Ask a leadership team how they set price and you will usually get a tour of other people’s websites. “We sit a little below X.” “We did not want to be the expensive ones.” “Sales said we would lose the deal.” The number is a compromise between fear and a competitor who may not even share your costs, your customers, or your ambition.
That compromise feels commercial. It is often the quiet reason growth does not compound. You win work you should not want, discount the work you should, and train the market to wait for a conversation about price instead of a conversation about value.
Price is a story about who you are for. A competitor’s PDF cannot tell that story for you.
What customers already tell you
You do not need a six-month research programme to start. You need the last fifty deals, the discounts you already give, the work you throw in for free, and the customers who did not blink.
- Where did you win while being the expensive option? That is your value floor, not an anomaly.
- Where did you discount to “get it over the line” and then resent the account in delivery? That is a packaging problem, or the wrong customer.
- Which features or services do customers treat as the reason they bought — and which are theatre?
- What job are they hiring you to do that they would still pay for if you stripped the proposal down?
The market is already voting. Competitor-led pricing ignores the votes you have and copies the votes someone else designed for a different company.
Rebuild the offer, then the number
Pricing work that lasts is offer work. In Direction we start with the proposition: who it is for, the job it does, and the language that makes the price feel like a conclusion rather than a hurdle.
Then we package. Good packaging makes comparison harder in the right way — not by hiding the number, but by making the alternative (doing nothing, hiring internally, picking a cheaper generalist) look more expensive in time, risk or outcome. Bad packaging is a menu of extras that invites a strip-down negotiation.
Only then do we set the number. We use three anchors: the value of the job to the customer, the cost to serve at the quality you refuse to drop, and the price at which sales still feels proud. If those three cannot meet, you do not have a pricing problem. You have a focus problem.
The sales conversation has to change with it
A new price with the old script is a raise nobody can defend. Sales needs a story, a walk-away, and permission from leadership to lose the deals that only close on discount.
That is Change as much as it is pricing. Managers have to say the new number out loud. Exceptions need a rule, not a private Slack to the founder. The first thirty days of a price change are where most companies quietly undo the work.
We stay for those thirty days. We sit in the calls. We write the one-pager. We watch where the team apologises for the price and we practise until they do not.
What “more margin” actually funds
Teams fear that a higher price is arrogance. In a well-run company it is how you fund the system: the people who make delivery excellent, the time to say no, the product you can stand behind. Discounting to fill the pipeline is how you fund chaos.
If your prices were set by glancing at competitors, start with the last fifty deals — not a new rate card. Bring us the wins, the discounts and the accounts you regret. We will help you write an offer customers will pay for, then a number that matches it.