Episode 188 | Behavioral Pricing For Accounting Firm Owners With Etinosa Agbonlahor

Behavioral pricing strategy plays a vital role in transforming overworked accounting firm owners into highly compensated advisors. Host Michelle Weinstein welcomes guest Etinosa Agbonlahor, CEO of Decision Alpha and behavioral economist, to explore how client psychology drives buying decisions. Many financial professionals struggle with under-earning because they treat pricing as a simple number instead of a structured choice. Etinosa explains how concepts like reference points, anchoring, and loss aversion directly impact what prospects choose to invest. By moving away from emailed proposals and presenting clear choices during live sales calls, firms can eliminate ghosting and command premium rates. Firm owners don’t need to fear raising fees because buyers rarely remember past baseline prices or make decisions based solely on cost.

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Behavioral Pricing For Accounting Firm Owners With Etinosa Agbonlahor

Welcome to the show. We have a very special guest. Our special guest is a behavioral economist and the CEO of Decision Alpha, which is a behavioral pricing firm that helps businesses improve pricing for growth, traction, and a stronger perceived value. She is also passionate about helping people live healthier financial lives and brings over a decade of experience working across the US, Australia, Africa, and the UK. Before we welcome our special guests to the show, if you are a solo firm owner or maybe have a small firm with a small team and think, “I’m too small to charge premium rates,” think again.

Premium pricing isn’t about size. It’s about positioning, confidence, having clarity in your sales conversations, and using a repeatable sales process that works. Even if you hate selling or freeze up when someone asks, “What do you charge?” It’s okay. There is a plan, and you can break free from imposter syndrome and actually build the kind of firm that works for you, not the other way around. If you’d like to explore what that looks like, go to TheAbundantCall.com and book your strategy call with me or my team now. We’ll walk you through exactly how to grow your revenue without having to get more clients, but having massive clarity and massive confidence. Now let’s welcome our very special guest, Etinosa, to the show.

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Welcome to the show.

Thank you so much. I’m excited for our conversation, Michelle.

I’m super excited to have you here, Etinosa, and just really diving into behavioral pricing challenges that many firm owners have. Before we dive in, I’d love it if you could share just a little bit about you. I already had your bio, but I always think it’s a lot different and more unique coming straight from you. I’d love it if you could share just a little bit about you, quick 30 seconds to a minute, and then we’ll dive into our conversation because this is a hot topic.

My name is Etinosa Agbonlahor. I am the CEO of Decision Alpha. At Decision Alpha, we help business owners with how to price, how to package, and how to communicate their value to clients so they can build more profitable businesses. We do all of this using the power of behavioral economics, which really focuses on understanding how people make financial decisions and how you can use that to structure the decisions you put in front of your clients. That’s what we do at Decision Alpha. I am a behavioral economist trained as one. I’ve worked with big organizations like Fidelity Investments and the Commonwealth Bank of Australia, have a deep finance background, and I bring all of that to Decision Alpha.

Behavioral Pricing Strategy: When prospects enter unfamiliar financial situations, their fear of loss far outweighs potential gains. As a choice architect, how you frame the decision determines whether they act.

I’m super excited to have this conversation because I think for any tax accountant, fractional CFO, bookkeeping, or firm owner, understanding how people make financial decisions is probably one of the most challenging things for a firm owner to wrap their head around. Many people think that people just buy based on price. That’s why in this industry, I believe, we need to eradicate this epidemic of the under-earning and overworking disease that many firm owners, I believe, have.

The reason why is that everyone just has these price conversations where, here at the Abundant Account, we talk a lot about relationship-based selling and value pricing and doing things based on what you want, not what the people around you want or are doing. How do people make financial decisions from all of your knowledge and your experience and being a behavioral economist? I’d love it if you could just share what you see on how people make these decisions and what you see the biggest challenge in this industry specifically is.

Leveraging Reference Points To Frame Value

People make financial decisions, not as you said, not rationally, but we bring our psychology into it. What that means is we make decisions, for example, relative to a reference point. If you landed a client who pays you $50,000, you’re excited. You think that’s a good number, until you find out that everybody else like you landed clients who pay them $100,000. It’s a number, but now it looks different because of what you compared it to. The number itself then was meaningless until you compared it to get and to give it value. Value is contextual. That’s the first one.

