Pricing conversations get presented as a clean choice: charge for your time, or charge for the client's outcome. I've argued the outcome side of that pretty hard before, and I stand by it. But the binary hides a real, practical problem that comes up on almost every engagement that isn't a repeat client: at the very start, neither side actually knows what the outcome is worth yet.
You can't price the value of a lead generation overhaul before you know the current conversion rate, the average order value, and how much room there actually is to improve. Sometimes the honest answer, discovered only after looking properly, is "not that much room, actually." A value-based quote given on day one, before that work is done, is a guess wearing a suit.
The Two-Phase Fix
The model that actually holds up under scrutiny has two phases, priced two different ways.
Phase one: paid discovery, priced flat, never hourly. A short, bounded piece of work, a week or two, with one deliverable: a clear, numbers-backed picture of the opportunity. Current conversion rate, traffic quality, average order value, realistic upside if specific things change. You're not selling the fix yet. You're selling certainty about whether a fix is worth pursuing at all, and what it's worth.
It has to be flat. Pricing discovery hourly quietly reintroduces the exact problem the rest of this piece argues against, just at a smaller scale: it ties your fee to time spent instead of the quality of the answer you produce, which rewards being slow or inexperienced over being sharp. Not knowing the outcome's value yet doesn't mean you fall back to charging for hours. It means you get more deliberate about pricing the thing you can already see clearly: the value of speed and certainty. A fixed fee for a fixed, bounded deliverable does that. An hourly rate doesn't, no matter how uncertain the eventual number is.
Phase two: the actual work, priced on value. Once that number exists, a value-based or performance-based quote isn't a guess anymore, it's arithmetic. If phase one shows a realistic path to £150,000 a year in additional revenue, a quote in the tens of thousands stops looking arbitrary and starts looking obviously proportionate.
Why This Beats Either Pure Model
Pure hourly pricing has the problem I've written about elsewhere: it charges for effort, not outcome, and rewards slowness. Pure value pricing has a quieter problem that gets skipped over in most of the advocacy for it: at the very start of a relationship, you're pricing something neither you nor the client can see clearly yet, which makes it feel like a leap of faith on both sides.
The hybrid model removes that leap. The client isn't being asked to trust your judgement about a number you haven't proven yet. They're being asked to pay a small, bounded fee to find out the number together, with no obligation attached to what happens next.
The One Rule That Makes This Work
This only works if the discovery phase is genuinely, explicitly obligation-free. State it plainly, in writing, before you start: "This buys you a report and a number. You are free to take it to another agency, do it in-house, or do nothing at all. There's no pressure and no assumption that phase two follows."
Without that, discovery pricing quietly turns into a foot-in-the-door sales tactic, and clients can smell that from a mile off. With it, you've built the one thing both hourly and pure value pricing struggle to establish early: trust, backed by a number that isn't a guess.
The pitch isn't "hire me and trust the outcome will be worth it." It's "pay a small amount to find out exactly what the outcome is worth, then decide." That's a much easier yes.