# SaaS Pricing Strategy: 5 Stupid Mistakes Killing Your Revenue (And How To Fix Them)

## Метаданные

- **Канал:** MicroConf
- **YouTube:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JUB5t1SuIMo
- **Дата:** 27.04.2026
- **Длительность:** 42:05
- **Просмотры:** 171

## Описание

Most SaaS founders frame their value too low, segment customers too simply, and end up leaving serious ARR on the table. In this MicroConf US 2025 talk, SaaS pricing expert Marcos Rivera breaks down the 5 stupid mistakes killing your pricing power, and the framework to fix them.

🎟️ Join us at the next MicroConf event: https://microconf.com/upcoming-events
📈 SUBSCRIBE: https://www.youtube.com/@MicroConf?sub_confirmation=1

Marcos Rivera is the founder and CEO of Pricing I/O, former Head of Pricing at Vista Equity Partners, and author of "Street Pricing: A Pricing Playlist for Hip Leaders in B2B SaaS." He's helped price over 500 B2B SaaS products and now teaches founders how to shift pricing from guesswork to framework.

In this talk, you'll learn:
- Why time savings is just table stakes — and what actually drives willingness to pay
- How to evolve segmentation beyond small/medium/large (the MindBody case study)
- The 5 SaaS packaging structures and how to pick the right one for your stage
- When to charge by user, by usage, or go hybrid — and how product maturity dictates the answer
- How to discount surgically without anchoring your value too low
- The "5Q" framework for pricing decisions: Why → Who → What → How → Which
- A simple ROI-based formula to calculate a ballpark price using value multiples (5x, 10x, 15x)
- What to measure across acquisition, expansion, and retention to know if pricing is working

Whether you're under $2.5M ARR or scaling past $10M, the data shows pricing changes drive outsized revenue impact, even at the early stage.

— 

📌 Subscribe for more talks on SaaS growth, marketing, and product:
https://www.youtube.com/@MicroConf?sub_confirmation=1

MicroConf is the leading community and conference for independent SaaS founders building profitable B2B software businesses.

Get involved:
🎟 In-person events: https://microconf.com/upcoming-events
🤝 Mastermind matching: https://microconf.com/masterminds
💬 Private founder community (MicroConf Connect): https://microconf.com/connect

Follow MicroConf:
Website: https://microconf.com
X / Twitter: https://x.com/microconf
Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/microconf.com