We use reference points to help us understand things. What is this like? I wasn’t using Michelle’s service. Who else would I be using? What do I compare her services to to help me understand if it’s valuable to me or not? That’s the first one. We’ll be reference dependent. The second one, and this is really interesting as business owners, is that people also will anchor. Anchoring is when you look at a random number out there in the environment, and it influences what you then do down the line. You see charities use this a lot where you can donate anything you want. They always have a suggested donation.

What is the suggested donation doing? It’s serving as an anchor. You would have given a dollar, but now that you see the suggested donation is ten, you’re like, “Fine, here’s fifteen.” I want to be like a good person. I reference dependent. We use anchors, and this can influence our decisions even when they really shouldn’t. They’re just random numbers in the environment. The other one is that people tend to be loss averse. We feel the losses, especially when we’re not domain experts, meaning that we haven’t bought the service 300 times, we’re not familiar with the context, we do not know, and we’re not making these decisions every single day.

Using Anchoring And Loss Aversion In Pricing

When we are beginners to a context, we tend to feel losses twice as deeply as we do gains. What that means is if I lost $100, I feel it twice as much. It’s like I lost $200 compared to if I actually gained $100. All of this for business owners means that when you are thinking through your pricing, you’re not just putting a number in front of people. You’re putting a decision in front of them. Whenever you put a decision in front of somebody, you become what we call a choice architect. You have the freedom and the ability to structure how you put that decision in front of them, knowing that it’s going to inform and influence what they choose.

Behavioral Pricing Strategy: Surgeons don’t offer patients a menu of options when operating. Highly specialized financial advisors should prescribe the single exact solution their client needs.

Remember, people are reference dependent. What number do I put in front of people and how do I structure that so that they can make so that I can inform what they’re going to compare my price to? If I only put one number in front of that, they might compare me to other competitors. What if I put two prices in front of them? Maybe they compare each price between themselves. Now they’re choosing how to work with me, not if they want to work with me. You see what I’m saying?

Yes. I want to go back, though, because like you said, the people we gravitate towards are loss-averse. We feel the loss two times more deeply. I truly believe that that’s how people make their buying decisions. In the sales process and things we’ve talked about here on the show is really focusing on the questions that we ask and keeping it about the problems because people will, I’m going to guess, like you said, if we’re loss averse, we’re willing to invest more to get out of the losses and the pain twice as much as we are from feeling good about it.

Especially if it’s pain that we haven’t felt before, we’re not familiar with. If you are a tax rep, for example, people have never been audited before. Do not know how. They have never been through this process before. When you dive deeper into, let’s understand the pain, let’s quantify the pain, let’s understand the urgency around it. What happens if you do not solve it? You’re filling that, you’re making that deeper, you’re helping them understand, “This is a big deal, and I have to figure it out right now,” versus, “What is it going to look like if you solve it?” You’re leaning more into opportunities that might have more limited effect. Again, given that they haven’t done this before.

All aligned with everything that I talk about. As you said, I think when we tell somebody in here at the show, and I like to call it an investment, when we present an investment for somebody to work with us, as you said, we’re not just putting a number out there. It’s an actual decision that you’re putting in front of them. I’ve never thought of it from that point of view.

That’s so important to remember because most firm owners, and maybe you can speak to this, think that I’m just going to send a quote or a proposal. That’s probably one of the dumbest things you could do because you’re helping them not make a decision. If they see your quote, they see your proposal, “I do not like it. I’m just not going to call you.” Most firm owners feel ghosted quite often. “How come I never heard back?”

How come most of the people that I’ve ever talked to that I’ve helped for almost a decade now, they do not close at a high rate? The firm owners are meeting with people, wasting time with people that are not moving forward. They’re not moving them through that sales process. It’s because, as you said, you’re not presenting a decision to them. When we do not present the decision, there is nothing to do. You’re not in a sales process anymore. They just saw it as a number.

I’m a firm believer in bringing and pulling up that decision into the actual conversation where it makes sense. This is something we talk about when we work with people. How do you frame up the choices that you’re going to put in front of your customer within the sales script itself? It’s not, “I’m going to email your document to you, you make your mind up, and then you get back to me.” You’re never going to hear back from me.

No, never. It’s like, that’s like the number one thing firm owners do wrong, and I think we’re in alignment on that. If you do not bring up the investment in your price discussion, in your sales conversation, you’re never going to hear back from people or if you are, you’re hearing back from only a very small percentage of people, and you’re leaving hundreds of thousands of dollars on the table.

