Are you clear about the value of your services?
And can you easily show this to your clients before moving on to conversations about fees?
If not, you’ll probably encounter one of the biggest challenges of an initial consultation: getting your prospective client to see the value of the services you are offering and therefore to say ‘yes’ to the fees you want to charge.
In order to avoid this problem, I recommend using ‘Client Value Generator’ questions to make sure your prospective client understands the value of your fees before you tell them your fees:
DOWNLOAD THE ‘CLIENT VALUE QUESTION GENERATOR’ WORKSHEET NOW
To create these questions, follow these steps:
- Diagnose the value (for this specific prospective client) of your services
Start your conversation with a prospective client by investigating the issue, problem, or goal that they need your help with.
It’s essential to investigate their situation thoroughly – if you don’t fully understand it, you can’t give a proper diagnosis of the challenges or pitfalls they are facing. And without this diagnosis, potential clients won’t see why they need your help and they won’t want to pay your fees.
In other words, for prospective clients to see the value of your services, they must see that the benefit of getting your help is greater than the cost – and the first step is for you to see this value for yourself.
I recommend you diagnose the worst-case scenario of the cost to a client of getting this wrong or the best-case scenario of the value to a client of getting this right. If possible, come up with some examples of where these scenarios have applied to others in the past and the consequences they have suffered as a result.
- Create questions that will demonstrate the value of your services to this prospective client
Once you have diagnosed the value of your services to this prospective client, the next step is to create a list of questions to help you demonstrate that value to them.
Asking great questions is a powerful and effective way of demonstrating value because when you ask the right questions, the client will tell you the value rather than you trying to tell them.
Once you know the best-case or worst-case scenario facing the prospective client, you need to ask questions that will help them see this too.
There are different ways to do this but a good starting point is to ask “what if……?” and then present them with the scenario you have in mind. For example “What if we don’t put in place an agreement to protect you from the risk of X and then Y happens – what would that mean for your business?” This way, you can let them tell you what problems or impact that scenario would cause for them rather than you trying to tell them.
- Use my ‘Client Value Question Generator’ worksheet to create the questions that demonstrate the value
To help you create the right questions to demonstrate the value of your services, I’ve created a simple tool: a ‘Client Value Question Generator’ worksheet that will walk you through the process of creating the right questions in any situation. If you follow the process in this worksheet you will ask the right questions to demonstrate your value to prospective clients and have them say ‘yes’ to your fees. Get your copy HERE.
When you download the ‘Client-Value Question Generator’ worksheet, I’ll also send you a separate video that will walk you through how to use it, step-by-step.
The worksheet and the video walkthrough together will help you ask the right questions so that prospective clients understand the value of your services and they will say yes to working with you at the fees that you want to charge.
DOWNLOAD THE ‘CLIENT VALUE QUESTION GENERATOR’ WORKSHEET NOW
