How are you selling and pricing your consulting & professional training/coaching services? Do you sell and price by the hour, by the day, by the project?
This type of business will keep you on the revenue/income roller coaster, and it will often keep you overworked and underpaid. This is a TRANSACTION business.
Landing a project or client, then doing the work, and then having to find another client is a hustle-and-grind business that will keep your income inconsistent, and you underpaid.
You are not an employee; you are an entrepreneur, so you have to think and do things differently to have more control over your income, sustainability, and consulting business success.
Here’s the SECRET SAUCE to getting paid more, having a consistent and predictable income, and simplifying your business. Sell a transformation instead of a transaction.
When you bring in clients and give them a valuable transformation (lasting results), versus doing a transaction (temporary fix), you get paid significantly more, retain your clients longer (most of them a year or longer), and you can get off of the revenue/income roller coaster.
When you sell a transformational service, you can serve your clients at a higher level.
Transformational engagements are where you can get better and bigger clients. Think about $100k, $200k, $500k, and even million-dollar deals.
How do you make this shift (if you aren’t doing this)?
Build your pricing around the value of the client’s outcome, transformation, and results. You have your pricing baseline when the client can quantify the value of what your help will mean to their organization or company or what it is costing them not to have what they want and need.
One of my clients was a coach for a company. However, because of her experience and skills, they began having her do work that was out of the original agreement of the engagement, and they were paying her by the hour for the extra time.
This company had struggled with high turnover at the management and executive level, and it was costing the company so much money. It had become an urgent problem within the organization that was stopping growth.
However, the scope of work she was doing was worth several hundred thousand dollars if this company had to hire someone outside the company to fill the same role.
My client was being paid peanuts for the highly skilled hiring work she was doing but didn’t know how to restructure things with the client to get paid what she knew she deserved.
We restructured her offer to $130k plus a percentage of the positions she was helping them fill (less than a recruiter.) By establishing the value and showing them how much she was saving them and getting them far better results, and saving the owners valuable time, it was a “no-brainer.”
Value, how do you define this? It is different for each client depending on their situation and what the result you provide is worth to their company.
Consider this…
What is a bottle of water to someone who isn’t thirsty, but sitting right in front of them is a machine filled with bottled water? They decide it might be nice to have a bottle, so they put a $1 in. If that same price were $100, they probably wouldn’t buy it because it’s not important enough or urgent. So, there was no lost opportunity or cost if they didn’t buy the bottle of water at that time.
However, take a bottle of water and offer it to someone in the desert who is only within a few hours of death because of severe dehydration. What would they pay for the water?
When you solve a big urgent problem, or pain, or provide a result, or transformation that could be worth millions to a company or business, do you think you would be able to sell your service for $100k, $250k, $500k, or even a million dollars?
Of course, you can, with the proper process in place.
When you get clients a transformation that provides them with a high-perceived value, you can often get 5-10% or more of that value as your fees.
One of my clients, Dawn, was selling her services for a few thousand dollars before we began working together. She was giving away her expertise to the wrong clients, but she wanted more growth and sustainability of revenue/income in her business.
By restructuring how she was offering her services and showing more value to the right people, she began getting $60k clients + equity in their companies (with projections, potentially making the deal worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, or millions.)
This is just one way to structure a bigger deal with better clients at higher fees.
However, larger companies and organizations won’t always want to give away equity, so in this case, you can price by the value (gain or cost.)
Depending on who your ideal clients are, you can often 5-10x or more what you are charging. Also, by getting away from project work and into result or transformation engagements with your clients, you can build monthly retainers with clients and leverage your time to work less.
Let me ask you?
What could you offer the right company if money was no object? Could you offer your services for $100k, $250k, or $500k and give them an outcome or result that would make it easy for them to say yes?
It is a game-changer for your consulting practice when you shift your mindset to selling the value instead of a project, leadership development, business development, etcetera.
You will be able to work with fewer clients, for more money, and with less time. They won’t care about the time; they will care about the results. So, if you deliver the results fast, it is better for them and better for you.
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If you want help scaling your business into multiple six or seven figures and this newsletter resonates with you, book a call with me at A.carden.com. I want to wish you all the best through the holidays.
If you would like more education and training on growing your professional consulting, coaching, or client service business, here are some ways to get more!
- You can subscribe to my EXPERT IN YOU PODCAST & SHOW. Choose the platform you like!
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- You can attend my upcoming Expert In You Business Accelerator & Marketing Luxury Retreat!
- You can book a call if you want my help to grow and scale an Ultra-High-End Coaching or Consulting business!
Did you find this blog valuable? I would love to hear your feedback and thoughts.
To your success,
Ann