Professional Services
Solving Pricing Complexity for Professional Services Firms
Professional services businesses often utilize a variety of fee structures, contract terms, and specialty discounting to balance costs and deliver the service levels customers expect. With so many factors to consider in the pricing equation, it can be difficult to manage price variation and price leaks while maintaining a consistent understanding of customer sentiment. INSIGHT understands these challenges and can help businesses develop a pricing approach that is best suited to capture more profit dollars and meet business objectives.
Learn more about INSIGHT’s approach:
Common Challenges
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Account Performance and LTV
Account performance and LTV are not systematically analyzed to develop strategy and prioritize investments
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‘One-size Fits All’ Pricing
‘One-size fits all’ pricing where services and segments are not differentiated, rate tables are not up-to-date and rational
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Coverage Models and Incentive Plans
Coverage models and Incentive plans aren’t always aligned to strategic growth needs
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Margin Leaks
Margin leaks across waterfall including discounts, contractor mix, hours, terms, etc
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Cross-selling Opportunity isn’t Realized
Cross-selling opportunity isn’t realized as recommendations aren’t highlighted or new services training aren’t provided to the team
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Capacity Utilization
Limited visibility and planning around capacity utilization e.g., pricing to capacity, monitoring planned vs. actual
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Lack of Oversight to Pricing Compliance
Lack of oversight to pricing compliance may contribute to more deviations than expected (approval flow, deal desk, etc.)
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Client Retention and Renewal Strategies
Client retention and renewal strategies are more reactive vs proactive
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Sales Processes Are Not Codified
Sales processes are not codified and supported by technology (e.g., contracts DB, CRM) to enable closed-loop learning
Navigating Pricing Complexity in Professional Services
Sustainable profitability through tailored strategies that address the unique challenges across professional service businesses, such as rate realization, market variability, and contract management.
Accounting & Finance
- Pricing seasonality
- Segmentation & right to win
- Account planning & expansion
- Revenue management office
Business Consulting & Advisory Services
- Labor market fluctuations
- Project variations & realization
- Contract terms & fees
- Renewal planning & expansion
HR Services & Staffing
- Labor market fluctuations
- Contractor rates & negotiations
- Regional variations
- Services structure & quoting
Law Firms
- Margin leakage
- Rate increase realization
- Contract management
- Billing & collections
What Opportunities Exist in Your Business?
Select considerations for how to identify and approach potential opportunities in your business.
Align Segments to Value
Define peer groups to inform pricing and commercial strategy
- Lay the foundation for business decisions across pricing and sales effectiveness, then refine over time based on results
- Analyze the intersection of customer size, industry, and other key factors industry to define client personas based on distinct buying journeys and Life-Time Value
- Utilize market research to understand value perception, key buying criteria, etc.
Optimize Renewal Rate & Pricing
Differentiate pricing and offering based on customer and opportunity attributes
- Evaluate current-state pricing strategy to identify areas for improvement (e.g., shifting from cost-based approach, driven by labor estimate by role | day | hours, toward a value-based structure)
- Introduce differentiation by key elements of segmentation
- Set and manage prices at the service-level
- Monitor win-rate, quoted vs actual margin, and other key performance indicators
Grow Share with New Business
Establish and execute against growth goals by market, service area, etc.
- Align on growth markets and / or service areas, and business targets for each
- Engage practice and commercial leaders to refine pricing strategy for customer acquisition, with the intent to margin-up over the life-time of the account
- Equip team members with the talking points, testimonials, and go-get lists to reduce the barrier for action
Enable Proactive Account Planning
Equip teams with recommendations and tools to manage account expansion
- Categorize renewal risk and proactively track mitigation commitments
- Compare customer spend and purchase history within peer groups to identify patterns and likelihood of opportunities
- Ensure tools are in place to quickly identify and prioritize opportunities based on renewal timing, upsell opportunity, and likelihood based on peer comparison
- Engage teams through measurement of progress against KPIs
How Does INSIGHT2PROFIT Deliver Results?
