Stop selling time. Start selling value

If you’re still pricing on day rates you’re putting a ceiling on your growth and your profit.

In a workshop we ran with Blair Enns, author of Pricing Creativity, he said, “The way professional services are bought and sold needs to change.”

And I couldn’t agree more. Our Consultancy Sales Maturity Assessment, completed by over 400 consulting firms shows that despite 37% ‘agreeing’ or ‘strongly agreeing’ that their pricing reflects the value they create rather than the time they spend, only 14% are achieving an average delivered gross margin above 60%.

What’s the problem with selling time?

When you sell time, you turn your expertise into a commodity. You signal that the only thing that matters is how long something takes. Not what it’s worth.

You also cap your upside. If you get better, faster, more efficient… your reward? You earn less. Sound familiar?

Value-based pricing flips that logic

Blair outlines five levels of pricing success and at the top of that ladder is a simple shift:

Stop charging for what you do. Start charging for what it’s worth to your client.

Let’s say you help a client unlock £500k in new revenue or save £200k in cost. Do they really care whether it took you 2 weeks or 2 months? Of course not. What matters is the outcome.

How do you get started? Here’s what I tell consultancies we work with:

1. Anchor your price to the outcome, not the input

Have a value conversation early. What will success look like? What’s it worth to them? That’s your pricing anchor. Not your time sheet.

2. Offer options

Don’t present a single price. Offer a tiered proposal: a base option, a middle one, and a premium. Make it easy for the client to choose the level of value they want to invest in.

3. Use price as a positioning tool

Don’t be the cheapest. Be the clearest about value. If clients push back, it’s rarely about cost, it’s about clarity. Have you explained the return they’ll get?

4. Build confidence through process

Value-based pricing isn’t about bluffing. It’s about being confident in your methodology and making your process tangible. When prospects trust your process, they trust your price.

This takes practice but the payoff is huge

We see this again and again in the Network. The consultancies that shift to value-based pricing

• win more profitable work
• spend less time negotiating fees
• and grow faster because they’re not stuck on the delivery treadmill.

It’s a mindset you can develop and it starts by letting go of the old idea that time equals value.

So here’s the challenge:

The next time you send a proposal, stop and ask:

“Am I charging for my time or for the difference I’ll make?”

If it’s the former, you’ve got an opportunity. At the Network, we run ‘capability sprints’, facilitated 6-week programmes designed to enhance specific areas of your consultancy’s operations, with targeted strategies and structured deliverables to deliver rapid and measurable ROI. These sprints include ‘profitable pricing strategies’ based on this framework, to get more profit for the services you deliver.