Social Saturday · April 25, 2026

How to Sell AI Services — Value-Based Pricing

The value-based pricing frameworks Denise Gangi and Anne Murphy shared at Social Saturday — the math, the mindset, and what it takes to name the number.

with Denise Gangi and Anne Murphy

The Napkin

Anne Murphy held up a piece of paper at the end of this session. Coffee-stained. Handwriting that she’d call chicken scratch on a good day. A business plan for She Leads AI — written the way you write something when you mean it, not the way you write something when you’re waiting to be ready.

Here’s the backstory. Before She Leads AI, Anne spent 33 years in higher education fundraising. Her last major project — helping build a new engineering campus at Oregon State University, in partnership with Jensen Huang of Nvidia and a major philanthropic gift. The project began when her boss and her boss’s boss sat at a bar, did what she calls “beer business,” and scratched a $200 million plan on a bar napkin. Then they took a photo of it and texted it to Anne. That was her plan. A napkin from a bar.

She has kept that image. At the close of this Social Saturday session, Anne held up her own napkin. Her She Leads AI plan. Same format, same energy, same level of polish — which is to say, none. Coffee stain and all.

“I’m turning the tides,” she said. “Here’s my plan. I wrote it on a napkin, just like those guys did.” Sixteen months later, it’s still the plan.

That’s what this session was about. Not waiting for the right format, the right font, the right comma. Not waiting until you’re sure. Putting your offer into the world — the actual number, on the actual napkin — and finding out what it’s worth.

I’m turning the tides. Here’s my plan. I wrote it on a napkin, just like those guys did.Anne Murphy

The Psychological Work Underneath the Math

Denise Gangi spent 11 years running the pricing organization at Broadridge, one of the largest fintech firms in the country, after coming from IBM Global Services. She has written price increase letters that had to be vetted across entire enterprise organizations, paragraph by paragraph, explaining the why to every client. She knows pricing.

And the first thing she said in this session had nothing to do with spreadsheets. She reached out to Anne after listening to multiple Social Saturday sessions where women said things like “I get a lot of pushback from the gentleman when I put my price out there” and “I’m not sure what I’m worth.”

“There is so much value in what you are bringing to the table,” she told Anne. “And you need to get what it’s worth.” That’s the starting point. Not a formula. A belief. Value-based pricing isn’t a pricing strategy in the conventional sense. It’s a decision about whose judgment you’re going to trust — yours, or the discomfort you feel when you say a number out loud. The math comes after that.

Price is a hypothesis. You put a number into the world and the market responds. A high close rate means you’re priced too low. A low close rate means you’re either priced too high, targeting the wrong people, or not yet articulating what you deliver clearly enough. The market is data. Your job is to run the experiment.

Underneath that is the money mindset itself, and Anne said it plainly. “I am done with any reason to not ask for money, to not transact in a clean and clear way. Money’s not dirty. Not for me. I’ve done my work about money.” Sales, in Anne’s framing, isn’t a transaction. It’s a gift exchange. “I am a gift to you, you are a gift to me. At some point we’re going to exchange gifts.” That reframe — from transaction to gift, from asking to giving — is the psychological work that has to happen before the pricing framework makes sense. Otherwise you’ll do the math and still feel like you need to discount it.

If you take those numbers out into the market and start shopping it around, that is the only way you will find out if your pricing is right. There is no shortcut.Anne Murphy

Denise’s Value Pricing Roadmap

Denise Gangi teaches this in five stages. They’re sequential — each one depends on the last.

01

Understand what value pricing is

Value pricing means your price is based on what the client perceives your work to be worth — not what it costs you to deliver it, and not how many hours it takes. You can influence their perception. But the client has to believe in the value themselves.

“It’s what does the client perceive to be the worth of what you’re taking forward. Now, you can influence that client’s perception, but ultimately the client has to believe in the value of what you’re bringing forth.” This is the shift that makes everything else possible.

02

Define your target market

Your Ideal Client Profile is not a permanent fixture. It’s a point-in-time description of who you’re best positioned to serve right now. It will narrow as you grow. Denise’s ICP lens — industry vertical, company size or stage, and whether you’re going wide across multiple industries or deep within one.

