How Do I Price a New Offering I’ve Never Sold Before?

The honest answer: start with what the outcome is worth and what the work costs to deliver — not with what other practitioners charge for loosely similar things.

Pricing by comparison is tempting when you have no prior sales data. The risk is that you end up pricing against the wrong reference point. What another practitioner charges for something with a similar name may reflect very different outcomes, very different delivery infrastructure, and very different positioning. Their number tells you little about yours.

Start With the Outcome Side

What does this offering produce, specifically? Not what it includes — what the client experiences as a result. A client who completes this offering will have ___. That blank is the foundation of the price.

What nobody explains about pricing new offerings is that the outcome value is a more reliable anchor than competitor pricing. If the work reliably produces a specific outcome — one that the client would pay significant money to have — the price follows from that outcome, not from market surveys.

For offerings where the outcome is speculative (because you haven’t delivered it at scale yet), work from your best honest estimate of what it’s likely to produce — and be clear internally that this is an estimate. A first price is a starting hypothesis, not a final commitment.

Then Work the Cost Side

What goes into the first price for a new offering includes: your delivery time, preparation time, materials or tools, any ongoing support between sessions, professional development that made this offering possible, and the overhead of running a professional practice. Add these up honestly. That gives you a floor — the minimum rate at which the work is worth doing.

New offerings sometimes require more prep time than established ones, because the materials and frameworks are still being refined. Build that into the first pricing calculation, even if you expect it to decrease over time as delivery becomes more efficient.

Set the First Price Deliberately

Why the first price matters is that it establishes a reference point — both in the market and in your own relationship to the offering. Starting too low creates a position that’s difficult to raise from without disrupting client expectations. Starting at a thoughtful, honest price from the beginning is easier to sustain.

A reason why for a new offering should be ready before the first sale. “I’m still figuring out the price” is not a position that generates confidence. “This work produces X, and my rate for it is Y” is — even if the evidence base is still being built.

The process of arriving at a first price is: calculate the cost floor, estimate the outcome value, and set a price between those two that feels defensible and honest. Then sell it, deliver it, and refine based on what you learn.

Pricing new offerings with a rigor that matches the intentionality behind the work is part of what the Abundance GPS Skool community supports practitioners in developing. Join us here.