The 5 Critical Steps to Pricing New Clients

Welcome. Hi there, it's Mark Wickersham here. I'm an accountant who helped other accounting professionals get their pricing right, make more money, have a better practice. And in this video, we're going to look at the, the five critical steps that you need to go through when you are meeting a potential new client. Five steps that will help you get the right client at the right price.

So when we're meeting with potential clients, there is some best practice, there are some structures, some processes that we need to go through. And I'm going to walk you through five of the critical steps. And the first of those is research. We need to research the client that we're going to meet. Why is that? It's because the purpose of the initial meeting with a client is to understand whether or not we're a good fit for each other. We also want to ask questions. I call it the fact find. And so we want to gather as much information as possible. We want to build a relationship. We want to create that great fit and a great starting point. An important starting point is the research that we carry out. And so what that means is before the meeting, go and visit the website. Go and look for things on the website that you can use to start the conversation. But not just the website. Go to their social channels, go and find them on LinkedIn. Even better, go and find them on Facebook, on Instagram and other channels. Find out something about them. Find out if there is something that you have in common because that's a great way to create some rapport in the meeting. So go and find out something about them personally. Follow them on social media. Also do a search on Google, see what comes up. You might learn something really interesting. It could be that you find out something that's not so good about them. Perhaps they are the subject of a newspaper story where they've been in trouble. Perhaps they've been avoiding taxes. And that will be useful information to know before you commit your precious valuable time to a meeting. So number one is do the research. It doesn't need to take long, 15, 20 minutes. Website, Google. Search social posts and make some notes of things that you can then ask the client. Okay, next is what I call meeting one expectations. Now you'll notice there's meeting one. And that's because when I ran my practice, I started my accounting firm back in 1996. I owned it for 10 years before I sold it to my client managers. And in the first few years, I made so many crazy mistakes. And one of the things that I did was when I Met with potential clients with prospects. I wanted to do everything in a hurry. I wanted to meet them, I wanted to tell them what I could do, I wanted to sign them up, get the engagement assigned, and that was it. A client. We can't rush the process because.

Every client is different. It's a big decision, hiring an accounting professional, whether you're an accountant, whether you're a bookkeeper, it's a big decision because it's a relationship business. They're going to be working with you, hopefully for many, many years. It's a big decision. And so I strongly recommend that we think of all new client meetings as a two meeting approach. So meeting number one, the focus and the primary purpose of the first meeting is very, very simple. The first meeting should be all about.

Finding out whether or not we're a good fit for each other, whether you're the right person for them and whether they're the right client for you. Do you gel with them? And so it doesn't have to be a long meeting. It's about just seeing if you're right for each other. Meeting one is not the time to get into the detail. It's not the time to get into presenting your proposed solutions. It's not the time for agreeing prices. We simply want to see that we're a good fit. And so this step is about managing their expectations. And that means you have a standard process, an email that communicates what is the purpose of the first meeting. And so in that email you would want to certainly confirm the date and time of the meeting. Where is it taking place? Is it a physical meeting? Is it on zoom, Microsoft Teams? Is it online? But also what's the purpose of the meeting? Explain. The purpose of the meeting is to see if we are a good fit for each other. Also, I strongly recommend you manage expectations about time. Tell them how long you think the meeting is going to last. Tell them how long they need to put aside for the meeting. What are you going to do in the meeting?

And I would suggest that the first meeting is going to be, if it's an online meeting, it could be as little as 30 minutes, it could be 45 minutes. It doesn't want to be too long because it's the first meeting of a two meeting approach. So that's the second stage, the second critical step you want to manage expectations about that meeting number three. Number three is then the meeting itself, the structure of that meeting. So when they come along for the meeting, remember your goal is to see if you're a good fit. The Meeting should be more about you listening and them doing the talking. You want to learn. I call this the fact find. What it means is that you want to be asking questions. It's you asking questions and then giving you the information. And you want to research these questions in advance. You want to have pre prepared questions. So remember I said in step one, do the research. As part of doing the research, you also want to plan what are the questions that you want to ask now when you're doing a fact find when you're having a meeting.

As well as understanding whether you're a good fit or not. Also, what you want to find out in that meeting is you want to learn, you want to discover what's important to that particular business owner.

