Accounting professionals frequently ask me how they should position their prices to prospects and my answer is fairly simple. Before you talk about price with any of your prospects you need to find out what their needs and problems are and then show them your value and worth.
Unfortunately, I’ve often heard about accountants losing the sale because they don’t know what they’re worth. Nor do they understand their value!
Your worth is the benefit the customer receives from the services you offer.
However, it doesn’t matter if you’re an amazing accountant if you don’t have the confidence and aren’t showing your worth to potential clients. Eventually those prospects catch on and start worrying too much about the price. It’s your job to get them focused on the investment they will get by working with you. The first step is building up confidence!
I’m going to help you understand your worth with some specific tips so that you can help more people and increase your revenue.
Tip 1: A Confident Person is Not Conflicted
When I talk about confidence, it’s important to note that a confident person is not conflicted. There’s NO part of you that is holding you back, while another part of you wants to move forward. It just doesn’t work that way!
My guest on The Abundant Accountant Podcast, Ross Jeffries, shared a brilliant story that illustrated my point precisely.
When Ross was eight years old, back in 1966, his brother received a toy robot for Hanukkah. At that time toy robots could only do three things–move forward, move back backward and blink their eyes.
Ross was a little bit of a troublemaker and decided to push the robot forward and backward at the exact same time. The robot started to shake, and the motor began to burn. The robot toppled over face down and just stopped working.
What was the problem?
The robot had two equal and opposite powerful commands moving through it. One command was telling it to move forward while the other told it to move backward. The robot couldn’t handle both at the same time.
This is exactly what happens when we ask our potential clients to work with us and go for the sale. Part of us says move forward while the other less confident part says “NO, NO, NO, don’t do it. We’re not ready yet. We’re not worth it.”
The first thing you MUST do is be fully aligned with your worth, your offerings, and your prices surrounding those offerings.
There’s a famous quote from professional boxer Bernard Hopkins: “If you don’t know your value, somebody will tell you your value, and it will be less than what you’re worth.”
I’m sure this resonates with some of you because you’re working with a prospect, and you never share what your monthly service fee is. In your head you know it’s $2K per month, but then the prospect offers you $600 or maybe tells you that’s what they can afford and you feel obligated to take that offer because you didn’t actually share your prices nor have the confidence to tell them it’s really $2k per month for the services they are needing.
Tip 2: Confidence is Not a Thing, It’s an Action
I want you to consider for a second that confidence is not a thing or a quality. It’s an activity that you do.
Ross explained, “If I were to host a course on building confidence and I asked, Who would like to be more confident? I’m sure many people would raise their hands.”
The problem is, confidence isn’t a liquid that you can just dump into your head.
Confidence is the thing you’re saying to yourself, it’s what you’re visualizing, it’s how you manage your breath, and how you continue moving forward in your business.
This is good news! It makes it easier to change your confidence. It’s easier to change what you do to grow your confidence than it is to change your sense of identity.
This is exactly why affirmations don’t always work.
If keep repeating, “I’m a closer. I’m a closer. I’m a closer,” and your unconscious mind has loads of examples of you NOT being a closer, you’re going to get into trouble.
Now, if say, “I now claim my skills as an excellent closer. I now claim my skills as an excellent salesperson of my accounting services,” you’re giving your mind direction. You’re telling your mind to move towards what you want, rather than trying to convince it of a fixed sense of identity that it does not agree with.
Here’s an example of what you can do when you hear yourself saying things like, “I’m not worth it. I shouldn’t ask for that much money.” Simply change your tone of voice. Use a positive, more uplifting tone.
This may sound ridiculous, but when you change your internal tone it changes how you feel about everything.
The second thing you can do is take on a totally different perspective. Instead of trying to figure out how many clients you can bring into your firm on any given day, think, “How many unqualified prospects can I eliminate today?”
This is a really effective way to reframe your thinking. You’re making your mind look at everything from the perspective of qualifying the prospect versus stressing about whether someone is going to give you their business or not.
Tip 3: Build Your Performance Confidence
Performance confidence means you’ve done something really well thousands of times.
Let’s say you walk the tightrope at the circus. If you’ve done it 1,001 times, you can naturally expect that you’re going to do it well again.
The problem with many accountants who haven’t yet excelled at something (making sure they’re paid what they’re worth, for instance) is that they’re waiting for their confidence to come to them, but they refuse to perform until they’ve built the confidence, but they can’t get the confidence until they perform.
See what I’m saying there?
Instead of waiting until you’re super confident, I want you to take on what Ross calls “willingness.”
Willingness is taking a step forward, even if you’re not certain of what will happen.
You absolutely must start embracing uncertainty. Embracing uncertainty is more important than a futile chase for certainty.
Ross shared a brilliant metaphor…
Selling your services, tax plans, or monthly packages is like learning to paint, but the canvas keeps moving and changing shape. Sometimes when you dip the brush into the paint, a different shade of the color comes out.
You MUST embrace that uncertainty, and a little bit of chaos. When you can embrace the uncertainty, you will build confidence that is not dependent on the events of the day, or your feelings in the moment.
Recently, I was painting with my best friend’s four-year-old. We pulled out all of his paints and we started mixing the colors up to make different shades. We mixed purple with white for lavender, and then blue and yellow to make green.
However, when I would dip my brush into the paint and put it on the paper, the colors never came out the way that I wanted them to.
This is JUST like any sales process. All I do all day are podcast interviews, sales phone calls, working to find my qualified and unqualified prospects, but through it all I embrace that uncertainty.
I detach myself from the outcome, and you can learn how to do the same! Ross provided a few ideas to use to help build your acceptance of uncertainty.
1. Meditate – One thing that you can do to begin embracing uncertainty is to meditate. A meditation practice can teach you to accept what is coming up in each moment.
A meditation practice can help you train yourself to be okay with uncertainty.
2. Learn to have a sense of perspective – When you’re in a difficult situation, you can ask yourself something as simple as, “What was this person wearing on the day that they were born?” And, then ask yourself, “What was I wearing on the day I was born?”
By doing this, it helps you keep your perspective. We’re all here together, trying to live a life of service. Just remember this in difficult sales conversations.
3. No client is out of your league – It’s true there may be accountants who have been working with clients longer than you have, but you have to get up to bat before you can hit it out of the park. My point is that there is NO such thing as someone being out of your league.
There are NO super big clients. There are only incredible value opportunities, where you can provide amazing value.
In Conclusion
If you’ve been struggling with showing your worth to potential clients, and continue to allow them to dictate all of your sales conversations, there is hope!
Put at least one of the above tips into action every single day and start watching your confidence rise.
PS. So many of my accounting professional clients come to me because they are tired of giving away their knowledge and expertise away for free. If that sounds like you, I invite you to join my complimentary Masterclass created just for accountants who want to build a practice with premium clients who eagerly pay you what you’re worth. Sign up now!
P.P.S. Get Ross’s book:
