Last week I shared with you one of the “best things” that recent attendees got out of the Practice Growth Formula workshop I presented at.

The best thing I shared with you last week in Part 1 of this 3-part series was the principle “if you only do it once, doesn’t do it at all”. 

Here is the second best thing our attendees got out of the workshop.

Best thing #2 – Packaging for premium positioning is possible, even for professional services

I often ask my clients how they engage their clients and how much do they charge for particular services. The answer is always “it depends”.

I get it. It depends on the client, the complexity of the work, how much time it takes, etc.

The problems with needing to come up with a fee quote for every job are:

• The engagement process takes a lot of time – you’ve incurred quite a lot of time on the clock before delivering anything of value to your clients;
• Your clients get a feeling of uncertainty – if you can’t give an estimate on the spot, then there’s a risk that you don’t have as much experience in the matter as you claim you do; and
• You’re unnecessarily lengthening the sales process by not being able to agree a price earlier on in your sales process. Rather, you’re probably having a meeting, followed by an email, followed by phone calls before you finally get a “yes”... or a “no”.

How products and packaging can increase your firm’s sales revenue

Products and packages help you achieve a few things – all leading to more fees:

• Simplifies your service offering to make it easy for your clients to understand – simplicity sells
• Allows you to up sell services more easily
• Creates a sales funnel for your business to attract more clients into your business earlier on in the decision making process

We worked through some ideas for products and packages at the recent workshop. Here are some of the questions we asked our clients to get them started. These are also the first questions we asked our clients in our Premium Packaging Program and you can use these same questions to get started yourself:

1. What are the broad streams of services you provide (e.g. compliance, virtual CFO)?

2. Do you provide different levels of service to different clients under each stream (e.g. the level of service you provide to a small family run business would be different to the level of service you provide to a large Multinational company)?

3. What “products” can you create based on these streams and levels of service?

4. How can you bundle them up to different types of clients to create “packages”?

5. What other products do you need to create to enable clients to trial your services before committing to your packages?

Next week I’ll share with you the third “best thing” attendees got from the recent Practice Growth Formula Workshop.  

I hope this week’s tip was useful for you.