When business owners come to us sometimes, part of the work that we do with them is teaching them how to incorporate this framing decisions within their sales script so that in a natural way, you’re still framing up, here is the value of working with me. Here’s how it solves the problems. We’re selling to pain. That’s how it solves the pain points that you’ve raised. This is the investment. Is this, this, or the other thing? Which one works for you?

I even take it one step further, and I know it goes against the grain with many people and some of my colleagues other than the industry, but I believe that if you’re going to go to a top specialist, let’s say, Eric Green. We both know him, and you’re going to get a resolution. There’s only one case that’s going to get you out of jail. There’s not like three options in some cases. I truly believe that when we bring this up to even set yourself apart from the people that are offering options and other things, we just provide the one thing that’s going to solve the whole problem.

If you want out of your interests and penalties and everything else and the mess that you’re in with the IRS, there’s only one way out. We do not have different options. I truly believe that for most advisory work, we treat this as surgery. This is like, if you want to live and you want the tumor out of your brain, do you go to the surgeon and does the surgeon provide you three options and ask which works best for you? The three options in the world that I see for many of my clients, and you can tell me from the psychology standpoint of how this might make sense, these people do not know what they need.

They do not know what option is best. Where people that are selling bookkeeping, accounting, tax advisory, tax planning, I have no idea. Just do what’s best for me. There shouldn’t be any options in my world. I think it’s different if you’re buying some software or Zoom and you’re like, “There are maybe three options where on websites they do a pretty good job leaning you towards the option that they want you to be at.” What is your take on that, hearing it from that perspective?

It’s a really interesting perspective. What matters at the end of the day is the intention behind it. The choice environment. When a person is going to Eric Green, for example, or if you provide the same services, the issue is pressing. It’s urgent. There aren’t that many competitors. There aren’t that many people to go to who can tell you, I’ve done this for so long. I can tell you exactly what you need to know. Also, before they even have the conversation, they’ve probably already given him some context. I know they have initial conversations.

They pay for that. There’s a journey they’ve gone on so that you’re deeper into the process when they finally say, “We’ve done a diagnostic, we’ve looked at the tumor, we understand how we will take it out. Therefore, this is it. It’s this or that.” They’ve built trust throughout that process. It’s a little bit different if you walked into the surgeon’s office and they looked at you and went, “What’s your name and what’s your email? Great. This is a surgery we recommend. Take it or leave it.”

I know. It’s very different. What’s interesting, Etinosa, in this business, it is very similar to my approach, and you tell me what you’ve seen with other firm owners, but if it’s done right, when you go get a surgery, like my boyfriend had to have a surgery two years ago. The orthopedic surgeon would not see him unless he had an MRI, CT scan, blood work, clearance from the cardiologist, and like one other thing.

They made him jump through all these hoops before he even had a meeting with that appointment. Here it’s the same thing. Eric Green or anybody doing tax planning or even bookkeeping. If you do not see someone’s books, if you do not see someone’s taxes, if you do not see all the mail they’ve received from the IRS, you do not know what you’re getting yourself into.

We have to be able to know otherwise. As you said, you’d just be showing up to the doctor and saying, “Which surgery works best? It’s not going to happen that way.” If anyone’s working with a specialist, you have much less competition, and you can command and make a decision. I love how you said that you can put a decision in front of somebody. That’s the only decision that they have. It’s either fix this or go somewhere else. Those are your two options.

The thing that you’ve done there in that process is that you’ve been able to differentiate yourself by having them jump through hoops. Qualify themselves over and over again to even gain your attention. You further qualified and differentiated yourself by diving deep into their context. Throughout that process, you’re showing them this is how you would work with me. This is the value I would bring to you. This is why you want to work with me. “This is why you do not want to work with me. This is why we wouldn’t be a good fit.”

Throughout that process, the process itself is differentiating and putting you in a category of your own so that when you do then say it’s this or nothing, it’s easier for them to go, “There’s not a lot of people I can compare her to. No one else has done the same process with me.” To go back to the original question of should you put multiple options in front of a client? Should you put only one? It really goes back down to that question of differentiation and the context. When you’ve differentiated yourself to such a distance, to an extent to which they’re only thinking about you, they’re not comparing it to somebody else because of what you’ve done before you even got to that decision.