Quick Wins, Foundation for Value, and Centralized, Sustainable Pricing Capability
Strategic, Market-Based Rate Setting to Drive Profit Growth
Pricing Solutions to Advance Profitable Renewal Decisions
Meet Our Experts
With over 250 dedicated pricing strategy experts, our team helps businesses achieve profit and EBITDA growth through our process proven on over 800 engagements since our founding in 2006.
Andrew Boronka
Andrew is a Principal at INSIGHT2PROFIT. He has more than a decade of experience driving pricing excellence and enhancing client experiences across various sectors including manufacturing, industrial, B2B2C consumer, and distribution. He has led price transformation initiatives across more than 25 engagements contributing to over $200M in EBITDA impact through pricing transformation.
Examples of Andrew’s experience include:
- Implemented multiple quoting tools and pricing engines, achieving significant impact in the waste management service sector driving $1M of impact within the first 90 days of the pilot and $50M during the subsequent national rollout
- Execution of many value-based pricing frameworks within global industrial manufacturing resulting in over $70M of EBITDA generation over multiple years
- Reduced Pay Per Click Marketing (PPC) spend by $7M through A/B testing for a supplier of residential building materials
- Utilized competitive benchmarking through web-scraping within the ecommerce space to help drive $14.5M in margin improvement through price within the first 4 months
Andrew earned his B.S. in Accounting from The University of Akron and an A.A. in Business Administration from North Central State College.
Justin Seefeldt
Justin is a Managing Principal at INSIGHT2PROFIT and brings 15 years of experience as a management consultant focused on pricing, sales and marketing strategy. Over the past decade, Justin has spearheaded over 70 engagements across various industries concentrating on pricing and profit strategy, resulting in delivering clients more than $1B of value creation.
Prior to joining INSIGHT, he spent several years at a Fortune 500 wholesale distributor, focusing on strategic pricing, private brand management, and commercial analytics.
Examples of Justin’s experience include:
- Collaborated with an industrial holding company to develop a scalable pricing structure and process across more than 40 individual businesses, yielding over $30M of EBITDA impact and 500 basis points margin improvement
- Achieved over $10M of EBITDA impact for an omni-channel building products manufacturer by developing a gross-to-net waterfall that identified key areas of profit leakage and creating corresponding strategies to mitigate them
- Served as a centralized pricing function for a Fortune 500 multinational specialty manufacturer to coordinate pricing strategy and action plans across businesses, executing a $400M pricing action against downward margin pressures
Justin earned his MBA in Corporate Finance and Marketing Strategy & Planning from DePaul Driehaus College of Business, Kellstadt Graduate School of Business and a B.S. in Consumer Economics & Finance from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
Gerry Thomas
Gerry is a Principal at INSIGHT2PROFIT. Gerry has 9 years of experience in pricing and commercial strategy across various roles, including consultant, manager, senior manager, and director. He specializes in B2B pricing, particularly for industrial equipment, heavy machinery, chemicals, and industrial manufacturers and distributors. He has also collaborated with several B2C clients in industries such as leather goods, white goods, face care, and consumer product goods.
Prior to joining INSIGHT, Gerry spent 8 years as part of the Accenture Strategy team in the Pricing and Commercial Strategy group. During his tenure at Accenture, Gerry worked in sales enablement, zero-based budgeting, and in pricing and commercial strategy.
Examples of Gerry’s experience include:
- Led a project contributing $80M in EBITDA improvement over 16 months by implementing a value-based pricing methodology across the portfolio for a heavy trucking OEM
- Achieved a 2.5% net price improvement during inflationary headwinds for a B2B valve and industrial equipment portfolio company encompassing over 30 distinct brands, implemented a configurable custom quoting tool and PowerBI KPI dashboard utilized across 15+ brands, providing ongoing support for continuous improvement over multiple years
- Delivered over $50M in EBITDA improvement as the pricing project lead for an industrial equipment manufacturer through value-based pricing strategy and implementation
Gerry earned his MBA from the Goizueta Business School at Emory University, M.Ed. in Secondary Education and Teaching from the University of Missouri-Saint Louis, and a BBA in International Business from the University of Georgia.
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