Here is a cheap trick I use in the first hour of every diagnostic. I put the company's pricing page on the screen, and I ask the founder to read it aloud. Not summarize. Read. Every tier name, every bullet, every asterisk.
Nobody makes it to the bottom without wincing.The wince is involuntary, which is exactly what makes it evidence. Nothing a founder says in the following ten minutes is as reliable.
The wince is the finding. A pricing page is the one artifact where a company's story about itself collides, in public, with what it actually believes customers will pay for. The deck can be aspirational. The blog can be generous. The pricing page has to commit. And so it reflects, with unflattering accuracy, every internal argument the company has deferred.
The tiers you publish are the org chart of your indecision.I have yet to meet a tier that survived the argument it was invented to avoid. It gets discounted into whichever tier somebody can actually explain.
What the mirror shows
A middle tier that exists only to make the top tier look reasonable. A feature list where "priority support" appears twice because two VPs each demanded it. An enterprise column whose only real content is "Contact us," which translates to: we will decide what this costs after we have met you and estimated your budget.Enterprise pricing can be quoted; plenty of good companies quote it. What cannot be quoted is a strategy nobody has settled yet. Buyers translate it exactly that way, incidentally. They are fluent.
None of these are pricing failures. They are unresolved strategy wearing pricing's clothes. The company hasn't decided who the product is for, so the tiers try to be for everyone. The company hasn't decided what the valuable unit of the product is, so it charges for seats while selling outcomes. The discount policy hasn't been written down, so it gets improvised at the end of every quarter, which is the most expensive possible place to improvise.
The test
Run it yourself, this week, without me. Open your pricing page and answer three questions out loud, ideally with a colleague watching, because the watching is what keeps you honest:
One. Why does the middle tier cost what it costs? Not "competitive benchmarking." What does the customer get at that price that justifies the gap from the tier below?
Two. Which customer should not buy the cheapest tier, and does the page tell them so? A fence that exists only in the sales team's head is not a fence. It is a suggestion.A fence is the rule that keeps a customer out of a tier they would otherwise squeeze into. Written down, it is policy. Unwritten, it is a mood.
Three. If a stranger read only this page, what would they conclude your product is worth? Write the sentence down. If it embarrasses you, you have found the work.
Why nobody looks
Because the mirror implicates everyone. Repricing means product has to rank its own features, sales has to give up an excuse, finance has to model something scarier than a spreadsheet copy of last year, and the founder has to say a number and mean it. It is much more comfortable to commission another competitor teardown.A benchmark deck tells you what your competitors have agreed to charge. It cannot tell you what your customers agreed it was worth, which is the only number in the building that pays rent. I have read hundreds of them. They are beautifully formatted and they change nothing.
The companies that fix pricing are not the ones with better data. They are the ones willing to read their own page aloud, wince, and treat the wince as a work order.
That's the pitch, incidentally. I'm the colleague who watches, and then stays for the fix.