You’re basically one of one. It makes sense to then go, “Yes or no.” However, for other people who might not be doing as deep a process with them, or maybe want to capture more of the clients or more of the prospects who come to them. It makes sense. You do not need three options by default. Do not offer three options if there’s not really a need to have three options, but there are ways that you can introduce that optionality and prmove the decision from, “Do you want to work with me?”

Yes or no to how do you want to work with me? You might do things like saying, “I thought this through, and I feel like I want most people who work with me to choose the middle option of what we offer.” We might introduce what we call in psychology a decoy offer. A decoy is a price or an offer that you do not expect most people would take, but it just sets up a comparison. It makes them compare the one you actually want them to take, makes them compare the decoy and go, “This other one might be better value or might be a better fit for me.” It might nudge them towards the one that you actually want them to pick. That’s one way of thinking through it.

If you are in a domain where there’s actually clear differentiation. You can work with me and just get generic diagnostic advice. You can work with me, and I can come along the journey and help you implement to some extent. You can work with me, and I can do all the work for you. There are three different things that you are doing there. Maybe it makes sense to put those objects in front of the customer and explain in a very clear-cut way. Is this this or the other thing? I recommend you do this one based on what we’ve said. It goes back to, are you differentiated enough to be able to have that conversation? What is your intention? How do you set up that context so you can steer customer decisions one way or another?

I’m all about that way. We’ve got to remove the decoy and differentiate ourself on the front end so that you can just come in and put the decision in front of them. That’s best for them. It’s, “I’m the best to work with you.” If they want something else, or we didn’t get them to get beyond the price, then they can go find somebody else.

I know you’ve worked with other people who use this method. How often do you see that work compared to folks who are offering options? I’m just curious.

Every person that’s ever come to me has not been closing because they offered options or they take a passive approach. If they’re offering options, if they’re offering different, too many packages, like I believe you can have different options, but the second you’re with your client, you’re only offering the option that solves their problem because any person who is dealing with a resolution case, dealing with tax planning, CFO advisory, they do not actually know what they need. It’s very much similar to going to surgery.

I’m not telling the doctor, “I only need these ligaments fixed. The other ones are okay.” They are surgeons. They are experts. They know what they need to fix. I’m not. It’s not my specialty because I believe that every person selling any business advisory services knows something unique and different, and the client is clueless. We do not know. That’s why we need CPAs. That’s why we need an EA. That’s why we need a tax attorney. That’s why we need that specialty. We need someone to tell us, “Here’s the problem. Here’s how to fix it. Now let’s go do the surgery.”

Simplifying Price Presentations Within Five Minutes

I will say there is some research that shows that if it takes more than five minutes to explain your pricing and your packaging to a client or to a prospect, you lose about half of them, about 50%.

I believe it.

There is wisdom. When businesses come to us to work with us on their pricing, their packaging, their communication of value, one of the things that we help them do is just simplify. Simplification doesn’t mean you’re putting to your point the same thing in front of all customers. It’s usually now in your mind, “I’ve got two types of customers or two types of archetypes. If type A comes into the room, I’m only going to offer them this or this. If type B comes into the room, I’m only going to offer them that or that.” You never go, “Here’s everything we offer, pick a dish.”

It’s not the pick-a-dish. This is Etinosa, more like we’re going somewhere for a holiday meal. As you go to a place somewhere for a holiday meal or a set menu. If you go to a restaurant, it’s like, “Tonight it’s only the set menu. You cannot do à la carte.” Where I believe that many firms that I’ve seen offer à la carte are missing revenue left and right because anything à la carte, people are just going to do the bare minimum because they do not know what they do not know.

Positioning High-Ticket Advisory Like Specialized Surgery

I, as a taxpayer, have no idea what I need in a tax plan. I do not know if I were in deep waters with the IRS, what I would tell Eric I would need. I would have no clue. That’s not my expertise. I’m looking for an expert to tell me what to do, just like a surgeon. When you shift that, that’s when everything changes. I want to go back to what you were saying earlier about the passive approach.

When you were about to say something or share, maybe you haven’t worked with a ton of firm owners, but let’s just say a business owner that takes that passive approach where they just send an invoice, or they send a quote. What have you seen is the biggest missed consequence that business owners have because they’re so passive in their approach and they’re not, like you said, putting decisions in front of prospects in the sales meeting?