Her advice on finding the right-sized clients — if you work with VC-backed startups, find out which VCs invest in your target industry and size, then look at their portfolio. Those are your prospects. “As your business grows, your ICP could narrow. You don’t have to be all things to everybody to be a growing concern.”

03

Estimate the value

This is where the math starts. The goal — translate what you deliver into dollars the client can see. Start with features, then translate each feature into a benefit, then quantify that benefit.

Denise’s example — the feature “it automates the deal approval workflow” becomes the benefit “saves each engagement coordinator 8 hours a week. If you have 5 coordinators at $100K each, that’s $100K of freed capacity per year.” The formula — hours freed per week times weeks per year times hourly rate times number of people equals annual dollar value. Stack multiple benefit buckets and sum them.

04

Convince the client of the value

You’ve done the math. Now the client needs to see it too. Denise uses three tools.

  • A competitive heat map — list yourself and competitors across the top, features and benefits down the side, and fill each cell with Harvey balls for full, partial, or no delivery. Where you’re full and they’re empty is your premium justification.
  • Published competitor pricing — “You can look at competitors like HubSpot or Salesforce — they publish their rates. Go get their pricing because they publish it.”
  • Before and after benchmarks — set a measurement baseline before you begin and measure again at the end. Proof is not a story. Proof is a number.
05

Put your price in the market

Price is a hypothesis. Your close rate is the test result. “If you’re getting more business than you can handle, you’re not pricing it high enough. If you’re getting not much, could mean you’re pricing it too high — but there are other factors, like targeting the wrong prospects or not articulating the value.”

One more rule — keep it simple. “Complexity is not your friend in pricing. If it’s so complex that your client’s gonna go, ‘I don’t know, am I being billed right or not right this month?’ — that’s a problem.”

Anne’s AI Consulting Offer Stack

Anne has been asked to share her pricing more times than she can count. Her rule — she never prices for time. “I’m really trying to divorce my relationship with time and money. I want my time to have a different metric than money.” Here’s her stack, in the order she typically sells it.

AI Readiness / Impact Assessment

$2,000

Required before any engagement. Not optional. Anne uses it as a mutual fit evaluation — she conducts interviews and direct observation, because clients will lie on a survey when they’re worried about what AI means for their jobs. “I want to look at their eyes. I want to watch where their shoulders go.”

Five-Workshop Education Series

$2,000 per person, first cohort

For additional staff at large organizations, $500 per person. Includes office hours.

AI Governance Setup

$4,000

Covers AI policy, AI council framework, and role descriptions. Ideally sold first — often bought after the education series.

Design Partner / Platform Relationship

Flexible pricing

For early adopters willing to provide feedback and usage data. Anne follows a 45-day rule between design partners, advice she takes from her collaborators.

Vertical Bespoke Consulting

Custom, layered on top

Built after the assessment and education work establish the relationship.

On raising prices — “We try to raise our prices by 10% in our fundraising consulting each time. And it works.” On ICP — “If they’re not running through a wall to work with me, I can’t work with them because I won’t be successful.”

Your Value-to-Price Calculation

This is the math Denise Gangi demonstrated live. Here it is as a fill-in exercise you can run on any service you offer.

Step 1

Name one service

What is the specific thing you deliver? Write it in one sentence.  

Step 2

Identify 2–3 benefits, not features

For each benefit, write what changes for the client in terms of time, money, or risk.  

Step 3

Quantify each benefit in dollars

For time saved — hours freed per week × weeks per year × hourly rate × number of people = annual dollar value.  

Step 4

Sum your buckets

Total annual value delivered.  

Step 5

Apply your value-share percentage

Enterprise software, established — 10 to 30%. Proven AI products — 30 to 50%. Newer AI services still proving themselves — start at 10 to 15% and raise as proof accumulates.  

Step 6

Gut check

Does this number feel too high to say out loud? That’s data — it means you haven’t yet made the case to yourself. Go back to Step 2 and make the benefit more concrete. Does it feel too low? Raise it and see what happens when you put it in the world.

