Why pricing is rarely just about price?

Five takeaways from the discussion

Can we measure it?

The number of hours involved matters far less than the result achieved.

If pricing feels difficult, the challenge may be value

Many businesses know what they charge, but struggle to articulate why it matters.

Experience increases value

The ability to solve a problem quickly is often a sign of expertise, not a reason to charge less.

Trust remains one of the strongest sales tools

Referrals, recommendations and reputation continue to open doors.

The best sales conversations start with curiosity

Understanding a customer’s challenge is often more powerful than delivering the perfect pitch.

How do you know what you’re worth?
That was the question at the heart of a recent TechSPARK expert roundtable hosted by Lucy Paine, with sales specialists Sally Fox-Price and Jack Thompson.

The session was intended to explore pricing. Instead, it revealed something more interesting.

Pricing questions rarely stayed focused on pricing for long.
Attendees brought real challenges to the table. Some were wrestling with how to price expertise. Others were looking for ways to justify fees, respond to pushback or move conversations away from cost alone. As the discussion moved around the room, a common thread emerged.

The issue wasn’t usually the number.

It was the value behind it.

One of the strongest themes of the discussion was the distinction between effort and impact.

As Jack Thompson pointed out, customers rarely buy hours, days or deliverables. They buy outcomes. More revenue. Less risk. Time saved. A problem solved. Yet
many businesses continue to frame their pricing around effort rather than results.

That creates an interesting challenge. The more experienced you become, the easier some problems become to solve. What once took days may now take hours.

Yet many business owners still feel the need to justify a price through visible effort rather than accumulated expertise.

The conversation repeatedly returned to the same point: customers are often paying for knowledge, judgement and experience, not time.

Trust was another recurring theme.

Drawing on examples from her own experience, Sally Fox-Price explored the role that referrals, recommendations and reputation continue to play in winning business. Despite the growth of digital channels and automated sales tools, trust remains one of the most effective ways to reduce friction in the buying process.

The group also explored the importance of asking better questions.

Too often, businesses focus on explaining what they do before understanding what a customer is trying to achieve.

The discussion highlighted how understanding motivations, challenges and desired outcomes can transform both sales conversations and pricing decisions.

Perhaps the most useful insight from the session was how interconnected these topics proved to be.

A question about pricing became a conversation about value. A conversation about value became a discussion about trust. A discussion about trust led naturally into sales.

By the end of the roundtable, there was no single formula for setting prices. But there was broad agreement on one thing.

Pricing is often treated as a financial decision when, in reality, it sits at the intersection of value, communication and trust.

The number itself is usually the final step.

The harder work is making the case for it.

For those unable to join us, these expert roundtables offer something increasingly rare: the opportunity to hear experienced practitioners tackle real challenges in real time, alongside peers facing similar questions. The result is less theory, fewer generic answers and a far richer conversation than any presentation could deliver.