Ignition helps agencies and other professional firms get paid for the value they create rather than the hours they work.  Making the transition to modern pricing practices requires a change in thinking as well as a change in practices, so the centerpiece of this program is an in-depth workshop that explores the leading edge in professional pricing, including:

* The many other progressive pricing strategies used by today's businesses and how they can clearly apply to professional service firms

* Why the "billable hour" is not a "unit of value" (only a unit of cost) and how to effectively sell the value you create in other more effective forms

*Why your costs are really none of your client's business, and how to change to dialogue away from transparency of agency costs to what really matters: the value being created for the marketer

* Why progressive marketers favor a change in agency compensation

* How to charge for the value of outputs vs. the cost of inputs

* Selecting the profit-optimizing price for each engagement

* The importance of decoupling the perceived value of ideation and execution

* Why pricing is a strategic function that should be centralized

* The psychology of pricing and how to use it to your advantage 

We begin the process by conducting a review of your firm's current pricing practices so we can customize the program specifically to your challenges and opportunities.  Following the training of your senior team, we’ll work with you to establish what we call a "Pricing Council."  This is a key component of making pricing (not just costing) an ongoing core competency of the firm.  

Drawing upon Ignition’s extensive work in teaching progressive pricing strategies to professional firms around the world, this program is built around four key areas:
 

1. THE PROBLEM

* Why clients favor a change in compensation approaches

* The power of price

* Matching professional buyers with professional sellers

* Why pricing is an essential part of your business model

2. THE PARADIGM

* Why cost-based pricing is the wrong paradigm

* The nature of value in the world of professional services

* Selling outcomes, outputs, or inputs

* Costing is not pricing

* What you really sell, and what clients really buy

* Sellers change pricing, not buyers

3. THE PRINCIPLES

* Moving away from the language of cost to the language of value

* Selling your value instead of your costs

* Bottom-up vs. top-down pricing

* Why your costs are none of your clients' business

* Price the client, not the service

* Compensation agreements as a financial portfolio

4. THE PRACTICES

* Putting "scope of value" ahead of "scope of work"

* The pricing spectrum

* Setting a fixed price based on value instead of cost

* Selecting the profit-optimizing price for each engagement

* Dealing with price psychology and overcoming price objections

* The critical importance of providing pricing options

* Decoupling different classes of value

* Aligning the economic incentives of both buyer and seller

* Centralizing pricing in your firm: the Pricing Council

The Progressive Pricing Strategies program can help your firm catch up with the pricing revolution and move beyond the outmoded cost-based approach of the past to the customer-based pricing strategies used by today's successful 21st-century businesses.

To get a better understanding of Ignition’s work in this area, we invite you to review some of the published articles by and about Ignition associates in leading business and trade publications including Advertising Age, Admap, The Advertiser, Communication Arts, The Economist, Bloomberg News, Wall Street Journal, and The Guardian.