1. "How do you handle this today?" — get the alternative first. What he's really comparing you to is almost never a competitor; it's the makeshift thing he does now.
2. "Roughly whose time does that take, and what does it come to in a month?" — turn the reference into a number. A figure out of his own mouth is ten times more credible than one you calculated, and he won't haggle with himself.
3. "If this stopped needing attention entirely, what would those people do instead?" — that lifts the reference to the upside, which is where the ceiling becomes visible.
How to use it when you quote: repeat his number, then say yours. "You said this takes two people three days a month, so call it a hundred thousand a year. Ours is thirty-eight." You haven't persuaded him of anything. You put his own figure next to yours.
When you must go back to cost: for bespoke or headcount-delivered work, cost decides whether you lose money. Price the floor first, then talk about the reference — don't fold them into one number.
Mechanism: people never judge a price in absolute terms; they judge how far it deviates from a reference point. Give him no reference and he'll pick one himself — usually the cheapest substitute around, or simply not spending the money at all.
Boundary: value pricing assumes you can state his upside and that he believes it. In markets where buyers compare on spec alone — commodities, tenders, near-identical products side by side on a shelf — the reference is brutally transparent and there's little room for it. That's where cost and channel are the real levers.
Low tier · the buyer you shouldn't be fighting for: small budget, happy to do it himself. Its real job is to absorb "too expensive" — with it in place you can drop a tier instead of dropping your price.
Middle tier · the one you actually want to sell: make it the default and label it "what most people choose". That one line does the recommending and the social proof at once.
Top tier · the ruler: priced a clear step up (commonly two to three times the middle), built for the buyer who wants it all handled and doesn't want to think about it.
The one-sentence quote: "People in your situation mostly take B. A is the do-it-yourself version, C is us handling everything end to end. Would you rather save money or save hassle?" That last question closes off the buy-or-don't question entirely.
Red line: the differences between tiers have to be real — scope, response time, volume, who does the work. Three names for the same thing at three prices is a stage set, and sooner or later he compares notes with another customer. What you lose then isn't this deal.
Mechanism: valuation in the brain leans heavily on the set of options sitting in front of you. Adding an option isn't just one more choice — it changes where the other options sit relative to each other. So the option set is itself a thing you get to design, and it's worth more design attention than the numbers.
Boundary: past three or four options decisions slow down and sometimes don't happen at all (choice overload is itself contested in the literature, so don't treat it as a law either). Safe practice: cap at three, and mark the default.
Mechanism: wanting and hurting run on separate circuits — the brain doesn't compute one net figure and then decide. So raising the wanting and lowering the hurt are two separable jobs, and someone who only knows how to discount is working half the problem.
Boundary and red line: reducing the hurt on something he ought to buy anyway helps him over the hump; doing it on something he shouldn't buy is manipulation. The test is simple: if he later worked out the full price and the full benefit, would he regret it? If yes, what you reduced wasn't his pain, it was his judgement.
1. "From {date}, {product} goes from X to Y." — lead with the conclusion. Burying the number in paragraph three reads as guilt.
2. "The reason is {the real reason}." — cost, heavier investment, wider scope, all fine, but it has to be true. Invent one and get caught, and what you lose isn't this price rise.
3. "You'll be getting {something specific} more." — pair a rise with a real addition wherever you can, even a small one.
4. "Your current price holds until {date}." — a grace period isn't a favour, it rewrites a loss into something he can plan around.
Two habits about sequencing: raise on new customers first and watch whether the close rate moves, then go to existing ones; notify existing customers in batches by contract date rather than all at once — if it goes wrong you still have room to change course.
Some will leave; the only question is whether they're the ones who should. If the leavers are your least profitable and most demanding accounts, the rise worked. If your best customers leave, you raised in the wrong place.
Mechanism: a price isn't only a number to him, it's a term of the relationship. Changing a term needs a recognised basis — and that judgement tracks "are you taking advantage of me", not supply and demand.
Red line: inventing a cost story, or timing a steep rise for the moment he's most locked in, both work in the short run and both convert a relationship into one-off revenue. The test is the old question: would you be willing to explain your pricing logic to him exactly as it is? If not, you already know it won't hold.
Ninety minutes, on one thing you currently sell — a product, a service, or your time.