One of the things, and we work with a couple of firm owners, and one of the things that we help people understand is that as human beings, we have limited time, attention, and memory. In behavioral economics, we call it, we have limited cognitive bandwidth. We’re like computers. If you open too many tabs and too many screens, at some point, we cannot deal with everything.

Behavioral Pricing Strategy: Human attention is limited. Never leave a call without the next step on the calendar, or you immediately surrender your advantage as a top-of-mind authority.

Eliminating Proposals To Stop Prospect Ghosting

What that means is when you send a proposal, when you defer the decision, you are taking the chance that your customer is going to. You’re moving from being top of mind in front of your prospect to then allowing them to make that decision in a moment when you’re no longer top of mind. They have to remember you. They have to remember to go in. They have to remember to compare your options and go through the work all over again.

Necessarily, you’re getting yourself to a place where you move from being top of mind at an advantage to now you’re at a disadvantage. What makes sense is if you are the business where your price tickets are higher. You’re not sub-$5,000, where somebody can just go, “This makes sense. I’m ready to invest in it.” You can always, and you should always make sure that you have that next call scheduled. It’s not, “I’m going to send you a proposal.”

Securing Next Steps To Preserve Cognitive Bandwidth

It’s, “We’re going to pencil in the next call. I’m going to walk you through it, and we can discuss it then.” Always make sure that there’s a next step, especially if this is a business you want to nurture. Make sure the next step is not, if they’re not ready to close yet, the next step is we’re penciling a conversation. We’re going to sit face to face. I’m going to walk you through it so I can help you understand and, again, communicate that value to help you make the right decision.

It’s not only in that step, but I would believe that in any part of your sales process, there should always be the next meeting scheduled. If someone pays you and you engage them and they engage your firm, the next onboarding meeting for that client should be scheduled. There should always be a next meeting or call scheduled with your client at all times. It eliminates back and forth and saves you a ton of time. I love that you said deferring the decision, passive approach, sending proposals, and sending quotes is all deferring the decision. Do you have any stats on that? I’m just so curious. How much business do businesses lose because they do the deferral decision-making process for their clients and prospects?

I do not have any stats at the tip of my fingers, but I cannot imagine that it’s less than half that easily. Remember what we’re talking about. A confused mind says no. If the stat shows that if you put or spend more than five minutes talking and trying to explain your price to customers, more than half of them will walk. I can imagine that the same number of people are going to walk if you then go, “Here’s a document, go forth and conquer, and come back to me when you’ve decided.”

Have you seen this shift in a specific client where they went from having their clients be in their confused state of mind, deferring decisions, taking the passive approach, sending proposals, and what the shift looked like? I have story after story, but I’m just curious about yours.

We’ve worked with firm owners, for example, who had a confused pricing scheme. The reason the pricing scheme was confused was that they were trying to cater to everybody who they were interested in working with. Whenever clients would come, they would pull out this big table of “It can be this and that, and you can use AUM here and da-da-da,” and all of these things.

Naturally, you’re confused, so you cannot speak clearly to your clients and help them understand and have confidence in you. When we are selling to customers, it’s the confidence we’re selling. It is, “I can help you.” That is what we’re trying to get to. If that confidence isn’t there and it shows up in a muddled pricing sheet, they also will sense your anxiety and not feel the trust to work with you.

Pricing sheets and pricing menus and pricing anything needs to be tossed out the window, in my mind. I always say people buy confidence. Here at The Abundant Accountant, to firm owners, I sell them confidence. I take non-confident firm owners and make you so confident that you’re like, “What just happened to me?” You said with those firm owners, the confidence is what they’re selling because that’s what people buy.

I 100% agree with what you were saying. People are looking for somebody with confidence. We want somebody whose hand we can hold, who says, “Come with me. I can take you across the street. I can get you to profitability.” Going back to the story, what we did to help them build that confidence was actually giving them clarity. We said, “Let’s step back. Let me work through. First of all, let’s just understand what your margins are for what you’re offering right now. Who actually is coming in the door and who’s choosing what services? Who do you like to work with?”

We do not use that as a premise for the work you actually do. Let’s just take it into consideration. Once we lay it all out, it allows us to go, “You’ve been offering six different things to everybody. You have two main client types. Where there’s an overlap between the people who are coming into you and the people who you actually want to work with. You’ve got two main client types. Of those two main client types, the ways they can work with you are either A or B. That’s how you can chart them. It’s either A or B. If they’re simple or complex. If it’s simple, you go this way.

