I spent most of my career in the accounting and consulting industries in which the billable hour was king. I was never a fan of the billable hour. I didn’t like it for the customer. I particularly didn’t understand why the firms I worked for didn’t see this model as setting an artificial ceiling on earning for us.
I didn’t like it. I began looking around for a better way. That’s when I found Ron Baker’s books and the Verasage Institute. Ron’s books reflected how I thought pricing services should work, and because he is much, much smarter and more articulate than I am, it brought sense to what I had been struggling with in my head. Needless to say, I was happy to hear this group of voices at Verasage and to learn from them.
When I struck out on my own and joined the Duct Tape Marketing network I swore I would never do billable hour work – and I haven’t. All of the work I’ve done has been based on creating a fixed price agreement.
Now I think I’m ready for (what I believe is) the next step. I feel that if I truly believe that price is how we capture value, and value can only be determined by the customer, then I should let the customer (directly) set the price. I’ll be posting some more about the details of how this will work, but here is the bottom line – if you are a customer of mine, you will determine the value of the work I do for you and that will be your price.
In many ways, this really isn’t that big of a change from what I do now. I’ve always offered a 100% money back guarantee. I’ve always tried to have a sales conversation, rather than a sales call, in order to jointly:
- determine the problem(s) that need addressing
- determine if that is a problem that I can help fix
- determine if it is a big enough problem for you, the customer, to do something about
- determine a price that makes sense for the customer
I have recently gotten to the point where I feel I can do a good job of this. And I give a lot of credit to the Sandler Sales training I have received over the last year or so. They have really helped me learn how to get away from all of the typical “sales stuff” that we professionals hate and really focusing on having a conversation to see if we can truly help one another.
So, it doesn’t feel like a huge step for me to make this change, but as the zen master said, “We’ll see”.
I’ll post some more this week about how the details of how this will work with some of our existing programs. In the meantime, let me know what you think
Bill Brelsford Small Business Marketing Consultant
