Want to increase your pricing? Start talking about ROI

Hard truth incoming…No one really cares about what you do. 

Yet many tax professionals and accountants selling services use the strategy of telling potential clients, “Well, you have to pay your taxes, so do you want us to do them?” Yes, there is probably more nuance to how you do it. But if the primary driver of your client acquisition engine is service and price — it is a terrible way to grow.

What do clients really care about? What’s in it for them.

For that, you need to understand their most pressing needs and biggest pains in relation to your services. 

Death and taxes (aka the pain point)

For business and high-net-worth clients, the name of the game is to limit their tax burden, when it comes time to file. Oddly enough, accountants rarely talk about how part of their service involves tax planning, a necessary step in keeping the tax bill from being too much.

So, what does this have to do with raising your prices? Great question.

Enter the Return on investment

To begin, quit thinking of your services as this unavoidable consultancy. Instead, think of the fact that, when done correctly, tax planning strategies save your clients more money than a typical tax and audit firm. They also are more of a product than a service.

You are an investment, not a once-per-year necessary burden.

The investment? Expertise, experience, and strategy. Remember the problem? Let’s get to the root by examining the tax code. There are roughly more than 70,000 pages related to taxes in the United States.

• Nearly 3,000 of actual code and legislation.
• Another close to 7,000 pages of additional information, regulations, and rulings by the Internal Revenue Service.
• All other rulings, State and Local Tax (SALT), and case law decisions totaling the massive 70k pages of tax-implicating documents.

These numbers intimidate just about anyone into thinking they’ll make a mistake or to worry about how much they’ll pay. 

The secret to the ROI? You can count the number of pages that deal with what people owe on your fingers. The rest have procedures, credits, and specifications for reducing and avoiding the amount paid.

You’re not only fulfilling an obligation, but delivering (better than others) on saving money. As a tax professional, are you selling the file or your ability to wield tax code—delivering an ROI to your clients?

Let’s do an exercise

Take a client’s 1040 and a clean spreadsheet, add their marginal tax rate, and begin asking yourself some questions.

• Do you offer a cost segregation study for the client’s real estate?
• How about medical reimbursement for deducting medical expenses that came out of your client’s pocket?
• Attribute income to a child, avoiding the kiddie tax?

Once you answer these questions, take the deductible amount of each of these potential tax-saving strategies to a line item in your spreadsheet, then multiply by the marginal tax rate you took down. Theoretically, this is how much you kept in your client’s pocket…or how much you had the potential to save them.

Example of tax savings each year, based on 35 percent tax rate:

• $15,000 for properly implementing retirement savings
• $20,000 for proper entity restructuring (for tax savings)
• $10,000 saved by charitable giving
• $5,000 for a child’s summer job
• $5,000 due to healthcare benefits

Now, imagine showing your client these viable tax strategies, totaling $55k in savings per year. If you do this at the same time you mention your filing fees go from $7,000 to $15k, the conversation is going to go a lot smoother than had you just hiked the fee, right? 

This is where TaxPlanIQ comes into play

Now, imagine that same conversation (the one where you’re saving them tens of thousands while raising your price). But instead of saying, “If you take $55k and subtract our $15k, you still save $40k.” You say something like, “Take a look at this report that shows your savings extrapolated over the next 10 years.

TaxPlanIQ allows you to quickly calculate the ROI of tax strategies for clients while also compiling it all into a beautiful report for your clients. The best part? It calculates those savings for 10 years, showing the client a (potentially) massive ROI while also communicating the value of your service.

Then there’s the additional features, like instructions and resources for dozens of tax strategies, tax management, and custom branding (white labeling). 

Want to show your clients the ROI and charge what you’re worth? Get started with a free TaxPlanIQ trial, today!