Ron Baker needed a landscaper. Three came to quote, and the difference between them is the entire art of talking about value.
The first walked the property with a clipboard and said: 40 dollars an hour, once a week. He was selling his costs, and Baker’s only thought was how long everything would take. The second scoped the job properly and quoted a defined package: mowing, edging, shrubs, 100 dollars a month. Better, he was selling an output. The third put the clipboard down and asked questions. You travel a lot? You hate yard work? What is your plan for the property? Baker mentioned he wanted to sell the house within a couple of years. The third landscaper offered three options, topping out at “the best curb appeal in the neighbourhood, and over time we will upgrade the whole garden, 300 dollars a month.”
Baker, one of the world’s foremost pricing experts, hired the third at three times what he had been paying, and describes himself as the happiest he has ever been with a landscaper. Same lawns. Same mowers. The only difference was the conversation.
The short version. Value is not a thing you own. It is a feeling in the customer’s head, and most of it is emotional. You uncover it by asking, you do not assert it by listing. Then you talk about who the customer becomes, offer three ways in, remove their fear, and price the value rather than the effort.
First, unlearn the maths you were taught
Most experts price and pitch from the inside out: what it costs me, how long it takes me, what I do. Baker spent a career demolishing that logic. Cost does not determine price. Price justifies cost. A coat sells for ten times the price of a hat not because it costs ten times more to make, but because buyers value it ten times more. His proof that the cost-plus worldview is broken fits in one line: if price were simply cost plus a margin, no business would ever go bankrupt, and businesses go bankrupt constantly.
The deeper point comes from Blair Enns: “Value does not exist extrinsically in the world. Value is nothing more than a feeling, a sense of regard. The value is in the client.” You cannot state your value in a brochure because you do not have it. They do. Which changes the job completely: your task is not to claim value. It is to find it.
And most of it is not financial. Enns’s example is a financial adviser whose wealthy clients do not actually buy rate of return; they buy “reduced complexity and the ability to sleep at night.” The obvious value sits on the invoice. The real value sits underneath it.
Step one: diagnose before you prescribe
Baker borrows the rule from medicine: “Prescription without diagnosis is malpractice.” The expert who quotes on the first call is the first landscaper, selling effort to a stranger.
So the first conversation is questions, not claims. What is the client trying to become? What happens if nothing changes? What has this problem already cost them, in money, and in sleep? The third landscaper won because he learned one fact, the house is being sold, that transformed what the garden was for. Every client has an equivalent fact. Your price and your pitch are worth nothing until you know it.
Step two: say who they become, not what you do
Baker’s line deserves to be on the wall of every firm that sells expertise: “Products and services say, look what we can do. Transformations say, look who you can become.” Customers, he insists, “don’t buy units of effort. They buy desired transformations.”
The practical move is a language swap, from the deliverable to the outcome:
The rule inside the table: attach every claim to a future the client feels, one to move toward or one to escape.
Step three: remove the fear before you add the benefit
Rory Sutherland’s insight, and possibly the most useful sentence in this whole series for someone who hates selling: “We spend too much time trying to ladle on extra positives rather than looking for negatives to remove.” His example is the four-day test drive: lend someone the car and their fears dissolve on their own.
Buyers of expertise are mostly afraid: of choosing wrong, of being locked in, of looking foolish. So find your equivalent of the test drive. A paid diagnostic before a big engagement. A guarantee. A named, dated case that proves someone like them survived working with you. One removed fear outsells three added benefits.
Step four: give three options
Baker’s most repeatable mechanic: never quote one price. The third landscaper offered basic, better, and best-curb-appeal, and the question in Baker’s head changed instantly from whether to hire him to which way to hire him. “It changes the frame from should I work with you to how should I work with you.”
Three options also do quiet work on value: the top option anchors the middle one, and the choice itself tells you what the client actually values, which is diagnosis continuing inside the sale.
Step five: hold your nerve
Baker calls self-esteem “the first sale”: “It’s the reputation you have with yourself. If you don’t believe you’re worth ten times your rate, your customers never will.” The moment you discount at the first flinch, you have told the client the price was fiction, and, worse, you have told them the value was too. Apple never goes on sale for a reason; the held price is information about worth.
This is where the whole guide compounds: diagnose properly, name the transformation, remove the fear, offer three doors, and the price stops being a negotiation about your hours. It becomes a small share of a future the client already wants.
Brave New, plainly
Brave New is the strategy-led growth partner for high-stakes B2B. We build brands that get found, remembered, believed and valued.
What we believe: strategy is the moat and story is the weapon. AI made sameness free, which makes distinctiveness the most expensive asset in your category and the only one that compounds. So the machine does the volume and the versions, never the thinking. As Google and BCG put it in 2026, AI is an engine for growth, not a replacement for talent. The strategy holds the reins.
And what we refuse to do. We don’t do boring. We don’t do vanilla. We don’t do borrowed voices, templated copy, safe work that reads like the category, or dashboards that flatter while the brand quietly fades. Dull is a tax. Our clients don’t pay it.
Insight, with no mercy for the dull. If your brand sounds like everyone else, that is the problem we exist to fix.
How do I explain my value without bragging? Stop asserting and start asking. Value is a feeling in the client’s head, so uncover what they are trying to become and reflect it back. The client who hears their own goal in your words does the convincing for you.
Should I lower my price to win the client? Rarely. Price signals worth, and discounting at the first objection tells the client the value was inflated. Offer three options instead, so the conversation becomes which level, not whether.
What is a value conversation? A structured discovery, before any quote, of the outcome the client actually wants, what inaction costs them, and the emotional value beneath the financial one. Diagnosis before prescription.
This piece pairs with “The Tension Deficit” and “The Long Game Is a Pricing Strategy.”
Sources: Ron Baker, “What Makes People Buy?” (The Futur, 2022) and the REFRAME webinars (2025), including the landscaper story and the transformational-language frame; Blair Enns, “The Four Conversations” (2025); Rory Sutherland on removing negatives (Cloud Army, 2023); Google/BCG, “The New Era of Marketing Partnerships” (2026).
Anne leads content, strategy and SEO across the Brave New client roster.