Prompts From the Session

These are reusable. Copy, paste, adjust for your context.

The Value Quantification Prompt

Use Claude, Perplexity, or Manus

What is the average cost of [specific activity] in [your target industry and company size]?
Then take that number, apply your efficiency percentage, and multiply by deal or transaction volume. That's your annual value estimate.

The Competitive Benchmark Prompt

From Denise Gangi’s live demonstration

What are the published pricing tiers for [competitor] for [feature or product type]? What do industry benchmarks suggest for [your consulting or service type] in [your target industry]?

The Value-Share Percentage Prompt

Denise used this to confirm the 10–30% and 30–50% benchmarks before presenting them to clients

For [your product or service type], what percentage of the value delivered does the vendor typically charge? What is the range for AI-enabled services versus traditional software?

The Email Re-Engagement Prompt

Anne used this the week before this session and found one client she believes she can re-engage

Go through my email from [date range]. Find: (1) people I met with but never followed up with, (2) proposals or conversations that went cold, (3) warm leads I haven't touched in over [X] months. For each, give me the person's name, the last thing we discussed, and a suggested re-engagement opener.

The Executive Briefing Prompt

Anne builds this before every discovery meeting

Build me an executive briefing on [organization or prospect]. Include: mission and programs, leadership, current AI posture (if findable), budget signals, peer organizations, and 3 potential entry points for an AI consulting conversation. Use only publicly available sources.

Community Voices

Just because I’m confused on exactly how this pricing structure will work, I have not once in the last three months lowered what I’m going to come to market with. You don’t get to come in on a discount. I know my worth, and I know the worth of my platform.
K.
I finally launched my first app that is a reasonably priced app for what it does, but there’s no free layer — you just pay and that’s it. The moral of the story is — don’t keep putting your stuff out there with no price, because people will come to expect that from you all the time.
V.
Crunchy chords come to their own resolution.
B.L. — on the closing breathing exercise

From the Chat

Dropped during the session, and the industries the community shared during Denise’s ICP exercise.

Denise’s Contact Information

Shared in the chat at the close of the session. Reach her on LinkedIn.

Dr. Claire’s Website

Vikki shared doctor-claire.com as an example of a community member who has her prices publicly listed — worth following.

Industries in the Room

Auto insurance, book manuscript editing, dairies, brick-and-mortar small businesses, women-owned small businesses, music industry, startup founders, HR and operations, large-enterprise nonprofits, financial and investment management, small legal firms, food and beverage retail, and ongoing content creation.

Anne’s Research Agents

Anne shared a lighter version of her own research stack in the chat — Mini-Rupert, a scaled-down version of her Rupert research agent, Scout, her outbound research agent, and Pepper, the internal research agent that searches within her connected knowledge bases like Notion, GitHub, and Obsidian.

Who Presented This Session

Denise Gangi

Denise Gangi

She Leads AI Social Saturday Speaker — April 2026

Denise Gangi spent 11 years leading the pricing organization for a major division at Broadridge, one of the world’s largest fintech firms, after building her career at IBM Global Services. She now leads Deepgrids, where she’s building agentic AI workflow tools for enterprise deal and engagement management. She teaches value-based pricing to consultants, founders, and AI practitioners who are done leaving money on the table.

Denise on LinkedIn
Anne Murphy

Anne Murphy

Founder, She Leads AI

Anne Murphy is the founder of She Leads AI. In this session she shared her own AI Consulting Offer Stack alongside Denise’s frameworks — the actual numbers she charges and why.

Anne on LinkedIn
Open decision — CRM check

Verify Denise’s Society member or ACA status before publish. If no membership is confirmed, the speaker credit above stands as-is with no member badge added.

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Anne Murphy

Anne Murphy

Founder of She Leads AI and a leading AI operations consultant specializing in governance, education, and responsible adoption.

Currently building the world’s first matriarchal agentic company and co-founder of a stealth start-up to be announced soon.

33 years raising hundreds of millions for STEM education and research — also consulting through Empowered Fundraiser Consulting.

Proud mom of three, backpacker, Midwest roots, Pacific Northwest energy.

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