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Client satisfaction: Pricing performance in tough times

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26th May 2009
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Paul Shrimpling of Remarkable Practice offers some wise words on how to make the most of the client relationships you have in the recession.

The Professional Pricing Society in the States recently offered US accountants a list of ‘six things to improve when times are tough’. For UK accountants, I will outline four items which could radically boost your business and keep clients happy.

Be inspired by Who Wants to be a Millionaire?
When money gets tight you can imagine your clients asking themselves, ‘is that all I get for this price?’ This may encourage them to shop around and consider one of the other accountants who are regularly asking them to think about switching. The classic solution to this is adding things that are perceived to be high value but actually cost you very little.

Take a tip from Who Wants to be a Millionaire? and suggest that they ‘phone a friend’. When times are tough, clients need reliable reassurance and as an accountant, you can provide this better than anyone else. Pick up the phone and call your most valuable clients in the next few days to check on how they are holding up. Give them a shoulder to cry on if necessary, support them and help where you can.

The McDonalds method
The chances are, you’ve heard servers at McDonalds asking ‘do you want fries with that?’. What they are doing is offering a complimentary service that you may want to buy. If you were selling cameras you'd be offering batteries, a protective camera case and fancy strap.

As an accountant you could be offering board meeting support with your management accounts service, and possibly bookkeeping too. With payroll you could offer a free financial service consultation to all your clients' staff, or perhaps access to an HR service you have sourced.

Upselling
Once again, let’s look at how McDonalds approaches this. I bet you recognise the phrase ‘would you like to go large?’. McDonalds has increased its average order value on a healthy percentage of its worldwide sales by asking this simple upsell question with every order, and this is a technique that can be adapted for accountancy services.

Since clients need to get closer to their numbers in these tumultuous times, you could suggest that they consider moving from quarterly management accounts to a bi-monthly or monthly service. Perhaps they would value a debrief from you with trend analysis to help them make some important decisions in the coming months? Why wouldn’t you offer service upgrades that are relevant and timely? It will build greater value into your client relationships, both for you and your clients.

Remove hurdles
Sprinting and also jumping the full length of an athletics track always looks so damned tough to me, so why do we ask our customers to do something similar when dealing with us? If you shorten the race and remove the hurdles, your customers (and prospects) will love you for it. Make it easy for them to buy from you by:

  • Creating guarantees that remove all (or most) of the risk associated with using (or buying) from you.
  • Creating offers that allow your clients/prospects to try before they buy (e.g. encouraging a long standing client to trial your management accounts service monthly for three months to see if they prefer the more immediate insights and results over their usual quarterly service).

Got any insights or advice? Post your comments below.

If you’d like more insights on how to market your firm in a remarkable way, complete my marketing effectiveness survey.

Paul Shrimpling
www.remarkablepractice.com
Paul Shrimpling is managing director of Remarkable Practice and author of a white paper entitled ‘The 7 big mistakes that accountants make that costs them a fortune in lost sales, lost profits and lost personal cash’.

Replies (2)

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By People Scope
27th May 2009 16:06

Analogies
As the other responder has indicated, the use of parallels for business development drawn from consumer markets tends not go down well with the professional mind-set. And that's without the very obvious negative connotations of McDs and the supersize thing. There's probably another client relationship tip in this somewhere though...:-)

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Teignmouth
By Paul Scholes
26th May 2009 17:02

Mmmm? rather than Yum
Not sure about the wisdom of quoting the McDonalds methods on additional or “up” sales, have you seen/read “Super Size Me”. Both methods have lead to customers who bought more than they needed and who now avoid the purveyor like the plague. Come to think of it they wouldn't go to the athletics track either.

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