Vicki Smith: The 6 Month Value Pricing Update

Fixed pricing has definitely made my time more efficient. It's probably freed up five to ten hours a week for me, which is huge. That's five, ten hours a week more that I get to sleep, or spend with my family. Now I have about 60% of my clients on fixed pricing, and I'm not keeping time sheets, so it's great.

 I would rate the experience to moving towards value pricing to be a very positive one. It has given me a greater comfort level with the pricing with the clients, and it's also given the clients a comfort level, and I totally enjoy not having to keep track of the time spent with my customers.

I do feel that with the fixed pricing it has created the opportunity for my clients to use me as a trusted advisor, because they're not concerned about, "Oh, I'm going to get billed for every minute that I'm on the phone."

One of the hardest parts was coming up with the analysis, and spending the time to come up with the packages, a set package based on what type of services I was offering them, to give them their three choices, the good, better, best. Doing the analysis was actually a very informative process, because I was able to really look in depth at what each client needed. That actually took me quite a bit of time, because I tend to labor over things like that, trying to be fair to my clients, and fair to me.

People can't argue price when they've chosen it. That's just a big comfort level for me to know that they've agreed to the price, they know what the price is up front. There's no surprises, there's no variances on it, and they're comfortable with that. They don't get hit with a big swing in what their bill is from month to month, or year to year based on something that happened during the year. I think it's made my client's more comfortable, and it's made me more comfortable, and that alone is worth the time that it took to go through the analysis, and having the conversations with my clients.

I think you need to know your clients, and you need to really take a look at the scope of services that you want to offer to your clients, and you need to reach a comfort level with how much work you can do with your clients.

My expectations were not really formed in going into this. I really hadn't done any research on value pricing, had not heard a lot of it, so I didn't really know what to expect, so it's been an enjoyable journey. It was a very interesting thing to go through, and I think it is a value to my business, to of gone through the value pricing, and I'm going to continue doing the value pricing with all of my business.