You're pricing your projects wrong

Most projects a priced based on people's time.

The proposal, as well as containing lots of justification for choosing you as a supplier, is essentially a shopping list of project member's time and how much their hourly rates are.

This is helpful in terms of being transparent and making feel the client is informed.

But IS it really helpful?

More information doesn't necessarily mean more power.

Unless your client is empowered to make a choice and believe that the price you're giving them is worth paying then it doesn't matter how granular and transparent you are about your pricing it won't help them.

In the end you're providing a number and your client needs to able to make sense of that number and explain it to others.

Also, when it comes to doing work that includes some inherent uncertainty, such as creative work or developing an innovative app, then defining price based on time isn't necessarily helpful either.

More than anything clients want certainty about what they're going to get and what they're going to spend in order to get it.

And they want to avoid any regrets about how much they spent (i.e. they want to feel good about spending more money).

They want definite outcomes without feeling like they've been conned.

They want solutions and good feelings.

How does you project pricing help create these?