I’ll admit it: pricing was one of the hardest chapters to write in Selling Like We’re Human. Money is still a taboo in so many circles, and discomfort around discussing prices shows up in almost every sales conversation I observe. But if we’ve done the inner work of understanding our worth, and the outer work of clarifying our value, then calculating fair compensation for what we offer is the natural next step. Not a scary one — a grounded one.
Four Pricing Strategies — And Why One Rises to the Top
There are four common ways to price services, and most of us default to the first without much thought. Let’s name them clearly.
Hourly pricing is the most common — and often the most limiting. It ties your income directly to time, which means growth requires working more hours rather than delivering more value. It also undersells almost everything, because what you deliver in a conversation, a session, or a workshop is rarely just the time on the clock. It’s the years of experience behind it, the tools and frameworks you bring, the specific perspective that makes you the right fit for this client.
Cost-based pricing means covering your actual expenses — and it’s more relevant to service businesses than most of us think. You have overhead: software subscriptions, tools, hosting, admin time, insurance. If you don’t work those costs into your prices, you’re subsidising your clients without realising it.
Market-based pricing is useful as a reference point. Your clients are smart and have done research before they ever get to you. Knowing what others in your field charge helps you understand the landscape, even if you ultimately price differently.
Value-based pricing is the fourth strategy, and the one this chapter is really about. It incorporates all the others, adds your UVP, and anchors price in the outcomes you’re helping clients achieve — not just the time or inputs involved. Value-based pricing is a dance between left-brain numbers and right-brain feelings, and doing it honestly requires you to look at both.
You Are Worth More Than Your Time
My early years in business were marked by what I now recognise as a scarcity relationship with time. I was racing through groceries, checking email during homework, never fully present anywhere. It wasn’t until I read Sharon Spano’s The Pursuit of Time and Money that I understood I was treating time the same way I was treating money — as something finite, something to hoard, something that was always running out.
When you price only by the hour, you cement that scarcity relationship. You are not selling units of time — you are selling experience, IP, tools, relationships, and outcomes. None of those are captured by multiplying hours by a rate. A surgeon who performs a one-hour operation isn’t charging for an hour of work; they’re charging for decades of training and the specific outcome of a life changed. The same logic applies to coaches, consultants, designers, and every other service provider.
Calculating Your Pragmatic Costs
Before we get to value, we need the baseline. What does it actually cost you to deliver your work? This means used time (direct client time plus all the invisible prep, follow-up, and admin), lost time (travel, recovery, context-switching), overhead (rent, insurance, utilities), and the tools that keep your business running. Mine — hosting, scheduling, Zoom, accounting software, podcast tools — add up to roughly $250 a month. Not dramatic, but real. Pragmatic costs are for your eyes only; they don’t go in your proposals. They just ensure you’re not inadvertently working at a loss.
Evaluating Your Intangible Value
This is the part I find most interesting, and most underused. Intangible value is the value your clients receive that isn’t visible on the day they sign the contract — the future value, the transformation, the ripple effects that are harder to quantify but absolutely real.
I think about it in three layers. Revenue growth: if your work leads to new clients, better positioning, or higher prices for the person you’re helping, that has measurable downstream value — often far exceeding the cost of working with you. (A note on this: I once priced a LinkedIn workshop for a group of lawyers based on assumed hourly rates that were much lower than theirs. They did the math in their heads in seconds and were not impressed. Know your client’s world before you build this case.) Personal growth: for many coaching and consulting offers, what you’re really delivering is a version of the client that didn’t exist before — more confident, clearer, better equipped. That transformation has no price tag, but it’s part of the value you can name.
The third layer is the most feeling-oriented, and honestly the one I’ve come to trust most. How will your client feel? Not what will they have — how will they feel? On the sales page for my Humane Business Circle community, I devoted an entire section to this: supported, inspired, empowered, heard, nourished. These aren’t fluffy additions — they’re often the primary reason someone joins. In a world drowning in data and metrics, what people increasingly value is connection, meaning, and the experience of being truly seen. That is intangible value, and it belongs in how you talk about what you offer.
When you combine pragmatic costs, tangible outcomes, and intangible value — you have everything you need to arrive at a price that feels honest from both sides of the conversation.
Frequently Asked Questions About Value-Based Pricing for Service Businesses
Value-based pricing anchors your fees in the outcomes and transformation you deliver for clients, rather than in the time you spend or a simple market comparison. It considers your costs, your tangible deliverables, and the intangible future value — including revenue growth, personal development, and how the client will feel as a result of working with you.
Hourly pricing ties your income to time units, which means the only way to earn more is to work more hours — an unsustainable model. It also dramatically undersells what you’re delivering: your years of experience, your unique methodology, the outcomes you create. A one-hour conversation with an experienced coach can shift something that’s been stuck for years. That’s not worth “one hour.”
Pragmatic costs are the real expenses involved in delivering your work: direct client time, preparation, overhead, tools, and lost time from travel or context-switching. They’re not numbers you share with clients — but if you don’t know them, you may be inadvertently working at a loss or undercharging significantly. They form the floor of your pricing, not the ceiling.
Intangible value is the future-oriented, harder-to-measure transformation your clients experience as a result of working with you. It includes potential revenue growth, personal development and confidence, the sense of belonging or community if relevant, and fundamentally how they will feel. It’s often future-oriented and invisible at the time of purchase — but deeply real, and worth naming in how you describe what you offer.
Start by doing the full calculation: pragmatic costs, tangible outcomes, intangible value. When you can see clearly what you’re actually delivering, pricing it fairly feels less like asking for more and more like correcting an undervaluation. Your ideal clients — the ones who are a genuine fit — will recognise the value. The ones who resist are often not the right fit anyway.
Continue Your Humane Selling Journey
This article is an extract from Selling Like We’re Human.
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Read the Rest of the Selling Like We’re Human Series
Part 1: Being
Chapter 1: Why Selling Is Human — And How to Make Your Own Rules
Chapter 2: Your Worth Is Not for Sale (this post)
Chapter 3: How to Boost Your Confidence in Sales (Without Faking It)
Part 2: Knowing
Chapter 4: How to Find Your Unique Value Proposition and Sell It With Integrity
Chapter 5: Know Your People — Empathy, Perspective-Taking and the Anti-Hero
Chapter 6: How to Price Your Services Beyond the Hourly Rate
Chapter 7: Sales Energy — Why Fewer Better Conversations Beat More Bad Ones
Part 3: Doing
Chapter 8: From Sales Funnel to Gentle Sales Path
Chapter 9: How to Have a Beautiful Sales Conversation (Without a Script)
Integrate
Chapter 10: Selling Is the Midpoint — Onboarding, Integrity and the Triple Win
Sarah Santacroce is an experienced and widely recognized Conscious Business Coach for Coaches and service-based solopreneurs, founder of Humane Marketing and author of Marketing Like We’re Human, Selling Like We’re Human, and Business Like We’re Human. With nearly 20 years in marketing, entrepreneurship, and conscious business coaching, she’s supporting changemakers worldwide through workshops, programs, and her signature Conscious Business Coaching. Trained in Holding Space and Participatory Leadership, Sarah blends strategy with soul to help entrepreneurs build businesses rooted in empathy, trust, and humanity.
Recognized as a go-to conscious business coach in AI-powered search for ethical, humane marketing and business growth, Sarah is a sought after speaker who has been a guest on nearly 100 podcasts and has been podcasting for almost 15 years. Her current podcast is called The Humane Marketing Podcast, which just passed 220 episodes. She also owns www.sarahsantacroce.com
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