Your accounting services pricing IS related to client psychology! Huh !!!
What’s your price got to do with client psychology?
It’s Tax Season. Your clients want their tax returns done. As soon as possible. All they want is “compliance”. And compliance is a commodity business. Very price sensitive. Irrespective of what you say to differentiate. Isn’t it?
When your clients’ think they are buying a commodity, you have little control over your pricing.
So how will you increase your pricing by knowing something more beyond this “commodity psychology?”
Here is something that you need to do, now !!…….
First : You probably heard something called Cognitive Psychology.
Cognitive psychology is the scientific investigation of human cognition i.e. all human mental abilities – perceiving, learning, remembering, thinking, reasoning, and understanding. So cognitive psychology studies how people acquire and apply knowledge or information.
Second: You need to know how your clients apply the knowledge and information you give them.
What do clients do with the data and information you give to them?
Hence, what your clients do really is to use the objective data that you generate for them through your accounting processes, for some business purpose. In effect, your clients are using cognitive psychology.
And how do they take decisions?
Now, if you understand the ways your clients arrive at the decision making from the accounting data and information you provided to them, you will get an insight into your clients’ psychology.
Which decisions they take when you give them data and information?
And if you can actually guess how the client is going to use the data and information you provided to take which exact decisions, you will know a different, more effective way to present that data and information to your clients.
What happens now?
Now when you package the “what, how and which” along with the commodity data/information that you deliver to your client, you give them a surprise, a pleasant one.
You have taken away one anxious conversion (data/information into decision parameter) effort away from your client. It tells the client three things – a) you understand his/her business situation; b) you are not just a data/information-crunching engine; and c) you are measurably helping him/her to take decisions far more easily.
Now, you are not just a commodity seller anymore.
Deliver your “package” to the client, with:
A “to do” list derived from financial statements
A concise description on how it will benefit the client : e.g. 10% reduction in average receivables will infuse $ nnn into your cashflow, reducing your interest costs by X %
Links to helpful resources e.g. promotional offers for goods/services that the client buys regularly
Some referrals that the client can use strategically e.g. your cost of top three large volume items is 72% of your total cost of goods sold – so please negotiate well with the suppliers. Here are some additional suppliers for you to consider.
In a nutshell, don’t deliver just the information to your clients. Instead, deliver “actionable intelligence” along with the information.