One of the things that accountants don’t always do well is price for value.
Way back when I was running the consulting division at a large firm, we started by setting up bronze, silver & gold packages with a series of pro-active services / trusted advisor services upfront with the compliance stuff rolled in.
We offered that menu of choices and human nature is such that people most often go for the central “silver” package. As we knew this would be the most popular package we put the most value in there… and then made sure we could deliver on that value as efficiently as possible.
Delivery of the value is key, people won’t pay a premium price unless you deliver that value.
By packaging it this way we were able to double the average revenue per client, proving its effectiveness!
Another critical thing to consider is that accounting firms often go for a fixed fee and then over-deliver the value. I learnt this the hard way with a $50 000.00 client I had when I was a consulting manager, and we delivered $100 000.00 worth of value before we could pull it back in & make sure that we still retained a margin!
So with that in mind:
Surprise & delight so that the clients are prepared to pay that premium price.
I found that there was very little pushback over the years from clients paying more if it was approached in the right way, packaged attractively and you made sure that you really lived up to their standard of expectation.
