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Most agency pricing tiers are built around scope: more deliverables, more hours, more stuff. But your clients don't want more stuff. They want results, faster. In this solocast, I break down velocity pricing, a model where every tier delivers the same outcome but at different speeds and support levels.
Agency Forward explores the future of agencies as tech and AI drive down the cost of tactical deliverables. Topics include building competent teams, developing strategic offers, systemizing your business, and more.
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Unknown Speaker 0:00
Here's a question for you. When a client looks at your pricing tiers, what are they actually choosing between? If the answer is just more stuff, like more deliverables, more hours, more pages, more revisions, you've got a problem because you're not selling outcomes, right? You're selling labor by the pound, essentially. So today, I want to talk you through a different model. I call it velocity pricing, and it might change how you think about packaging entirely. No one was asking for another community, but I've made one anyway. So what's different? The dynamic agency community is designed around access, rather than content, access to peers who've done it before, access to experts who've designed solutions, access to resources that have been battle tested. And right now, the price for founding members is only $97 a year. Join today, so your agency has immediate access to everything you need to grow. You can join a dynamic agency dot community, and now let's talk velocity selling.
Unknown Speaker 1:05
It's easier than ever to start an agency, but it's only getting harder to stand out and keep it alive. Join me as we explore the strategies agencies are using today to secure a better tomorrow. This is agency forward.
Unknown Speaker 1:22
So I have been having a lot of conversations with agency owners lately about pricing. Now I am not the master when it comes to pricing conversations. I can refer you to plenty of people who better understand these things, but there's a pattern that I keep seeing right they build in, like three tiers, and the only difference between them is the amount of work that's actually going in. So like, basic gets you 10 hours, pro gets you 20, and then enterprise is 40, right? Or maybe it's your number of blog posts, landing pages, ad sets. The point is that the tiers are just volume dials on the same deliverables, and the result is that the sales conversation will often turn into a negotiation about scope, and so people will ask, like, can I get Pro features at the basic price, or, what if we drop two blog posts right to lower the cost? You've probably been in that conversation, right? A lot of agency owners have, so it's not surprising that this comes up, but here's like, here's what's actually happening, right the when you price by scope, you are, you're training clients really well. Clients eventually, like prospects at the time, and then as they turn into clients, they maintain this thinking
Unknown Speaker 2:36
of like they're, they're focused on the inputs, not the outcome. So they stop asking, like, will this solve my problem? And they start asking, am I getting enough stuff for my money? And so we all know that's a race to the bottom right. There's always going to be someone else who's going to be able to offer more stuff for less, and we really don't want to play in that game.
Unknown Speaker 3:00
But if you think about like, what your clients actually want, right? Nobody wakes up thinking like, oh, I need 20 hours of an agency's time this week or this month, right? It's they wake up thinking, I need this problem solved before q2 their urgency is often about time, right? Their budget follows their urgency. And so why isn't your pricing built around that?
Unknown Speaker 3:24
So that's why I want to introduce this velocity, like selling model velocity pricing, whatever you want to call it, but here's the idea, it's instead of selling more deliverables at higher tiers, you sell faster time to value. That becomes a lever that we're playing with here. So same outcome at every single tier, right? What changes is how quickly the client gets there, and then how much support they receive along the way. Okay, so let's try to make this concrete. Say you run a branding agency, right? Every client gets a complete brand identity. That's the outcome. Doesn't change. What would change would be the velocity. So standard might be 12 weeks. Let's call it 6k okay, the core outcome delivered at a like, a more sustainable price for someone client handles some of the implementation with your guidance. They got weekly check ins. You're moving at a comfortable speed. Then you move into, like, the next phase of this could be accelerated, and so we're doing it half the time, six weeks, and we'll do it at 9k so it's the same outcome, but a compressed timeline, right? So there's more touch points where we give them, like prioritized scheduling, you handle more of the implementation, so the client is in the bottleneck. And then the last tier could be a sprint for three weeks and it's 12k
Unknown Speaker 4:40
right? This is like an intensive engagement. You have a dedicated team attention. We're doing daily stand ups, like full just white glove execution and so that everything can move as fast as operationally possible. Okay? Now we have the same destination, like they're getting that brand identity regardless. But we have different velocities, which give us different price points.
Unknown Speaker 5:00
And so we can charge okay?
Unknown Speaker 5:03
So if you notice, like with that example, right, the 12k client isn't getting more stuff. They're actually getting the same result, just faster with more support. They're paying a premium for that speed, because speed actually has value to them.
Unknown Speaker 5:17
You can look at my site if you want, for the dynamic agency, OS,
Unknown Speaker 5:21
so I've removed the one of these packages. But the the idea is the same. I sell one outcome. It's going through the dynamic agency OS. It is nailing down your positioning through this program. Now you can do it one on one which costs one thing. You can do it in a cohort which costs another. And then I had a DIY version that I was thinking about launching. Maybe if you guys respond to this, I might still decide to launch that at some point, but that would be different. Now, the speed at which you can get results changes for all of those because it changes how much you're actually accessing me. If you're getting one on one coaching, we're meeting continuously for just one on one attention in a cohort, you have to share that attention with others, and then DIY, it's like you're getting some videos from me, and so the speed at which you can get those results, you could still do the DIY version and you just go ham and put in all of the effort and finish this at the same amount of time at someone who's doing it one on one, but there's a lot more effort required. And so the price point, then is also lower, right? So this all makes sense. So you can check that out for another example.
