Pricing, Not Price, As A Competitive Advantage

By Tim Williams

The way to win more business is not to offer the best price, but rather the best pricing approach.

Many firms will argue their clients are “price shoppers,” and it’s true undiscriminating buyers can be found in every market. But most smart clients understand you get what you pay for. The reason some of them seem prone to “buy on price” is much more about how we sell than how they buy. 

Based on the hourly rate system, what most agencies sell is their costs (buckets of hours), so it’s no wonder their clients are focused on costs. But what would happen if agencies decided to sell their services in a different way?

Are you creative or aren’t you?

To stand out in a competitive pitch, inject as much creativity into your compensation proposal as you do in your proposed concepts and recommendations Give your prospect multiple ways to buy your services, not just a take-it-or-leave-it total of your estimated hours. 

Car washes demonstrate more creativity in pricing than agencies do. They offer multiple options (silver, gold, platinum), various versions of car wash packages, premium add-ons, monthly or annual memberships, and more. Honestly, is adding up your estimated costs the best you can do?

You can’t really claim to be “a different kind of agency” without taking a different approach to the economic foundation of your success. Ron Gibori, co-founder of agency start-up BGO (Blinding Glimpse of the Obvious), puts it this way “There are no new models, just more talk, without a new approach to the money.” Ron’s partner Mark Beeching elaborates:

“We embrace shared risk and reward with clients in a variety of ways -- from pinning significant fees to agreed performance criteria through to joint ventures with clients and shared or even full-risk ownership and funding of new IP by BGO. We'd rather apply our inventive business brains to new win-wins with clients than endless wrangling over budgets and billable hours …”

Changing your pricing changes the dialogue

At a minimum, decide you’re going to join the rest of the business world in selling outputs instead of inputs. (Can you imagine paying for a new laptop based on the number of hours it took to build it?) Then commit to replacing your standardized rate card with a spectrum of pricing approaches designed around customer value instead of agency cost. This can range from fixed price options to licensed programs; from royalties to outcome-based agreements; from dynamic pricing to usage of IP (the way Hollywood makes money).

Not only does a creative approach to pricing help you stand out from the firms creaking under the outmoded hourly rate system, it changes the dialogue you have with your clients when in comes to compensation. Would you rather be talking about something clients want to minimize (costs) or something they want to maximize (value in its many forms)?

From treadmill to virtuous circle

If you need some extra motivation, consider that transforming your pricing strategies is really the only way you’ll be able to create and sustain the “virtuous circle” that is the basis of every extraordinarily successful firm:

The elements of this cycle are interdependent. You can’t expect “effective work” to sustain your success if you don’t also have an effective way to get paid for it. In fact, without a pricing strategy that produces healthy margins, you’ll forever be swimming against the currents. As the late great Stephen Covey preached, “No margin, no mission.”