When your customer buys from you there are two things they want.  Every time.  You must understand these.

So what are these two things? 

Your customer needs CERTAINTY

When you buy you want to know exactly what you're getting and how much it’s going to cost. The problem is, the old way that as a profession we’ve priced - time-based billing - is a redundant way of pricing, and by definition pricing based on time gives no certainty for the customer.  Whilst you might tell them your hourly rate, they will never know until the job is done how many hours it will take. So we must get away from time-based billing because customers hate it.

Your customer needs CHOICE

The other important thing for a customer is CHOICE! We want to have the freedom to decide things on our own, to make choices because we are all different. We want a solution that meets our own specific needs.

As an example, think about the most profitable company on the planet – Apple. ...

I recently caught up with Jane Aylwin who is, quite simply, an extraordinary bookkeeper.  During our interview she told me how – in the last 5 months – she had added £53,000 in fees, almost entirely from pricing (which means most of it goes straight to bottom line profit) in a different way.

She started off, just like many bookkeepers, working from her kitchen table.  And getting OK results.

But those OK results got worse and worse as her business grew and she took on people to work for her.  Her old pricing models were no longer working.

The big epiphany
A few months ago, on the way to a client she had a big realisation… she needed to do something different.  Otherwise she’d keep getting the same results.

That meeting with a client was the first of 4 meetings that week; a week she now describes as her ‘week of wow’.  In that week she had a pricing conversation with each of those 4 clients…

… and in...