Never pitch. Diagnose.

Most fees are lost before anybody says a number.

The meeting goes fine. You listen for a while, then you explain what your firm does, how you work, the software you use, the fact that you are proactive. Then you arrive at the price, or promise to send one.

And the prospect has nothing to weigh it against, because nothing in the conversation established what any of it was worth to them specifically. So they do the only thing available, which is to compare your number to another firm's number.

What a doctor does

A doctor never sells you anything.

You arrive, and they ask questions. Where does it hurt. How long has it been like that. Does it get worse when you do this. They are not building rapport and they are not softening you up. They are diagnosing, and you can tell.

By the time they say what needs to happen, you have already decided they are right, and you do not ask what the alternatives cost. The questions did all the work that a pitch would have done badly.

Nothing about that changes when the subject is a set of accounts.

The order the conversation should go in

There are four moves, and the order matters more than the wording.

What has made you look at this now? Not what services do you need. Something has changed, or they would not be sitting in front of you. Whatever comes out here is the actual reason they are shopping, and it is rarely the reason they gave when they booked.

What is that causing? This is the move most people skip, and it is the one that does the work. A problem stated is just a fact. A problem followed through is a cost. "The accounts are always late" is a fact. Follow it through and it becomes not knowing what tax is coming, finding out too late to do anything about it, and a fortnight of juggling every time. Same situation, entirely different weight, and they were the one who described it.

Where do you want to be in a year? Now you have both ends. They have told you where they are and where they would rather be, and neither of those is your opinion, so neither is arguable.

So what do you feel I could help with? Ask this and let it be quiet. Most people, given the space, will summarise your own service back to you, in their own words, better than you would have pitched it.

What you have built is a gap. Not a case for your firm, a gap between where they are and where they want to be, described in their language. You do not have to sell across it. You only have to be standing in it.

The tell

Do this properly and you do not introduce the price. They do.

If you have to bring up the money, you have not finished the earlier part of the conversation.

That is the most useful diagnostic in the whole meeting. A prospect who asks what it costs has already decided they want the outcome and is now working out whether it is available to them. A prospect who has to have the price presented to them is still deciding whether they want anything at all, and any number you say lands as an interruption.

What to say when they ask

Then the sentence is:

"Let me bring up my screen, ask you a few more questions, and give you a price now, if you have got ten minutes."

Nobody says no to that. Everybody wants the price, and they want it as soon as it can be had.

Think about having your house painted. Somebody comes round, walks through the rooms, asks about the woodwork and whether you want the ceilings done. If they say they will email you in a few days, you are mildly deflated, and you ring somebody else that afternoon. If they sit at your kitchen table and work it out in front of you, you very often just say yes.

You are not different. Your clients are not different. Wanting to know the price is not a sign of a price-sensitive buyer, it is a sign of a buyer.

Why the scoping questions belong in the meeting

There is a second reason to price in the room, beyond momentum.

When you go through the scoping questions together, out loud, the client watches the number being built out of their own answers. How many employees. What state the records are in. When they will get you the information. Each answer is theirs.

By the time the figure appears, they know exactly which of their own circumstances put it where it is. That is a completely different object from a number in an email, which can only be accepted or argued with. It is also why an honest conversation about scope is worth more than any amount of justifying afterwards.

Then say the number, and stop talking. There is more on that moment here, including why the four seconds after the price are the most expensive in the meeting.

The prerequisite

None of this works if pricing takes you an afternoon.

You cannot turn your screen round and scope live if the answer depends on you going away to think. So the work has to have been done in advance, once, at your desk: your bands, your minimum, what each service is worth, what moves the number. After that the meeting stops being a pricing exercise and becomes a conversation that happens to produce a price.

That is what Power Pricing holds. You answer the scoping questions with the client watching, the figures stay hidden until you reveal them, and they can sign there and then, at the point where they are most certain they want it.

But the software is the last five minutes. The conversation before it is the part that decides whether the number gets accepted, and that part costs nothing to change. Ask better questions, follow the problem through to what it is costing them, and then say nothing until they ask you what it will take.