How to Raise Prices When You’re Not Speaking to the Decision Maker

When you're having the pricing conversation, you should make sure that you are talking directly to the decision maker. But what happens if that's not possible? Well, this was the question that I got from a member of the Value Pricing Academy, and her name is Stacy. And she said this. She said, I've moved my clients from hourly to fixed pricing. And I know she's done an amazing job with that. But. But my question is, how do I move them to value Pricing using my packages and effective pricing without losing them? A lot of my clients are non profits and they require board approval before they can accept price increases. A lot of the boards have a CPA as their treasurer. And I asked for some clarification. She says, I usually work directly with the executive director, but then she or he has to get the approval from the finance committee and the board. With nonprofits, there is usually not one decision maker. So that's an interesting challenge and one that I often come across. And so let's just broaden that out as the issue here is what is what the challenge here is what if we're having the pricing conversation and it's not the person that makes decisions? So in this case it's because Stacey is talking to the executive director, but they have to go and talk to the board at the nonprofits that she works for. But this can be many, many other situations. I think back to my time in practice many, many years ago, and when I was speaking to sole director companies, for example, very often the spouse was also involved in the business. And I sometimes found that with a sole director business or sole practitioner, they would often then go back and talk to the spouse. And sometimes the spouse was the one that would make the final decision. And so when I was particularly, particularly when I was doing advisory work for small businesses, I would very often try and have the meetings with both the husband and the wife when it was a very small business, because it's the other party that sometimes is the one that makes the final decision. So that's the challenge. How do we overcome that? Well, let's look at that. And also, just so you know, Stacey mentioned about effective pricing. What she means by that, if you're not sure. She's a Value Pricing Academy member and she uses the effective Pricing software, which is a software tool for pricing with confidence. It's a pricing system that allows you to have the pricing conversation with the client to ask them questions, to give them choices, options, identify the scope of the work, and then it comes up with prices, value based prices for different packages, and Firms that use that in front of a client tell me they often get more, much, much higher prices, sometimes double the prices they were expecting and sometimes much more. But the challenge again here with Stacy is she's not talking to the decision maker. So let's have a look at how do we solve this. Well, firstly, ideally you do want to involve all the decision makers. And that means that when you are meeting a brand new client, one of the questions you should identify, you should ask some questions to identify who are the decision makers, who is the person that makes the final decision, and hopefully you are speaking to that person. But it may be it's somebody else, they have to go away and talk to somebody else. You need to uncover that early on in the process, identify who is the decision maker. And ideally you want to make sure that you are talking to the decision maker or the decision makers. But that may not be possible for various reasons, like Stacy with her non profit clients. So let's imagine that's your challenge, that you can't speak to decision makers. What do we do? Well, firstly, you want to make sure that you understand all of the real, deep down rooted issues facing the business. And this is a general thing that we should always do anyway. We should be asking the right questions to uncover what are the real challenges, what are the root causes of those challenges, how they manifest themselves. Because the more we can uncover what are the real issues going on, which by the way is not always what the client will reveal straight away. A good example might be the client comes to you because they want you to do a cash flow forecast. Well, the real issue is they don't want a cash flow forecast. They want what it's going to give them. And there must be a reason why they want a cash flow forecast. And so we need to ask questions to really uncover what is the real issue here. So you need to do that. It's a general point of every single pricing conversation. And then what you want to do is when you're faced with, and in Stacey's case, it's the executive director, once she's uncovered all the issues, then when it comes to presenting price, we should always present different options, different choices. Think of it as the bronze, the silver, the gold. And, and we should do that for a number of reasons. And each of these should solve the real issues. But what happens is when we present different options, one of the big benefits is it changes the conversation. It's no longer a conversation about will I buy yes or no. If there's a single offer, it's we can, yes, we can solve that problem. It's this price. Then then there's a binary choice here. The customer will either say yes or no. Okay, which puts stress on us, it puts pressure on us. But the minute you give three different choices, then suddenly the conversation changes to which one is right, which is the right one for you. And so when the executive director goes into then meet the board meeting, they can then present the different choices together with how they solve the real issues. And. And that again, subtly changes the conversation. The board are now not making a decision about whether to hire you, yes or no, and accept the price. Now they're making a decision about which is the best option for them. And then the last point that I want to share with you is if you're not able to speak to the decision maker, let's say it's the executive director. The big challenge we have here is that when you're speaking with the decision maker, firstly, you can communicate the value fully because you're in control of the conversation. Secondly, you can then see how they're reacting. And it may be that there's price objections, which means that you can then deal with them there and then. But the minute you have effectively passed that on to somebody else, the executive director then presenting to the board, the executive director is not going to pitch it to the board with the same level of enthusiasm as you. They might miss out some of the key details of the value that they're not explaining. So how do we get the executive director to present it to the board in the way that you would do it? Well, one of the ways that we could do this is we could make sure that we provide them with a great summary of all the benefits of how each of your packages solve their problems. So they've got that information to present to the board. But another idea for you is what about doing a little video? And a tool that I love, I've been using for many, many years is loom, spelled L double O M. Loom is a great tool. There are many others where you just hit the record button, you talk to camera, and then as soon as that's finished and you hit the stop button, you get a URL that you can share. So what about doing a loom video where you do the presentation that you would normally do to the executive director, and then you can send that loom video off to the executive director so they can then share it in turn with the board, which then means that the board get to see you presenting the different packages. The benefits of each one how it solves the real problem and we'll do a proper pricing presentation that otherwise you wouldn't have control of. 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 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.