The Value Conversation might be my favorite of The Four Conversations in our model for selling expertise because it’s most likely to transform your financial fortunes.

Here, in the third of The Four Conversations, you endeavor to determine the value that you might help to create for the client and the share of that value you might command in the form of fees.

You’re not setting price here but you are offering pricing guidance and thus beginning the pricing discussion. You want to begin that pricing discussion by anchoring to the potential value to be created, instead of the cost of any solution. 

That’s one of the keys to The Value Conversation — there is no discussion of solutions.

This is the hard part. There is a place for thinking about and discussing solutions and costs, but it’s not here in The Value Conversation.

Your job here is to establish a broad price range, setting the high end as a function of the value that might be created, fully untethered from any solutions or costs. The client will likely narrow that range but you will have done your job.

Price However You Like

While The Value Conversation is a precursor to value-based pricing, it does not demand it.

You’re free to price inputs, outputs or outcomes (value), and you’re free to do it via fees, retainers, subscriptions, KPI-based incentives or any combination thereof. And you have the freedom to take as much or as little risk as you like, provided you have the authority, of course.

Regardless of how you charge, Value Conversation mastery will affect how much you’re able to charge.

Trust me, you want to learn to do this. It’s one of the most valuable skills you will learn in your career.

This Is First and Foremost About YOU

It’s a tired old refrain of mine by now but, like Sisyphus, I have accepted my destiny and will keep rolling this rock up the hill for eternity…

The value of The Value Conversation is what it does first to your own thinking.

You are the first target and beneficiary of The Value Conversation. Yours is the mind that must first be untethered from solutions and costs. The client can only follow you in this regard. If you’re not thinking of price as a function of value creation here then the client will not.

The order of events is as follows. By following the simple Value Conversation framework (explained in nuanced detail in The Four Conversations and Pricing Creativity) you will:

First, keep your own mind focused on value and curb the old habit of prematurely leaping ahead to solutions.

Second, lead the client to think in terms of value creation and ROI, guiding them back to this more creative and expansive mindset when they similarly slip into old patterns.

Finally, you will see your average proposal value increase as more and more of your clients reframe their investment levels around value creation, opening themselves up to the more expensive options that you will share in The Closing Conversation.

None of this happens without you being the first target of The Value Conversation, without your mind reorienting toward value — regardless of how you charge.

Have you freed your own mind, or are solutions and costs still getting in the way?

-Blair