package needs to solve specific issues for specific types of clients. And there's a process that we need to go through by creating customer Personas to make sure we really understand who is the sort of person that would buy this package versus this one, versus this. Because once we understand the Personas, the different people, we can start building packages that meet specific issues. And the better we do that, A, the easier is for people to buy and choose the right package for them. And secondly, it reduces the chance they'll want to take other little bits and pieces out of different packages. So that's the first thing we want to build our packages carefully. Secondly, kind of linked to that, there's this idea that creating a package is effectively a bundle. Bundling is where we take different things that we can offer and sell and put them into a package or bundle. And I often think about the classic one is the if you ever go to McDonald's, you've got the Happy Meal. And the Happy Meal is a bundle. It's a bundle that consists of some nice packaging which has got cartoon pictures on it. Inside it is something like chips, a drink, and then could be chicken nuggets. And then the fifth part of the bundle is there's a toy. And the reason they create this bundle is because it's designed for a particular solution that is children. And children love it because they love the packaging. They love the toy they love, the three things that are in, the three food items that are in. And that creates a complete package. It creates a bundle. If you took any one of those things out of it, it would not have the same impact. If they served those things inside just their ordinary paper bag, it wouldn't be so attractive to children. If you didn't include the toy, that certainly would affect an impact on children. They want the whole package. Okay. It solves a particular solution for a particular part of the target market, the children that go to McDonald's. So that's what a bundle does. When we create our three packages, we're essentially creating bundles that deal with the specific needs and wants of a particular segment of our customer base. Okay, so the next thing that we can do, though, is, yes, we still might find we have a customer that can't afford the premium package. They want the cheaper package. But there are some things they still want. And so what we can then do is in our pricing system, we can offer premium items as paid upgrades to, let's say, the middle plan. So if you want to allow people to buy things that aren't in a package, then prepare for that. And so think about, how would you price for somebody who buys the middle plan, for example, how would you price each of the individual things that are in the premium plan? And as a general rule, you should price the extra things in premium so that if they bought all of them, it's more expensive than if they just buy the premium bundle. Okay. So normally with bundles, and doesn't have to be, but normally when they buy a more expensive package, a bigger bundle, it's a better price than if they were to buy the individual parts of that plan. So if you allow people to buy elements from premium, it does mean they'll pay a higher price for those things, which is good for you. And you could use a script for that. You might say something like, when they want a particular feature in the premium, you might say something like, that feature sits in the premium plan because it creates a lot of value. But we can add it to the middle plan as an enhancement for you. And if the client says yes, you just talk about the price. You remind them of the benefit. And if they buy, great. Now, one of the things that Value Pricing Academy members use to make this work really well is they use effective pricing, which is a pricing software tool I created many years ago that gets extraordinary results. And with effective pricing, you can very easily set it so that you create upsells or enhancements. And one of the things that many Value Pricing member firms do is they then create the enhancements or the upsell so that includes items in the more expensive packages. And so if a client chooses the middle package on the next page, it will then list items that are in the premium package that they could buy individually and they'll see adding on to the price. If they buy the cheapest option you can set it so it reveals on the next page all the items in the premium and the middle package so they can cherry pick and choose individual things. The effective pricing software makes it very easy to put the client in control and choose all the extra bits they want and therefore choose to pay you a higher price. Thank you for watching that video. If you found that valuable, if there's something you found useful there, could you do me a favor? Could you first of all please just hit the thumbs up button to say you like it. But could you also put in the comments below what was the most valuable thing that you got out of that video and what's been your experience with that? If you could share that, it would be great feedback for me. And if the more people who like the video then I will go away and create more videos like this Also. This video that you just watched is an example of the sorts of videos that we put in the Value Pricing Academy on our school platform. And if you want to be part of that Value Pricing Academy, you can join for free and we'll put the link below. You can join for free and be part of a community of accounting professionals looking to improve their pricing on this Value Pricing journey and a place where you can ask me and my team questions. So once again, thank you so much for watching and I hope to see you inside the Value Pricing Academy. Bye for now.