What's their goals in life? What's their goals for their business? Where do they want their business to be in a year from now, in five years from now? Why do they start in business? You want to understand a bit more about what they want, what they're trying to achieve. You also want to understand what are the challenges, what are the problems right now? Because the better you are at understanding where they are now, the problems, the challenges, the better you are at understanding where they want to get to in the future, then two things happen. Number one, by asking those sorts of questions, it demonstrates and shows that you care about them. See, most professional accountants want to get straight to the details. They want to talk about how they can help them do their tax returns, their payroll, their bookkeeping. No, we can get to that later. We want to show and demonstrate that we care about them, where they are now and where they're trying to go. And the second reason we ask these questions is because we want to uncover value. We want to understand what's important to them. Because the better we become at understanding what's important and what drives value for them, the more that's going to help us with later in the process. When we communicate value, when we build our solutions, when we present our price and we want our price to be seen as great value for money. That doesn't mean low. We want high prices, but we want them price and our package to reflect how we're going to solve their problems. How are we going to help them achieve their dreams, get to where they want to? So when we're doing the questions, there is a process that we need to go through. There is really four stages, the four stages of the fact find. Number one, we have to ask the background questions. They're the easy questions, the ones that we're Comfortable with. It's the ones that we usually ask anyway. So this is easy. These are questions like, so tell me, why did you get into business? Where do you see yourself being in business? What do you want to achieve in business? What do you want to achieve out of your life? We're used to these questions. They are background questions. They help us to understand what drives the client a bit more about the business. And for sure, we need to ask those questions. They are the least important of the four stages. Unfortunately, most of us professionals, we spend all of our time asking background questions because they're comfort zone questions. But actually, stages two, three and four are much more powerful. But nevertheless, you'll spend five, six, seven minutes asking those background questions. But next, much more important is to ask the problem questions. What that means is we want to start to uncover what's going on in their business right now. What are the problems? What are the problems they're facing? What are the challenges? What are the pain points? What are the hurdles, the roadblocks? We want to ask questions to find out what they are. We want to ask them, what are your biggest problems in business right now? And we should spend a bit of time here because we want to uncover as many problems as possible. The more problems we uncover, the more pain the client's experiencing, then the greater the opportunity for us to come up with solutions that can remove that pain. And pain is a bigger motivator than gain. When we can demonstrate that we can take away their pain, they are more likely to hire you, buy from you, and pay higher prices. So we ask problem questions now. Then what we do is we start to ask consequence questions. This is where we really drill down. We want to understand what are the consequences of each of the various elements of pain or problems they have. So when they give you a problem, when they say, this is my problem right now, make a note of it. But come back to that problem and say, so what sort of things is that causing your business? Why is that a problem? What are the results of that? We want to understand, because the more we understand, the more we can help solve that problem. We can also start to quantify the problem. If we can quantify the problem, then later on we can quantify the value of what we do to solve that problem. And that's going to help us with both communicating the value later in the process and also coming up with a value based price. Number four is the outcome. Questions we then wrap up with. We might give them a few ideas of some of the things we might do to solve the problem. So you might say, so if we could do this and solve this problem, what would that mean for you? How would that benefit you? And number four is, is an important category of questions because when the client articulates to you the benefit of you solving their problem, when they articulate the benefit, they're selling themselves on your service, on your solution. Now, the questioning process is a difficult skill to master, but it's critically important. And I've given you the structure now, and the more you use it, the more you practice it, you will get better. And you'll find that when you ask great questions, you're going to not just learn so much, but also the client will really start to think, this accounting professional really cares about me. They really understand my business, they want to understand my business. And so they will see you different to other accountants, other bookkeepers who just get into the detailed stuff straight away and too early. So that's the structure of the first meeting. We don't talk about price, we don't talk about solutions. We're learning.

We end the meeting. This is the last agenda item on this meeting. You must not finish that meeting.

