When to Charge and When to Give Assessments Away (Without Regrets!)

It’s about time we settle the age-old debate: should you give assessments away for free or charge for them? Deciding whether to charge for an assessment or offer it for free is a strategic decision, but both can be effective depending on the situation!

When I say assessment, I’m referring to a wide range of applicable offers: cloud assessments, network assessments, IT assessments, security assessments, etc. Whatever it is that you have, the question always arises: when should you give that away for free and when should you charge for it?

We struggled a lot with this when we were an MSP! I want to share what really ended up working for us and the times where it made the most sense to use each method.

One thing to note before we dive in is that these assessments should be quick and easy to deliver. They’re not something that should require extensive time from your techs; it’s much better if they are non-technical and simply helping prospects understand what you’ve found.

With that out of the way, let’s begin with the basics of offering assessments for free!

When to Offer Assessments For Free

Offering a free assessment is all about positioning. If you’re targeting cold prospects or people who haven’t shown an active interest in your services yet, charging for an assessment is actually going to turn them away before you’ve even had a chance to show your value.

A lot of times when I say this, I typically get some pushback. “If I give it away for free, prospects aren’t going to value it!” While that is true in the sense that someone who pays for a service sees value in it, prospecting and marketing is all about creating interest with prospects who don’t even know that they need you yet.

If you’ve read our blog on the Target Market Pyramid (here’s the link if you’re interested), you know we’re talking about the 67% of your prospects that don’t know they need your services!

To make giving away a free assessment really work, the assessment needs to be of a high perceived value and really grab your prospect’s attention. Just because the assessment is free doesn’t mean you can skip the work of selling it!

You need to show your prospects why the assessment matters, what they’re going to gain from it, and how it will benefit them in the long run.

In my experience, you need to keep these three things in mind when offering a free assessment:

1. Make sure that you’re reaching the right prospects. A free assessment is not going to help if you’re offering it to the wrong people! Make sure you’re not targeting those who don’t need your services or aren’t qualified.
2. Even if you’re offering an assessment for free, you still need to sell it by building value. You must make a compelling case for why the prospect would want the assessment in the first place. Don’t just assume that free is enough to get them interested, because I guarantee you it’s not going to be!
3. You’ve got to provide a reason. We used to note that many businesses are disappointed by their current IT provider and positioned our free assessments as a low-risk way of allowing prospects to experience our services without commitment.

When we were an MSP, our free assessments really allowed us to demonstrate our expertise with cloud, and it allowed us to show our prospect why they needed cloud! If you’re looking for collateral to target this same niche, make sure to sign up for free on our Cloud Academy for the content that brought us success.

My final note on free assessments is this: don’t offer a prospect the assessment before you qualify them! If your prospect does not meet your ideal customer profile, you’re not required to give them a free assessment. It’s a case-by-case basis on who you provide this value to, and 99% of the time it’s best to target your most qualified prospects.

When to Charge For Assessments

In our experience, there were 2 key scenarios that led us to charge for assessments:

1. Our pipeline was so full that it was overflowing. In this scenario, we would charge for our assessments because it would help us to weed out less serious prospects. The price for the assessment would serve as second stepping stone for us to be able to qualify prospects that were in our pipeline!
2. We were giving away a presentation or running a webinar where we didn’t know the makeup of the audience. In this scenario, we didn’t know if who was listening was really a qualified lead or not. As with #1, charging for the assessment served as a way to weed out less serious and unqualified prospects.

The majority of our assessments were offered for free aside from the above scenarios! What worked best for us was qualifying our prospects before giving them a free assessment and focusing on packing these assessments with value.

Ready To Enhance Your Assessments?

Thank you for reading, and I hope that you learned something valuable! If you haven’t checked out our award-winning Cloud Academy, the collateral is custom built to bolster your assessments and offerings immediately! Sign up for free here.

Today, I’m going to leave you with a quote from Will Rogers: “Even if you are on the right track, you’ll get run over if you just sit there.”

Have a great week!