How to Show Your Clients You Care About Them

What do you do when you spot an amazing opportunity to help a client to change their lives, to add huge value? What do you do, what do you say to make sure that you capitalise on the opportunity, that you can get a premium value based price? In this video, I'll share with you the process, the scripts, the words that you say.

Hi there, it's Mark Wickersham here, author of Effective Pricing for Accountants and a number of other books for the accounting profession on value pricing. And in this video, it's really a follow up to a video I did where I talked about as a profession, what we should be doing. The right thing to do is to focus much more on our clients and thinking, just thinking about how we can help them, how we can help them increase the value of their business, their sales, increase their profits, reduce their costs, increase their margins, reduce their tax bills, increase their efficiency in their business, whatever. It might well be the things that we do to change people's lives. And let's imagine that you've done some thinking and you've come up with some great ideas to help your client. And let's imagine, just for argument's sake, that this client is called Mary. It's a great name to have. So you've been thinking about Mary, you've been thinking about her business and you've got a number of ideas. In fact, you've come up with about five great ideas for her business. Now, one of the things you should do when you come up with ideas is quantify them, which is the best idea and what could it be worth? Could it be something that saves 50,000 in tax? Could it help them to get 20,000 extra? Overdraft facility? If they're struggling for cash at the moment, is it something that could help them save 30 hours a week because of some technology you could implement for Mary, whatever it might well be, put an estimate on it and identify which is perhaps the best idea. Now, having got your idea, what you do is you contact Mary. You could email Mary. That'd be one option. I think much better it would be to pick up the telephone and talk to the client because it shows that you care, it helped build the relationship. So what might you say? You might say something like.

Hi there, Mary, I've just been thinking about you and your business. That's a great start because that shows that we care about our clients. I've just been thinking about you and your business, Mary, and I've come up with a number of really interesting ideas that I think could make a big difference to Your business. In fact, I've come up with five great ideas. It might not be five, whatever number you come up with, but pick, pick a number. The number of ideas you come up with. I've come up with five great ideas, one of which, Mary, is so good, I believe it can do. And then tell her what it could do. I believe it could help you save $20,000 in tax. I believe it could help you save 20 hours a week with some new technology that will save you time, whatever it might well be. So, Mary, I've been thinking about your business and I've come up with five great ideas, one of which I think could save you $20,000 in tax. So what I'm going to suggest is, can we meet this week? I'm free at 12 o' clock on Friday and 3 o' clock on Friday. Which one works best for you?

And get Mary to commit to a time. But also, you might say, and just to be clear, Mary, just so you know, we will not charge you a single penny for this meeting. It's on us. Because one of the things we now do in our firm is we spend more time thinking about our clients, how we can change their lives, how we can make their lives, their businesses better. And so this is just something that we now do for our clients. And we'd love to sit down with you, share these five ideas, and particularly the one that we believe could save you $20,000 in tax. So what we're doing is making it very clear to the client that not charging them for this, it's part of just adding value of being really client focused. Now, what you might then go and say is, at the end of that meeting, Mary, you'll have three options. The first one is you might decide that none of those ideas are right for you right now. You might decide to do nothing. And that's fine, Mary. Although I really think one of them, the top one, is going to be so powerful, I know that you are going to love it. Now, the other thing you could do, the second choice is you could then decide to go away and implement one or more of those IODs in your business, and that would be a great thing to do, Mary. Alternatively, the third option is you might say that you'd like us to do the implementation for you, and we're happy to do that, and we can talk about how we do that for you, if that's of help to you. And what we'll do is, if you want us to implement the idea, we'll then also talk about what that price would be. So what we're doing in our script is we're telling the client, we're thinking of them, that we've got some great ideas, we've quantified what the best idea might be. We've made it very clear to the client that we're not charging for this meeting, so the client doesn't have to worry about it. But what we're also doing is making it clear that if the client wants us to then go ahead and implement one or more of the ideas, we will then discuss the price and give a fixed price, a value based price to the client. So there's complete clarity over the process. So how do we then come up with the price? Well, my suggestion is this, that meeting, you simply outline the possibilities that the client has available to them and they can decide whether they do nothing, go away and do it themselves, or they'd like you to implement. And what I would then suggest is that you then arrange a second meeting, a follow up meeting. The first meeting could be a short one, it might even be just a Zoom call, for example, 20 minutes on a zoom call just to outline the ideas to Mary and then arrange a second call to then present in more detail your proposal. And the reason why you might have a second meeting is because it allows you to then go away and then start spending some more time thinking about how might you price it, what would be the best way of doing this work? It may be that as a result of the conversation with Mary, other things then come out, that there's other things that you could do over and above the ideas, or you might find out that Mary likes that idea, particularly if you could do this and this as well. So that's why having a second meeting allows you to prepare. And then what you want to do is create a draft proposal where you would sort out and set out what the pain is taking away, the benefits, the outcomes, and then give Mary some choices, some options, ideally three choices, where the middle choice is the one that is the one that Mary suggests that she really wants. The middle one is the one that the client really wants. But a new cover, a value based price that will be perhaps even a high price if there's a lot of value. But just in case that's too expensive, you have an entry level option where you take out some of the extra, it's a no frill, you take out some of the unnecessary bits, but also have a premium option at a much higher price and that's to create an anchor. You then have your second meeting with Mary and you run through your proposal, it's almost certain that Mary will buy one of your choices because you come up with ideas that are going to make a big difference. And the reason you're having a second meeting is because the client's excited about the possibilities of that. And if Mary picks one of those choices, as long as you price it using value pricing, it could be very profitable work. So that's the process. How I recommend that when you come up with great ideas for your clients, the process, the scripts, the words that you say so that you can then get a value based price. Now, if you found this valuable, this video valuable, please remember to click on the subscribe button and if you hit the little bell icon as well, you'll get notifications. When I do new videos, please also hit the thumbs up. If you like this video, just let me know with the thumbs up icon. Feel free to comment. What do you think of the video? Let me know underneath your comments. This idea, is it something that you already do? Have you got any questions? Let me know and feel free to share the video. Thank you so much for watching. I'll see you on another video again very soon. Goodbye for now.