Best practices for raising your prices

Busy season can be intimidating with onboarding new clients, renewing existing client agreements as well as considering business growth and sustainability. 

One of the biggest opportunities during this time is to increase your prices and boost profitability. Whilst this is now easy to do in Ignition with our Price Increases feature, there is a best practice framework that you can follow to balance fair compensation for your business with instilling transparency and confidence in your client relationships.

This article provides best practice guidance for when you are using Ignition to renew and apply increases to your yearly agreements. This process will give you confidence to raise your prices effectively and efficiently whilst navigating the challenge of busy season, resulting in clearer communications, more revenue and improved profitability! 

We strongly recommend that you include a paragraph in your terms template that covers annual price increases.

This protects you and allows you to be transparent about all yearly price increases so the communications and conversations with your clients can be as smooth as possible.

We have provided a short section below that you can add to your terms templates.

Please ensure that you consult your legal contact to review your terms templates before sending to your clients.

It’s incredibly important to communicate early and often with your customer about increased prices for the new year.

Ideally, we suggest sending out an email to all of your clients one month before their agreement is due for renewal to advise them early.

Then, remember to include a similar email in the renewal proposal when their agreement is due for renewal.

Feel free to use our email templates below to communicate with your client prior to the renewal proposal. You can customize them to your liking.

We’ve also included a new price increase email template for you to use in your Ignition account.

If you do not see this in your account, you can copy and paste the email template below to your Email templates under the New proposal email section.

Note: This step covers renewing existing clients that already have Ignition agreement with you. If you have new clients you wish to engage for the first time, scroll down to the next section.

Once you have communicated with your clients early about the price change, you can easily renew your client’s agreements by using the Renewals and price increase features in Ignition.

To do this, navigate to your Pipeline and filter for your Accepted proposals.

Then, select all the proposals that you wish to renew → click Renew.

Once all of your renewal proposals have been created, ensure that you review them and make any adjustments first. 

Then when you are editing the renewal proposal, navigate to the Services step. The price increase modal will appear.

Select the percentage that you’d like to increase your services by and enable the rounding toggle if you prefer neater, round pricing. 

Click Apply when you are done and all of your services will be increased by the percentage that you specified!

Please note: This does not increase service pricing in your service library’. You will need to do this separately.

When you are renewing a proposal, consider and review these aspects of the proposal:

• Proposal name
• Proposal start date
• Proposal minimum contract length
• Services on the proposal (price, how it's billed, any options you'd like to offer)
• Ensure the "require payments" toggle is enabled (if using Ignition payments)

Learn more about how renewal proposals are created here.

When you are ready, you can send your draft renewal proposals in bulk either all at once or by specific clients or proposals that you choose.

Alternatively, you can send each proposal manually if you prefer.

When your renewal proposal is accepted, you'll see renewal services displayed and linked to their currently active services in your client's Services tab.

Any new services will show a schedule of when it will start.

When the old proposal expires, it will be moved to a Completed state automatically.

Not to worry! You can easily make any changes or adjustments by editing an active service in your client's Services tab.

If your proposal has been accepted already, you can easily bill for out of scope services by creating an instant bill.

If you need to engage over 10 new clients, you can use Ignition's bulk proposal creation feature to save you tons of time and get paid with ease.

Note: If you only have existing clients with an existing Ignition agreement that you'd like to re-engage, scroll up to the previous section which will cover the renewal process.

In order to keep this article short and sweet, see the links below for more information on the bulk proposal creation process.

To create proposals in bulk, you first must do some preparation to ensure that:

1. Your proposal templates are up to date. (With this process, you can either use your proposal templates as a base, or you can use our Ignition provided templates.)
   
    
2. Your client list is up to date and that you have segmented your clients based on the proposal that they will receive. (Consider segmenting based on service, proposal type, form type, difficulty or pricing type.)

Then, when you are ready, you can create proposals in bulk from a template.