Pricing interviews.
What your buyers weighed, what your sellers concede, and what each of your executives believes the product is sold on.
Your deal data holds the outcome of every negotiation your company has ever run. It holds almost none of the reasoning. Why the buyer chose the edition they chose, what they were weighing it against, which concession ended the argument, and whether the value they expected ever arrived: none of that survives in a CRM field.
What a buyer would pay is written into decisions they have already made, and a trained interviewer can get it out of them. We interview your executives, your sellers, your customers and your competitors’ customers, in their own language, every outside conversation run in the open. What the interviews say is checked against your deal data before any architecture decision is made.
inside one engagement.
never through a translator.
behind the pattern library.
There are two places a pricing team usually looks for what buyers would pay, and neither holds it. Your own deal data has the outcomes and none of the reasoning. A survey asks a buyer to put a price on something they have not bought. The answer moves with how the question is worded, and in a market where the product and its alternatives change every quarter, it is out of date before the results are tallied. Peer-reviewed work on pricing research says the same.
What a buyer would pay shows up in the purchase they already made: which edition they chose, what they weighed it against, how they use the product, and whether the value arrived. A trained interviewer gets that out of a live conversation, in the buyer’s own words, and it is specific enough to build pricing on.
Four groups of people.
Each holds something the other three cannot.
Pricing problems rarely sit with one group, so all four are interviewed inside the same engagement and read against each other. Where your sellers and your customers describe the same deal differently, the design work starts.
Your executives
What leadership believes the company sells, and where they disagree. Disagreement at the top becomes packaging that contradicts itself and a discount policy renegotiated in every deal.
Your sellers
What happens in the room when price comes up. What the rep gives away first, which objection ends the conversation, and which part of the pricebook they have stopped putting in front of buyers at all. Where you record your calls, on Gong or a similar platform, we read the recordings as well, so the pattern comes from what was said on the call as much as from what the rep recalls.
Your customers
What they thought they were buying, what they use, and where the invoice surprises them. Renewal conversations expose the distance between the value story your team sells and the value your customers report receiving.
Your competitors’ customers
The alternatives they weighed, the deal they negotiated, and the verdict they reached on the money. This is the group our Real Deal framework for competitor-customer interviews is built around, and the interviewer says who they are here exactly as with your own customers.
Chris Mele
Ranked #1 on OpenView’s list of B2B SaaS pricing experts. Chris runs the interviews on every engagement himself, with a senior team that has held CEO, CFO, CMO, CPO and CIO seats in software companies and interviewers who work to the competitive-intelligence profession’s code of ethics in the interviewee’s own language.
LevelSetter checks what the interviews surface against your deal data at a scale no spreadsheet reaches, so the experts spend the engagement on the calls only humans can make.
Read more about Chris →The interviewer says who they are.
The conversation runs in the buyer’s own language.
The interviewer says who they are. Your own executives and sellers know who we are. With your customers and your competitors’ customers, the interviewer gives their name, their firm and the purpose of the call at the top of every conversation, and never has to name the client, so your confidentiality holds. That is SPP’s code of conduct. The full code, and what to demand of any firm you hire for this work, is on the competitive pricing analysis page.
The conversation happens in the interviewee’s language. Interviews run in seven native languages with no translator in the middle. In a pricing conversation, how a thing is said tells you as much as what is said: the hesitation, the hedge, the qualifier in front of a number, the exact words a buyer reaches for to describe value. Those are the first things to decay in translation.
A buyer who knows who is asking and why will walk through the alternatives they weighed, what the seller flexed on, and whether the value arrived. That depth is why the approach holds on the competitive side of the work as well as your own customers’ side.
What the interviews decide.
Interviews produce inputs to four architecture decisions. Each one is checked against what your own deals say about the same question, so neither source is trusted on its own.
Candidate value metrics
Which units buyers accept as a fair basis for the bill, and which ones they will work around to keep the bill down. Interviews move the value metric decision more than any other input, because acceptability is something buyers can only tell you in their own words.
Customer Group boundaries
How value gets derived across your base, which is rarely the same shape as company size or vertical. The interviews name the candidate groups; your closed deals test whether the groups hold up.
Packaging boundaries
Where an edition line can land without stranding a capability buyers treat as table stakes. Sellers and customers routinely disagree about which capabilities those are, and mapping that disagreement is most of the work.
The value story sellers can defend
The language your customers used, handed back to the field. A value story assembled from customer phrasing gives the seller words the buyer has already accepted.
The interviews are human work and they stay human work. LevelSetter holds what they surface next to your deal data, so every claim an interview makes is tested against what the deals did. The findings stay current as the next quarter of deals lands, instead of going stale six months after a deck is delivered.
Four questions to ask yourself first.
They cost nothing and you can run all four this week. If the answers come back clean, your evidence base is in better shape than most. If one lands uncomfortably, describe it to a pricing architect.
Ask five executives what the product is sold on. Do you get one answer?
Five answers is a common result and a serious one. The architecture inherits whichever answer was loudest in the room the day packaging was drawn.
On the last deal your team discounted, what went first?
Whatever goes first is what the field believes has no defensible value. Find out whether anyone decided that on purpose.
Which customer would use the words on your pricing page?
If the name takes a while to surface, the pricing page is written in language the market has never confirmed.
On the last deal you lost, who else was on the shortlist?
Then ask where that answer came from. A rep’s account of the choice set and the buyer’s account are different things, and pricing built on the first one is pricing built against imaginary competition.
Frequently asked questions
Tell us the pricing decision you are closest to making.
Describe the problem in a few sentences and a pricing architect replies. If the evidence behind the decision is thinner than you would like, say so, and we will tell you who we would go and ask.
Would rather talk it through on a call? Book a working session.