Social Saturday · April 25, 2026 · Companion Guide
What You’re Worth (and How to Prove It)
The value-based pricing frameworks Denise Gangi and Anne Murphy taught at She Leads AI Social Saturday. The math, the mindset, the ask.
Social Saturday · April 25, 2026 · Companion Guide
The value-based pricing frameworks Denise Gangi and Anne Murphy taught at She Leads AI Social Saturday. The math, the mindset, the ask.
Getting a ton out of Denise’s pricing frameworks? Leave her a testimonial after the fact.
Leave Denise a TestimonialWhat’s in this companion
Section 1 · The anchor story
Anne Murphy held up a piece of paper at the end of this session. Coffee-stained. Handwriting that only AI can read (ha!). A business plan for She Leads AI on a recycled napkin.
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 (notably to this audience!) Jensen Huang of Nvidia and his family. A real big deal. So when the project plan arrived – and was an image of a cocktail napkin with some scribbles from the bosses doing beer business, it was one of those moments.
So now…..she has her own napkin. 🙂
I’m turning the tides. Here’s my plan. I wrote it on a napkin, just like those guys did.
Anne Murphy · closing this sessionSixteen 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 if need be) and finding out what it’s worth.
Section 2 · Why it works
Denise Gangi spent 11 years running the pricing organization at Broadridge, one of the largest fintech firms in the country. She came from IBM Global Services before that. 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 said 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. And you need to get what it’s worth. Denise Gangi, to Anne
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.
Here’s what Denise and Anne both returned to throughout the session:
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.
If you take those numbers out into the market and start shopping it around, start having conversations, that is the only way you will find out if your pricing is right. There is no other way. I hate to tell you. Shortcut, no shortcut. You have to talk to people about it. You have to make the offer. Anne Murphy
And underneath that, the money mindset piece Anne named directly:
Global prosperity doesn’t happen if we don’t ask for money. The transfer of money, from the power, cannot happen if we don’t ask for money. 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. Anne Murphy
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.
Section 3 · The frameworks
Denise Gangi teaches this in five stages. They’re sequential. Each one depends on the last.
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. Not how many hours it takes. You can influence their perception. But the client has to believe in the value themselves.
This is the shift that makes everything else possible.
Your Ideal Client Profile (ICP) 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:
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 prospective clients.
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:
Stack multiple benefit buckets. Sum them.
You’ve done the math. Now the client needs to see it too. Denise uses three tools:
Price is a hypothesis. Your close rate is the test result.
One more rule: keep it simple. “Complexity is not your friend in pricing. Because 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 Murphy has been asked to share her pricing more times than she can count. She shared it at this session. One model, built around what she charges and why.
Anne’s rule
I’m really trying to divorce my relationship with time and money. I want my time to have a different metric than money.
Required before any engagement. Not optional. Anne uses it as a mutual fit evaluation. She conducts interviews and direct observation, because she knows 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.”
For first cohort. For additional staff at large organizations: $500 per person. Includes office hours.
Covers AI policy, AI Council framework, and role descriptions. Ideally sold first. Often bought after the education series.
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.
Built after the assessment and education work establish the relationship. Layered on top.
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.
Section 4 · The exercise
This is the math Denise Gangi taught live. Here it is as a fill-in exercise you can run on any service you offer.
Name one service.
What is the specific thing you deliver? Write it in one sentence.
Identify 2–3 benefits, not features.
For each benefit, write what changes for the client. In terms of time, money, or risk.
Benefit 1:
Benefit 2:
Benefit 3:
Quantify each benefit in dollars.
For time saved:
Benefit 1 value: $
Benefit 2 value: $
Benefit 3 value: $
Sum your buckets.
Total annual value delivered: $
Apply your value-share percentage.
Your share percentage: %
Your defensible price: $ per year
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. See what happens when you put it in the world.
A clean, copy-ready Google Doc version is available so you can run this exercise on your own service.
Open the Google DocSection 5 · Prompts
Copy, paste, adjust for your context.
Then: take that number, apply your efficiency percentage, multiply by deal or transaction volume. That’s your annual value estimate.
Denise used this to confirm the 10–30% (enterprise software) and 30–50% (proven AI) benchmarks before presenting them to clients.
She found one client she believes she can re-engage.
Section 6 · 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. I’ve only incrementally increased it. For the first time in my life, I’m not negotiating with anybody. You don’t get to come in on a discount. You’re not going to get a pro rate. I know my worth, and I know the worth of my platform.
On what She Leads AI gave her
I have zero imposter syndrome walking into this. Whether you’re basing it on time or project or SKU or seat, you are worth the absolute top of the market. Don’t shortchange yourself.
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. And someone clicked on my post on LinkedIn and said, “oh, I was expecting it to be free.” So 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.
Crunchy chords come to their own resolution.
Bios
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.
She Leads AI Social Saturday Speaker · April 2026
Anne Murphy is the founder of She Leads AI, uniting accomplished women to advance AI for global prosperity. She is a leading AI operations consultant, specializing in AI governance, education, and responsible adoption.
Anne brings 30 years of experience raising hundreds of millions of dollars for STEM education and research in the nonprofit and higher education sectors. Through Empowered Fundraiser Consulting, she provides fundraising strategy consulting and professional development for advancement professionals, helping organizations accelerate growth and deepen impact.
Social Saturday is supported by the She Leads AI Society. Society members make this free for everyone.