If it’s more complex, you need to go that way.” It actually boiled down to are they simple or complex? I literally boiled it down to that. Their pricing sheet went from this big jumbled mess to a very straightforward client coming in the door at A or B. Is it going to be a simple case or a more complex case based on their assets, etc.? Going to be more complex. Fantastic. You can put these options in front of them. It’s either this or this. I recommend you go this way based on the complexity of your assets, etc.

They went from dreading whipping out that price and walking them through to being very confident, very clear-cut, “Here it is, let’s go.” They were able to implement that recommendation literally in less than a week and came back. We’ve gotten so many referrals from that one client. That’s how ecstatic they were.

That, to me, is one of the benchmarks of whether we do a really good job and did we actually solve a problem for them, is do you go out and just spread the gospel about us outside of the moment you made more money, closing better, etc., but they go out, and they spread the gospel about us. That was one instance where we started with clarity to build confidence, which then translated to clearer pricing in terms, clearer conversations with the customers and prospects, clearer revenue.

I did not have one that bad, but I’ll never forget my client, Tim. We actually did an episode together. If you’re tuning in, you can go find the one with Tim. It’s a case study. He came to me. He’s like, “Michelle, I’ve been in business like a year. I’m not where I want to be. My wife told me I’m going to have to go get a job if I do not figure this out. I’ve got my whole tech stack, I’ve got my pricing menus, and people just are not engaging my firm.” I was like, “I wouldn’t engage your firm either, because none of that matters.”

Anyway, he’s still working with me to this day. As you said, I mean, he doesn’t have to get a job. He did as much revenue in one year, or what did he do? He did as much revenue in a quarter as he did the previous year. It was something like that, like crazy. Now he doesn’t have to get a job. His wife’s happy. She doesn’t understand what the heck changed. I’m like, “We ditched the pricing menus, we made things like you said, clarity. He got confident.” That’s what sells. What have you found for firm owners that they’re just brand new?

They’re like, “I just need leads. This whole pricing and conversation you guys are having sounds great, but I need leads.” In my perspective, and you can tell me what yours is, is that you could get all the leads in the world, but if you cannot close and you do not have this part figured out, how is talking to anybody going to get you the end result that you’re looking for as a brand new business owner? I do not care if you own a firm, a restaurant, or not a restaurant, but another service-based business.

If you do not have a sales process in place, you do not have your pricing figured out, and you do not have confidence, then why would you need a lead if you do not have confidence, which is the number one thing you said we’re selling, which I agree. Etinosa has the education behind this to support all this. If you are taking the passive approach and then you have more marketing and you do lead generation and then you let people defer decisions, then your bank account’s still at zero. What would you say to those people who are like, “I first need to get my leads first”? What would you say to them?

It’s interesting because from a business perspective, we prefer to work with businesses who have achieved product-market fit, but we mean they’ve proven themselves already right there. A bit more mature in the business. They’re more than a year or two years old. They’re making some revenue. It’s just a matter of, let’s optimize and help you close better. Again, it might be a little bit different because we’re not teaching people necessarily sales skills, but I wonder, because when we first started, we did a lot of work with startups.

You’re a year into it, you’ve raised your Series A, you’re a small business, you’re one year into the work. While they would be really eager to work with us and nail this down and figure it out, they had so many other decisions they were trying to make at the same time that they couldn’t prioritize which one or the other. I firmly believe that we want to sell to pain. I want you to be active. I’ve actually experienced stagnant revenue for X number of years. I dread having pricing conversations. My revenue is actually declining. I need to fix something, and I think it could be the price.

I want people who can already point to and say, “This is the pain I’m feeling.” That usually looks a little bit different from folks who are like, “The pain is I’m confused. I just started. I do not know which way to go. I do not know if it’s this, that, or the other thing. Also, I do not really have any money to pay you.” Practically speaking, we’ve tended to lean into folks who are a little bit more mature compared to folks who are at the beginning.

I understand you do not work with any of those people, but what would you say to a brand new firm owner knowing that you see that you’re fixing the problem that if they do not get it right from the beginning, then they’re going to have to fix that no matter what in the future? No matter what, you’re going to have to pay the price because you’re going to waste. I believe that if you wait longer and you do not have a sales process, it’s actually going to cost you more because if you had one, your closing ratios and how many decisions.

