Paying for stuff hurts. Paying for “opinions” hurts more. Paying for value you get, however, is usually completely fine. The simple way to communicate the value is to talk up the “numbers”, not your effort, enthusiasm, experience, or the number of inputs spent.
Easier said than done, in most industries.
It may seem like presenting pricing advice in value form would be easy, but that’s not how I started. If we met in 2019, I would have said that I did “strategic marketing”. You know, “marketing” aka the most vague service concept since leadership combined with “strategic” aka definitely not urgent.
However I tried to explain the deliverable, it always failed to show clients the depth of transformation I was offering. I just kept hitting the wall, discouraged by the fact that what I was doing felt real, but invisible until you tried it.
All I was really doing was the “trust me, bro” pitch.
Ouch!
After much pain, I got it – it was the effect on pricing: when I do my job with transformationorwhatever, the client can typically raise their prices by 30-40%, like from $90 to $125 an hour, and not lose out proportionally on client volume. And thus, “the pricing guy” was born.
So do me a favor: This week, go and ask 3 past clients what they feel the biggest ongoing impact was from you two working together. If at least one of them tells you a number, you now know how to demonstrate future value.