How to Use Your Pricing to Showcase Your Expertise

Whether you're transparently publishing your pricing online or surprising your clients with an invoice, both approaches have one thing in common. We're missing a unique opportunity -- to show our clients that what we deliver is worth what we're asking them to pay.

To be clear. I'm no fan of surprise invoices – either giving or receiving them. That's transactional business at its worst. Nor am I suggesting that you should always publish prices online. That's a conversation for another day. But we can do better.

All too often there's a disconnect between our client's expected outcome and their understanding of how we will get there. Collapsing that gap is where our opportunity lies.

The greater the pricing surprise factor, the more likely that the value of what we've delivering is diminished. It's not that clients don't appreciate what we do for them. They simply don't have an awareness of the expertise, knowledge, and consideration that factor into the work we do. After all, they came to us because they believed we were the right person to solve their problems. It's not up to them to know how the work is done.

A Casual Comment Changed Our Price Sharing Strategy

I remember many years ago Bob, one our software developers, said, "The problem is we make it look too easy for them."

It wasn't that our client was unappreciative. Far from it. They never took advantage of our relationship. It was balanced and respectful. They never disputed an invoice. They always thanked us for our work. They simply accepted what we delivered without a lot of fanfare. Until Bob made that comment, it never occurred to me that he felt undervalued.

I needed to hear that simple, actionable remark. As the leader, it was my responsibility to make everyone feel that their expertise and hard work were recognized and appreciated. It changed how we explained to our clients what we were going to do on each project. Our scope and pricing document became more than the typical business requirement --> solution loop. We described the steps that we would all take along the way.

Did they always want to know every tedious detail? Probably not, but the information was freely shared and visible.

By putting it all out there, the path to the final deliverable suddenly looked way more complicated than they had assumed. When we added the estimated time to complete each step and the folks involved, their appreciation for our expertise increased significantly.

We Were Practicing the IKEA Effect (and Didn't Know It)

In 2011 Michael I. Norton, Daniel Mochon, and Dan Ariely conducted a series of studies that compared a person's labor and effort with their perceived value of the finished product. One of their experiments involved people assembling their own IKEA furniture. They were asked to compare their completed work with that of a professional IKEA furniture assembler. (Yes, there is such a thing.)

The study revealed that people consistently viewed their finished product as more valuable than the professional's, even when the professional delivered a more polished product. When asked to bid on either their own less professionally-completed box or the IKEA preassembled product, the box builders consistently were willing to pay more for the product they contributed to creating.

While our clients aren't as hands-on as this IKEA group, involving them in the thinking behind the implementation gives them a sense of real contribution.

What if educating your clients is part of your deliverables, regardless of what they are?

6 Tips for Showcasing Your Work and Build Trust

Remember high school algebra class where you had to show your work? The answer was in the back of the book, but you had to explain how you got there. Detailing the steps is a thought (and thoughtful) exercise that puts us in our client's frame of mine.

The Bottom Line