Improve your profitability by transforming your revenue model

Getting Paid for Value Instead of Time

When it comes to compensation, agencies are on the defense -- not the offense -- because they are mired in industrial-age pricing practices.  Instead of bringing 21st-century pricing methodologies to the table, they are stuck in the bad habit of negotiating their costs instead of selling their value.  A decades-long decline in agency profitability has produced a cascading series of challenges, not the least of which is the ability afford and retain the best talent. 

It's not too late to reverse this trend.  Many recent studies have shown that the single most powerful way to improve agency profits is not to cut costs, or even increase revenues, but rather to improve pricing.  Just a 1% improvement in pricing can produce an 11% improvement in profitability.  Using real-life examples from firms around the world, this workshop will inspire you to roll up your sleeves and apply your brain power to some new, more effective ways of thinking about how your firm creates value and the many different ways you can get paid for it. 

The Fine Art of Packaging and Presenting Your Value

Your firm’s ability to capture value is dependent on its ability to effectively communicate it. Most professionals devote boundless energy to developing a superior work product but invest precious little time learning how to showcase its true value. Brilliant work doesn’t always sell itself. 

When preparing for a new business meeting, we must go beyond rehearsing for the pitch and first devote the necessary brainpower to articulating the meaningful value your firm can bring to the prospect’s business. 

What you do for your clients is immensely valuable. But to capture value, you must communicate value. This means moving from “What we do” to “What you’ll get” in every conversation, every presentation, and every communication with current and prospective clients.  This workshop will show you how.

Why You Should Always Provide Pricing Options

Why does every major marketer offer options when they price, package and sell their products and services?  What do they know that we (agencies) don’t? 

 Brand marketers give their customers a set of choices: different sizes, different features — and of course — different prices.  These powerful "choice architecture” techniques can be easily be adopted by professional service firms like agencies. Agencies that offer options in place of a single price experience higher average revenues for the same work and a more effective sell-in process.

In this online workshop, you’ll learn how to apply behavioral economic and value engineering principles which can help change the conversation with clients to a dialog on outputs and deliverables instead of getting mired in a discussion about hourly rates and staffing plans.  You’ll learn how showing different combinations of program elements and deliverables keeps the discussion focused on what clients really buy: outputs and deliverables, not hours and activities.

Changing the Compensation Dialogue

When a procurement professional walks into a pricing negotiation with an agency, they’re very well-armed. Representing the agency is an executive trained in client service, often accompanied by someone from finance. But a background in marketing and accounting is hardly the same thing as deep expertise price negotiation strategies.

Pitting these professional buyers against amateur sellers creates a serious mismatch. Agency executives are skilled in their craft of marketing communications, but they are woefully unprepared to craft progressive pricing strategies and present them effectively to professional buyers. The agencies that understand they are in the business of selling solutions to business problems, not filling production orders, have devoted the brainpower and firepower to making pricing (not costing) a core competency.

It’s time to level the playing field when it comes to dealing with professional buyers. If we’ll just step up to the plate, and we’ll get better and better with practice.  This workshop shows you how.

How Pricing, Not Price, Can Help You Win More New Business

The way to win more business is not to offer the best price, but rather the best pricing approach.  Many agencies will argue that their clients are “price shoppers,” and it’s true there are undiscriminating buyers in every market. But most smart clients understand you get what you pay for. The reason even some of them seem prone to “buy on price” is much more about how we sell than how they buy.

When agencies base their pricing on the hourly rate system, we’re really just selling our costs (salaries plus overhead), so it’s no wonder many prospective clients are focused on precisely that – costs.  But what would happen if you decided to sell your services in a different way?

To stand out in a competitive pitch, you can inject as much creativity into your compensation proposal as you do in your proposed concepts and recommendations. In this thought-provoking workshop, Ignition’s Tim Williams will show how your agency can move from “price taker” to “price maker” by employing a variety of effective, imaginative approaches that have nothing to do with tracking and billing for time.

How to Create a Value-Centric Relationship with Your Clients

While most agencies would say they have a discovery process that includes the identification of client objectives, this rarely goes deep enough to define the true metrics of success. What’s needed is a formal process devoted to defining success that goes beyond the obvious and peels the onion around the question “What does success look like?” Not just the typical lagging indicators like sales, awareness, or reputation, but the leading indicators of success – the behaviors and activities that actually predict success, not just measure it in the rear-view mirror.

This workshop also explores what is perhaps the most provocative question of all: “If money weren’t an issue, what role would you want us to play in your business?”  By defining the Scope of Value, not just the Scope of Work, we can transform a transaction-based relationship into one guided by a shared commitment to achieve clear marketplace results.