Many agencies are now convinced that it's time to bury the billable hour and adopt more progressive pricing practices, but aren't sure how to bring this transformation to life inside their organizations.  

Based on the experience of forward-thinking professional firms around the globe, the best way to make this happen is to formalize and centralize pricing as a core competency of the agency, separate from finance and accounting. This is the bold new concept of the "Value Council" -- a small, interdisciplinary group of senior executives charged with ensuring that the agency prices on purpose, according to the value received by the client, not just the costs incurred by the firm. 

The New Guardians of Value

This hands-on workshop shows how agencies of all sizes can implement this powerful idea and achieve not only long-term margin improvement, but also short-term wins that can impact your bottom line starting with your next P&L.

While the traditional finance department is focused on internal measures driven by costs, the Value Council is focused on external measures driven by value. The foundational job of the Value Council is to direct the focus away from efforts and inputs — which is what cost accounting measures — to outputs and outcomes, which is what clients really buy.

In this session we’ll explore the six essential roles of the Value Council:

1. Redefine and repackage how the firm creates value.  This involves deconstructing the multidimensional ways the agency creates value for its clients and recasting feature-driven services as benefit-driven solution sets. This also means moving away from the language of cost and replacing it with the language of value.

2. Keep clients and prospects focused on value created instead of costs incurred.  This includes meeting the predictable tactics of professional buyers (procurement) with the proven strategies of professional sellers, including the immensely effective principles of the "challenger" approach.

3. Create new pricing approaches and diversify the firm's revenue streams.  This means replacing the ubiquitous rate card with a "pricing stack" -- a rich variety of pricing approaches that can be applied to various client opportunities and help diversify the firm's remuneration portfolio. 

4. Measure what matters.  This is about injecting a success orientation into every aspect of how the firm approaches client business, starting with the idea of a "success workshop" for new client relationships and carrying through to ensuring every Scope of Work is preceded by a "Scope of Value." 

5. Guard the margins on every client and prospect. This means employing "profit analytics" to better assess which clients and services are contributing not just the most revenue, but the most profit.  It also means aggressively vetting prospective clients for their profit potential.

6. Institutionalize pricing as a core competency.  This is about firmly embedding the concept of pricing as a discipline in its own right -- separate from finance -- that is responsible for constantly evolving and improving the firm's profit model, guided by a defining set of principles.

In most firms, serving on the Value Council is a part-time role, not a full-time responsibility. By involving professionals from multiple disciplines within the company, we’re able to obtain insights and ideas that would never arise from a traditional financial-driving pricing process. Most importantly, the formation of a Value Council sends a strong signal to both your team and your clients that pricing is a professional discipline in your firm, never again to be confused with just counting your hours.

This workshop is presented as an online event, which includes live Q&A.  Participants receive access to all online content and are provided with a handout summary.  For details and pricing, please contact us.