Until you've agreed the date and time of the next meeting. And typically that will be within seven days. Within seven days. The only exception to that is if you've decided during the process of that meeting that you're not a good fit. And that's okay. It's okay to walk away, it's okay to say no. You don't have to commit to meeting every client for a second time. They might not be right for you, but if they are a good fit, end the meeting by committing to the second meeting within a week. Okay, next thing we do, this is number four. Four is we now want to manage their expectations for meeting number two. And this may be in the form of an email. And certainly, as with the earlier email, we want to let them know the date, the time, the location of the meeting. But also you want to get them excited about the meeting, looking forward to it. So you might tell them about some of the thinking you've done following meeting number one, that you've come up with a range of different solutions that will help solve their problems. And you want to use that meeting to explore the different possibilities so they can choose which is the best option for them. And once they've chosen the best option, you'll then work with them to agree a price. The other thing that you want to do in that email is also manage their expectations about how long that meeting will last. And I would recommend that the second meeting is a longer meeting because we get into the detail. Now, this is where you're going to go and build up the value of what you do and then present the solutions and agree price. And I would suggest to you that a second meeting would normally be at least 60 minutes, perhaps an hour and a half, could even be longer. So manage their expectations so they block it in the calendar. And therefore the meeting is. Isn't rushed. So that's number four. Number five, then, is the structure of that meeting. How do you structure that second meeting? And so there's really three parts to it. Part number one is where you want to recap on the first meeting. And you recap by restating, by summarizing the pain.

Last time we met, George, you said to me that you were having really real problems with this, this, and this, and they were causing this. Have I got that right? So we want to make sure we understand the pain. We want to remind them of the pain. Then what we do is we can then move on to our proposed solution. And this is where you would talk about what you think you can do to solve that problem, to help take away the pain, to. To help get them to where they want to go. And as part of your preparation, you may have a pricing brochure. It may be that you've created a draft proposal. And as part of that solution, you may have given some different choices. I would certainly recommend giving them a range of different packages. I call this menu pricing. Give them choices, because everybody loves choice. You want to give them some choice. And if you want to find out more about that, I have lots of other videos on my YouTube channel about menu pricing, why it works, the psychology and the mistakes that sometimes people make when creating their packages and menu pricing. So check those videos out. So you want to offer them some solutions to their problem, you want to build up the value of those solutions, and you want to get to the point where you. You get them to tell you which is the one that they want. What's the best solution? What's the solution they want? We want to get to the point where they want to buy. You've built up the value so much, you've understood them, you've built the value up, and they've chosen the solution they want. So the only thing left is the price. And that's the next part of the meeting. We deal with price last. We want to build the value up first. We build the value up until they understand the value, see the value, until they want what you've got. And then we talk about price. And when it comes to talk, when it comes to talking about price, we do that in the meeting, face to face. A huge mistake I made way back in my accounting firm in 96, 97, 98. I'd have these meetings with potential clients. At the end of the meeting, they say, mark, what's the price? And I'd make the crazy mistake of panicking, thinking, I have no idea, I don't know what to charge. So I'd say, what I'm going to do is go away and think about it. I'm going to create a proposal. I'm going to put it through the mail to you. And that's a huge mistake because when you send your price in a proposal through the mail, through the post, by email, when they receive that, I know what will happen because we all do it. Whenever we get a proposal or quote through the mail, the first thing we look for is the price. We go scanning through because we want to see the price. Your clients are no different. And when they get your proposal, it doesn't matter how fancy it is, it could be a beautiful proposal full of benefits and pain that you're removing. I can guarantee when they get it, they're going to go through it fast because they're looking for the price. Usually they'll go to the end and then work backwards till they find the price. And when they see that number, their brain makes an instant judgment. Ooh, that's more expected, Spencer, than I'm thinking. And the trouble is, you're not there. You've lost control of the process. So you must, must agree the price in the meeting. Of course, the question I usually get is, how do I do that? I have a complex service. It's bookkeeping, it's payroll, it's tax returns, it's end of year financial statements. Every client's different. I don't know the scope of the work, I don't know what to charge. You need a system. You need a system for doing it. A system that will enable you to price in front of the client in confidence. And a great system for that is effective pricing. It's designed to help accountants and bookkeepers price with confidence in front of the client. It's a digital approach to pricing that.

Has transparency so the client can see how the price is building up. It builds in price psychology so your price feels smaller. It's designed to get you higher conversions and higher prices. So check out effective pricing that will make it much easier for you to have the price conversation and you'll agree more prices in the meeting and much higher prices than you ever thought was possible because of the process.

So that's the structure of the second meeting. Number one a recap. Restate the pain, restate the problems. Number two present your range of solutions and get the client to pick which one they want works best for them. Number three work with them to agree the price. They're the five critical steps. Once the client then says yes of course what you want to do is get your engagement letter signed, get the payment sorted out and that's where your client onboarding system will would then pick up and kick off and take them through the next step of the process. Hope you found this valuable. I hope it's you go away and change the way you start talking to prospects. Please share with me the successes, the results that you're getting and please ask me questions. Thank you so much. Goodbye for now.