Yes, the decisions you put in front of people are going to convert at a much higher rate than being nervous, being scared, sending quotes, sending proposals, taking the passive approach, as you said, deferring the decision, having a confused mind by having the confused buyer. All of that’s going to cost them. You could have all the leads in the world, but if you cannot collect dollars, then they’re in the position where now people are finding you and saying, “I got a pricing problem. My revenue has gone down.”

That’s fair. I do think that from a theoretical standpoint, you should always. This always comes back down to. I want folks to go talk to their customers, talk to prospects, understand the value of what it is you deliver, and how would they price you? Just do the pricing research or at least have conversations with your customers and prospects. Let’s start to help you understand and get a sense of, “This is how people would value me. This is how they value the services and the work that I do.” I can create packages aligned to that.

What do they talk about when they say using my service? What are they using now to solve the same problem that I would help them solve? Those kinds of perspectives help you then build something that is more tailored and likely to be more effective. I do believe absolutely you should start, and if you can go talk to customers, talk to prospects, get some of those insights, and use that to then feed into your sales setup, you start to feed into how you talk to customers, how you set up your pricing at the beginning.

Do you see any other things that a firm owner should do in the beginning or year one or two if they’re not knocking it out of the park right away that you’ve seen has been the biggest hindrance?

In addition to doing customer research to understand how they value your product, get sales training.

Call us.

To learn how to have this conversation is actually quite important. Once you’ve gone through that and you’re at a place where, “I can sell, I know how to do these things, how do I optimize what I’m selling? How do I make sure that I’m speaking to the value that I offer? How do I make sure that I’m going to put prices and packages in front of people who will convert?” You can come and have us be part of that journey. Definitely, talking to customers is super important. Number one, we can help with that as well. Number two, also go get some sales training. Some people apparently are natural-born salespeople. I haven’t met any of them yet.

Not many firm owners are, though. Even some that have had sales training, though. It’s getting training in the industry, getting training from people that understand how to sell bookkeeping services, how to sell resolutions, how to sell tax plans, how to sell monthly accounting and bookkeeping, how to sell CFO advisory. That’s a very unique conversation to understand the language to communicate that value to your clients. It’s not maybe some general sales training from, like, Sandler or somewhere like that where it’s very general. This is to find something and somebody specific. If it’s not me, it’s somebody else. I would say that has been a big game changer for many firm owners that I’ve come across that have had other sales training.

I’m a big believer in story selling.

Me too.

It’s easier to sell when the stories you tell use the language that your clients are going to be familiar with.

I could sit here and talk to you for twenty hours easily. We could just chop up every single part of a sales conversation, of a price, we can agree on some things and disagree on others, but is there anything specifically that you believe that maybe I didn’t talk about, but you feel compelled to share, being a behavioral economist and seeing the behaviors of pricing that helps businesses really grow and get that traction and have all those fun things happen? Is there anything else that you feel compelled to share before we wrap up for the firm owners that are listening?

One of the things I wanted to talk about was a lot of times we let fear define our decisions. You, for example, might be a business owner who hasn’t touched your prices in eighteen months, two years. You’ve had the same price. You’re just comfortable with. It brings me some profit, and I’m okay with that. What’s driving that is the fear that if I change anything, if I change my prices, my clients are going to flip the table and walk away. That’s number one. It’s just not true.

Dismantling The Fear Of Client Rate Increases

There’s the research around why it’s not true and how, in fact, you do have the ability to make and change things within your business. People are not walking around with magnifying glasses, waiting for you to change things so they can walk away from you. People do not come to you solely because of your price. They come to you because of the value they get from you.

If you’re a business owner who’s thinking through who is at the place of revenue declining or has been at the same place, stagnant, and just do not know what to do or what to fix, you can feel empowered to test new pricing. Put it in front of prospects, see how they react to it, see who takes it and who does not take it up, and use that to then feel confident, build a new script, and introduce new prices to your clients.

If all of what we’talked about today has resonated with you, we’d love to offer this to your audiences. We do have a pricing diagnostic. We usually use it at the start of our paid client engagements. It just helps you see where your pricing is strong, where it might be fragile, and what to fix first. It helps you diagnose things like you have not changed your pricing in eighteen months. Let us discuss that. That might be a bit of an issue.

It is an issue. As you said, the research proves that, and it’s not true. I would say from my experience working with the clients, it’s 100% not true because most people increase their price two and 300%. We touch on it here, and we make sure that it’s changed. How do they get that pricing diagnostic?

