Pricing Models & Skills

Advanced Pricing Methods® — your model for richer customer relationships AND being paid what you’re worth.

ELEVATE Your Pricing Skills

Part science. Part art. Pricing is a competency that’s learned, then improved through practice.

Because no two customers are identical, even with similar challenges, different clients merit unique service approaches. It’s important to always tailor your offerings which means not being too “canned” in your approach or your presentation. However, you CAN use a consistent, repeatable process to formulate and price your tailored solutions.

Learn these powerful tools and processes through Fore’s Advanced Pricing Methods® (APM®) courses.

With APM®, you get increasingly better at understanding buyers’ deeper needs and helping them see the worth of achieving their desired outcomes.

Your confidence as a seller increases and so does the business-advisory capability of every person who participates in the APM® process.

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 how your sales will improve when you use APM®.

If we BLANK, what does that mean for your business?

Michelle facilitating a group in a pricing class

A majority of CPAs confess that they aren’t good at pricing and few enjoy it. Think about it. Almost no one in public accounting firms has formal education in how to go about pricing and how to get better at it. It’s mostly just trial and error. Worse, there’s no line item in financial statements showing us the dollars we leave on the table from poor pricing. And most firms report that margins are much lower than they’d like. Yet we also know that clients commonly feel like they are paying too much.

Why this discrepancy? It usually boils down to flawed communication. And it’s on us as the sellers.

There’s a lot of room to improve when it comes to exploring creative solutions, establishing goals with the buyer, and setting context about relative worth with customers. And just as importantly, we’ve simply got to get better at documenting exactly what is—and what is not—included in our prices. If we don’t, we lose control of managing profitability.

Communication Breeds Loyalty

The cause of most proposal-related buyer/seller communication gaps are:

not thinking through a project sufficiently,
not doing appropriate due diligence, and
not discussing with the buyer the real reasons WHY you’re proposing the work.

Customers won’t inherently know the value of a CPA or consultant’s help. We often assume that our value propositions are obvious. Advanced Pricing Methods® teach a process to communicate more effectively and remedy these problems.

Better pricing comes from better communication from the start. And wonderful side benefits from better communication are deeper relationships with our buyers and much more trust. Compare this to the traditional model of billing unexpected amounts in arrears which most certainly erodes a customer’s trust. Surprise bills are extremely counterproductive in a quest to earn “trusted-advisor” status.

Today, more than 1700 professionals in dozens of CPA firms use Advanced Pricing Methods® and evidence continues to pour in:

Buyers appreciate having the certainty in price, clarity in purpose, and control in their purchase they receive when firms sell to them using Advanced Pricing Methods®.

Communication Improves Profitability

Along with new pricing skills, discover how to avoid one of the costliest, yet avoidable, problems that firms face: scope creep. See improvements quickly when you apply the scoping and pricing techniques you’ll learn with Advanced Pricing Methods®.

Stop doing work that you don’t get paid for. Stop leaving money on the table. Start communicating well.

Contact Michelle to get started today!

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.

Joey Havens

Executive Partner, HORNE LLP

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 a significant amount of additional revenue on most proposals we closed because clients selected a higher service tier option that included high-value consulting projects. We become 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.

Eric Majchrzak

CEO, BeachFleischman PC

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.

Jeff Wald

CEO, K·Coe Isom