Pricing Education for CPAs
Learn how to price up front and get paid what you’re worth.
ELEVATE Your Pricing Skills
The Advanced Pricing Methods® Essential Skills Workshop is education and inspiration for accountants and consultants to learn a proven, step-by-step process to:
- price accounting-firm services upfront
- position services for their worth (instead of time)
- improve profitability and safeguard scope
- improve client trust and deepen relationships
This CPA-firm specific Workshop covers concepts that include various pricing models, cultivating a worth-mindset, bundling as a default approach, foundations for project definition and scoping, and all the requisite basics around three-option pricing.
Participants apply APM®’s sophisticated techniques hands-on to bring these concepts to life. Experience the huge difference APM® makes in how you view what you do for your clients.
Part science. Part art.
Part science and part art, pricing is a competency that, once learned, continuously improves with practice.
No two customers are identical, even those with similar challenges. The “art” comes into play as you discover each buyer’s unique needs and what your solutions are worth to them. While that sounds complicated, the science part is that you can do this using a consistent, repeatable process to formulate tailored solutions. Customizing what you say in your proposals provides the best odds of winning work.
Practice using Advanced Pricing Methods® to master understanding buyers’ deeper needs and positioning your true worth. The more you use APM, the more you’ll feel your confidence increase!
There’s a reason we don’t call it “CPE”
This course is nothing like typical CPE!
The Advanced Pricing Methods® Essential Skills Workshop is THREE days of content compressed into a day and a half. It’s fast-paced, intense, and some even say it’s mind-bending.
Regardless of how you describe it, you’ll come out inspired to begin and well-equipped to use APM in your very next selling opportunity.
RESULT TREND: Firms using Advanced Pricing Methods® experience dramatic increase in revenue-per-sale.
Ask about Fore’s Advanced Pricing Methods Results Calculator to apply result trends to YOUR sales figures.
See exactly how much sales will improve when you use APM®.
The pricing skill gap
Most CPAs readily confess they aren’t good at pricing. They’re right, but not for the reason you might think.
What CPAs do today—estimating hours and reconciling back to that estimate—isn’t pricing, it’s selling time. And if you’re a CPA, it’s probably not your fault.
Today’s CPAs are the fifth generation of accountants taught “we sell time.”
But you don’t sell time, or tasks. You sell transformations, solutions, credibility, wisdom, assistance, peace of mind, and even hope. A lot of CPAs sense this but aren’t sure what to do differently.
Time-based billing is so deeply embedded in our profession that few CPAs have derived “pricing” any other way. However, time is not—and shouldn’t ever be—a “price.” It’s a form of cost allocation. And certainly, it’s also a constraint. Because our time is finite, it’s reasonable for us to reduce it every way possible and become more efficient. But it’s self defeating if we don’t change our revenue model first.
Using a downward-trending datapoint—hours—as a revenue model is a terrible idea!
It’s high time (pardon the pun) for CPA firms to master a new revenue model.
Closing the Skill Gaps
Billing for time is simple. Plus it’s relatively easy to defend a bill by “justifying” the hours you invested in the project. But isn’t it lousy to be in this adversarial position with the customer?
Hourly billing created a safety net. When we can bill almost every hour, why bother planning out the project in detail? Why worry much about project-management? Getting away with skipping these activities in the past is why today’s CPAs don’t have well-developed pricing, scoping, and project management skills.
We’re fixing that! In addition to pricing approaches, Advanced Pricing Methods® addresses the second skill: how to sufficiently define projects so you can, in turn, get better at the third under-developed skill: managing to your project definition.
Worth-Based Pricing Replaces Time-Based Billing
Worth-based pricing involves buyers throughout the sale. It culminates with buyers knowing their total spend before they buy. Done well, worth-based pricing very effectively de-commoditizes CPA service offerings.
A worth-based price has two components: 1) worth it to the buyer to purchase AND 2) worth it to the seller to provide it. Advanced Pricing Methods® addresses both. The scoping and project definition discussed above speaks to the seller part.
The Advanced Pricing Methods® process teaches you how to do both.
The scoping and project definition needs discussed above speak to the seller part.
When it comes to “worth it to the buyer” part, we tend to assume that our value propositions are obvious. Interestingly though, customers don’t inherently know the real value of our help. We have to learn out to talk only about worth and stop talking about time.
Advanced Pricing Methods® teaches several ways to think about and talk about your worth.
Better prices come from better communication and relevant positioning, back to what you DO sell, above. Wonderful side benefits are deeper relationships with our buyers, greater trust, and less friction.
Compare this to the traditional model of billing unexpected amounts which erodes a customer’s trust. Surprise bills are extremely counterproductive in a firm’s quest to earn “trusted-advisor” status.
Start getting paid what you’re worth. Stop doing work that you don’t get paid for.
Contact Michelle to get started today!
Working with Michelle and Fore is an absolute pleasure. Michelle provides great insights, training and materials; and is always available for follow-up questions as she is vested in our success. She is one of the best consultants I’ve worked with in 30 years of business and I would recommend her and Fore to any firm looking to implement advanced pricing and generate more success for their firm.
The Advanced Pricing Methods® (APM) model has been the springboard to our growth! Our firm is having great success, in large part due to our “choice pricing” program (our name for APM). We have been able to greatly advance the size of our client engagements. We do not take any new client engagements that are not multi-disciplinary and willing to utilize choice pricing. We are so very thankful for Michelle’s contributions toward our accomplishments!
Michelle’s Advanced Pricing Methods® workshop produced results that exceeded our expectations. A year after we implemented her approach, our proposal win rate jumped to 80%, a 25% increase over the prior year. We were able to capture significant additional revenue on most proposals we closed because clients selected a middle or high service-tier option that included high-value consulting projects. We became more adept at sourcing work beyond compliance. By focusing on outcomes, not tasks, we created demand for solutions that helped clients achieve success; it’s what they care about most.
Michelle significantly improved and accelerated our customer engagement by teaching us how to offer price options that transferred control to our customers, letting them decide what they want to tackle and when. Offering options also encourages our team members to introduce more solutions and, as we all know, clients generally want more of our help than we think they do. These changes to our pricing approach expanded our relationships with customers, which has been key to us meeting our core mission of impacting their success.
Our profession is faced with transforming our business model which includes learning new ways to price our services. Frankly, our profession is not skilled in collaborating with clients on pricing. Michelle builds a foundation of clarity on why, an understanding of how, and provides real life examples that motivate change. Her ability to create a common language and vision are critical in helping team members change their mindset. Our firm’s progress in pricing has been largely due to Michelle helping us build a vision and foundation that allowed team members to change how they think about pricing. Maybe the best thing I could say is that the ROI on our investment in Michelle’s advanced pricing methodology has been tremendous.
Ready for New Results?
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