Just email me. It’s EA@DecisionAlpha.co, and my team or I will personally follow up and have that to you.

Great. Also, can you talk a little bit more in depth? What is the research on that fear? I’m very curious. I’d like some hardcore numbers.

The study was really, really cool. What the researchers did was they went up to folks who were shopping. Imagine you’re like at your local Target or Walmart or whatever. Somebody comes up to you with a clipboard and says, “That pack of cornflakes that you just put into your basket, how much was it?” Literally, most people, less than 50% had any clue what that price was, and an even lower number of people could remember it when the item was on sale.

That was a thing that they had just touched, just put into their basket, literally in front of them. You can extrapolate that to human beings making tens of thousands of decisions every single day. Your price is not something they keep in their mind. They’re not waiting for you to change things so they can flip the table and walk away. You have the ability to do and make decisions that will help you strengthen your business.

That’s so true. The fear or the thought that brings the fear to the forefront for most firm owners is that you think that all of your clients are just thinking about your price. Even for those people just doing compliance work, if you fear that they’re just going to look at your engagement letter from last year and say, “Why did you double your fee?” They probably cannot even find their engagement letter. If they really do not want to pay the extra #400,000 or $500,000, then they’re probably not worth your time anyway.

Maybe they’re already shopping with other people.

Etinosa, thank you so much for being here with us on the show. This was a lively, fun discussion. I absolutely loved it. I would love to have you back and keep diving into different topics because I’m sure you can dissect more left and right. I just want to say thank you for your time and for being here.

Thank you so much, Michelle. I really enjoyed the conversation.

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Thank you all so much for joining Etinosa and me on another amazing episode. I loved everything we talked about, and I love that she talks about how the research proves it. Every single one of you can raise your prices. We can set fear to the side. No one is going to just leave your firm because you increase your fees double or triple. If they do, that means they didn’t value you.

Over 50%, she said, when asked, do they remember what the price of whatever thing they had put in their basket is? 50% of them did not even know. That means 50% of your people probably would never leave you if you raised your prices. We just need to get the courage to do that. You need confidence. You need clarity. I really did love that every time you do not share your price in your sales conversation, you are allowing your prospect to defer their decision, which means you are hurting your own bank account and hurting them.

If we do not help our clients see that they have a true problem, then we’re actually not helping them. I guess helping, whatever. You are doing them a disservice by not helping them make a decision right now. Every time you allow a prospect to defer a decision, you’re actually hurting them. If you’ve created a firm and sometimes it feels like you’ve got a job because you’re wearing multiple hats that you cannot escape from, it’s probably because you do not have any systems and a real plan for freedom.

It’s really time to make the shift. You should not have to hit burnout to get to your next revenue goal. You should not have to defer decisions for clients. You should not take the passive approach. What you need is the sales process to close and enroll these clients. Here at the Abundant Accountant, we show you how to package your services, raise your prices so no one will leave you, and how you can work with these higher-margin clients who respect your time.

If you’re ready to elevate your firm to new heights, go to TheAbundantCall.com and schedule your complimentary strategy session with my team. We’ll assess your current sales process, we’ll identify key revenue opportunities, and develop a tailored plan aimed at doubling your revenue, all before you pursue bringing on any new clients. No marketing, no lead generation.

This is all about closing. Should you choose to want our help to implement it, we’ll guide you through that process. If not, no hard feelings. We’re here to support your success regardless of the path you take. Do not let indecision hold you back. You can just take the first step towards a more prosperous firm by scheduling your call with us at TheAbundantCall.com. Thank you all so much for joining us, and we’ll see you in the next episode.

Important Links

• Etinosa Agbonlahor
• Etinosa Agbonlahor on LinkedIn
• EA@DecisionAlpha.co
• Decision Alpha
• Book a Call to Grow Your Firm Revenue
• Case Study | How A $50K Mistake Led To A Sales Breakthrough With CPA Tim Wijtenburg

About Etinosa Agbonlahor

Etinosa Agbonlahor is a behavioral economist and CEO of Decision Alpha, a behavioral pricing firm that helps businesses improve pricing for growth, traction, and stronger perceived value. Passionate about helping people live healthier financial lives, she brings over a decade of experience working across the U.S., Australia, Africa, and the U.K.—shaping pricing, engagement, and customer behavior strategy for global financial institutions and venture-backed startups.