Unknown Speaker 6:23
But let's talk about like, why is this premium justified? Because some of you are thinking, but it's the same deliverable. How do I justify 2x the price faster delivery actually does cost more, right? You're rearranging schedules, you're you're deploying more resources at the same time, you're taking on more coordination risk, right? There's actual like operational cost to compressing timelines. But the thing that matters more is that for clients who need speed, aren't comparing your accelerated tier to your standard tier, right? They're comparing it to the cost of waiting. So if a rebrand takes 12 weeks, and they need it done before a product launch in four weeks. But the cost of waiting isn't 6k the cost of waiting is like the launch revenue that they're going to miss. So that makes 12k feel like a bargain, a 2x price on 2x faster delivery that it's like an easy yes for them, you just have to make sure that you can actually deliver like at that pace. Because if you, if you can't like, if you sell a sprint and you can't actually staff it, you're losing all credibility, or positioning falls through, and that is not going to do, do anything for your business. I mean, it'll do something, it'll hurt it,
Unknown Speaker 7:37
okay, but beyond the core tiers, right? You can also, like, offer add ons that accelerate specific parts of the process. Yeah, think of these as, like, velocity boosters. You could have a priority start so, like, jump the queue if you're this is specifically important if you're a high volume type of agency, if you're doing, like, very bespoke projects and like this, this won't work. But if you're probably in the lower ticket silent market, where you got a lot of people right, a priority start and letting people jump the queue for a faster kickoff could work. Maybe you have, like, a two to three week wait for client engagements, but priority means, hey, we can start like this week, right? That's worth something to to the right person. They could also have dedicated strategists.
Unknown Speaker 8:23
One point of contact, right? Who owns this project? Said there are faster decisions, fewer handoffs, less like let me check with my team. It's just they get that person to move quicker. You can do async video reviews, so instead of waiting for a scheduled call, you can send video walkthroughs. I recommend doing this just period anytime you can deliver something asynchronously to keep the project moving, you probably should, but there is potential to have that as an upsell. Within the engagement, you can also do implementation support. So like, there are things you're you kind of expect the client to do themselves, but you could take those on yourself and just have them pay for it, and now things will get done faster because your team has it
Unknown Speaker 9:02
and like, it kind of removes the client as a bottleneck. Right. Now, each of these is, is like, it's easy to price, I guess, because each one is like, it will directly impact the the timeline, and since your clients will be able to see clearly, like, the connection between what they're paying and the speed they're getting, it just makes it much easier for you to to approach us. Now what changes when you price velocity instead of scope? There are some things that will shift in your business. First, your sales conversations change, right? You stop talking about hours and deliverables, and you start talking about outcomes and timelines. When do you need this done by is a much better qualifying question than how many blog posts do you want,
Unknown Speaker 9:44
in so many different ways. But second, clients will self select based on urgency, not just budget. So the client who picks us like the sprint tier, isn't doing it because they have more money. They're doing it because they have a deadline. They're.
Unknown Speaker 10:00
Like, that's a different kind of buyer. And honestly, they're usually better to work with because they're motivated to move
Unknown Speaker 10:07
third this, this is probably a big one, right? You stop competing on like, more stuff for the money, right? That's it's a losing game, telling you, especially as AI is coming in and making it easier to create more stuff like that's not the output that we want. Instead, you get to with velocity selling. You get to compete on faster results for clients who value speed. Nobody else, like on your competitors. Pricing Page is offering that, right? It's a different access entirely.
Unknown Speaker 10:39
But with all of this, right? There's a couple things that I want to be like, I don't know real about. Like, this model only works if you can actually deliver faster at the higher tiers, right? So you need to validate that if you're, like, an SEO agency, and you're like, Yeah, I will get you on the first page of Google, in the top spots in one month, versus the six months that we think, like you might not be able to do that. So like, You got to have some real confidence that you can do this right. If your sprint tier promises three weeks, but like, your team can't realistically pull it off, you're just going to burn trust. So start by looking at, like, your last, I don't know, five to 10 projects, and like, what was the actual timeline? What would it have taken to cut that in half? That is a question that I love, uh, asking myself just throughout different things and asking clients, it's like, just, what would it take to achieve this result in half the time? And if you're constantly asking that and thinking, you're going to find some ways to to boost efficiency, that could easily translate into like this selling, right?
Unknown Speaker 11:43
The other piece of this is that it's much stronger if your positioning is around speed. So if we look at like the iron triangle, right, prospect can come in, and they can be aiming for, really, two of three things, pricing, quality or speed. And these, this is a constraint model. That's why you can only choose
Unknown Speaker 12:04
two. If they're if they just care about quality or they just care about price and they don't care about speed, this will have less effect, obviously, right? And so you might need to choose a different lever to lean into this, but if they care about speed at all, right? So quality and speed, or price and speed, or maybe just speed as like they want to go all in on that. This is the perfect model for them to to fall into. Okay, so here's your homework. Look at your current pricing tiers and just ask you, like, Am I selling more stuff or faster results? If it is more stuff, try sketching out what velocity based tiers would look like for your core. Offer right, same outcomes, but three different speeds. See how it feels like I think you'll be surprised at how much cleaner the conversations get. All right, that's it for today. If this episode was useful, share with another agency owner who's stuck in the scope pricing trap, and I will see you next week.
Unknown Speaker 13:02
That's the show everyone. You can leave a rating and review, or you can do something that benefits. You click the link in the show notes to subscribe to agency forward on sub stack, you'll get weekly content resources and links from around the internet to help you drive your agency forward.
Unknown Speaker 13:22
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