## Содержание

### [0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JUB5t1SuIMo) Segment 1 (00:00 - 05:00)

But my goal today is to give you at least something, anything to help you make more money. Does that sound all right? Yes. All right, very cool. So, we're going to do that by exposing the five stupid mistakes in SaaS pricing. Now, I say stupid because the moment you realize you're doing it, the number one response I get is, "Man, that was stupid. " And so, that's how I named these. So, I'm going to expose these to you. I'm going to help you avoid them. I'm going to give you tools so you can get started and do something about it. Sound fair? All right, let's get into this. So, the short about me, I already got the intro, so that's good, but I wanted to give you a little bit more context into where I learned all this stuff from, right? So, I started uh as a product manager. I just built a bunch of software products my whole career. Learned how to price. Joined Vista as their head of pricing. Did all their pricing for the firm. Uh you know, did all those playbooks and wrote and taught a bunch of people stuff. So, I've been doing this for now 25 years. Helped about 500 different B2B SaaS companies. This is all in tech. I don't do pricing for candy bars or tennis shoes, only tech. And so, took that, wrote a book, and if you guys want to talk more about that, I'll be seeing you later on at the museum. I also run a show about it. So, the information around pricing do's and don'ts, I just can't escape it. And so, I want to bottle that up and help you by giving you some of the big hits today. Cool? And no surprise, I also grew up uh listening to hip hop. I'm just a skinny kid from the Bronx who figured out this pricing stuff. So, I like to have a little fun with it. How many pricing presentations have you seen with Weezy on the front? Anybody? Yeah, oh, you've seen many. Okay. Uh excellent. Well, let's just keep rolling here cuz I have a lot to cover. Okay. So, I'm I organize this. I'm going to jump into the mistakes first. Five stupid mistakes. What are they? How to avoid them? What do they look like? I'm going to jump right into that here. There's scrappy smart people in the room, so I decided, let me just flip the script and start straight into there. How to avoid it. So, steps to pricing power. This is the number one message you're going to come away with today. And then how to get the ball rolling. And again, action-oriented folks, I would love for you to take what you learn today and try to apply it on Monday. All right, that would make me super happy. DM me on LinkedIn. Say, "Marcos, look what I did. Aren't you proud? " And I'll say, "Yes. " All right? All right, let's keep rolling. Five stupid mistakes. Let me introduce them first. Okay? And I call these the killers of pricing power. You work hard. You're solving problems. You know, you're in there day in day out. You're wondering if that next release is going to make it. The next deal is going to close. There's a lot of stress. A lot of things come in your mind, right? But you're not actually realizing that there's some hidden things happening that are killing your pricing power. And I'm talking, you don't have to be a $500 ARR to really have pricing power. You can have pricing power early on. And my big goal in just coming here today is to help you keep it, maintain it, nurture it, grow it over time. All right? So, the big five. First one is that your product value is framed too low. Yeah, you probably built something really cool. You probably been making it better and better with every release. And you're probably not capturing that value. All right? So, your framing is too low. We're going to talk about that. The second one is your segmentation could be too basic. All right? And just a quick show of hands, how many of you segment by small, medium, and large customers? You're in a safe space. It's okay. All's good, right? Not a bad place to start, but you got to move away from that as you learn about who your customers really are. We'll cover that here in a minute. The next one is packaging that is too complicated and yes, too simple. So, when you think about your packaging, your structure, how many tiers, what's in those plans, bundles, all that kind of stuff, I'm going to cover a quick framework to help you land that right balance. Okay? The fourth one is charging for the wrong thing. This is an easy one to slip into. You may start by charging by, say, by user seat or by invoice or by API call, whatever it is. But over time, you really got to see what's changing in usage and behavior and charge for the right stuff. The last one is when you're discounting something. And this is a little controversial. I have my own views on this. I think discounting has its place in B2B software. Some people say, "Thou shall never discount. You're giving away too much value. You're anchoring too low. " I call on it. I think in real life, people are going to negotiate. Procurement's going to come to you. You got to learn how to manage a discount, but you got to do it proactively. More as a surgical scalpel than as a, you know, sledgehammer, if you think of it that way. So, I'm going to talk a little bit about how do we discount so you don't give away too much value in your early days. All right? So, those are the big five. And the reason why I introed is cuz I'm going to walk through these pretty fast. All right? Here we go. Pop quiz. Pop quiz. These are four big elements

### [5:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JUB5t1SuIMo&t=300s) Segment 2 (05:00 - 10:00)

that drive customer loyalty, willingness to pay. Okay? Responsiveness to their needs. The quality of your product. Can they trust it? Expertise in their field. Time savings. Which one of these does not belong? Going back to my Sesame Street days here. Which one of these does not belong here as the top driver of customer loyalty and willingness to pay? Think about it. Quality? Expertise? All right. Let this sink in for a second. Time savings is way down there. Now, why is that? Isn't that the whole point? It is. The thing is, time savings is now the ante, right? The table stakes. No one buys software to spend more time on something, right? So, you have to have time savings to even get into the conversation. But what's really driving that loyalty, that willingness to pay, the expansion, are these other things. Things like responsiveness to their needs. Hey, I am I'm a changing growing business. Can you respond to my needs and keep up? Can you expand these use cases for me? Do you have the expertise to help me figure this stuff out and grow and move into different parts of my TAM? Or is your product quality there? Can I rely on it? Is it going to be there as I continue to expand and grow and scale? Those are the big ones there. So, my big takeaway on this particular mistake is do not stop at time savings. All right? Some of you actually have a measure of what that time savings is. It's probably something you want to look at least every few months. Am I actually saving that right time? But then take it beyond. Ask yourself, what does my customer do with the time savings? What do they do with it? Do they close more deals? Uh do they uh concentrate on other more important things? Whatever it is, but go beyond the time savings in your value prop, in your positioning. That's the big one there. Okay? Next one, I talk about your segmentation being too basic. This is an example of segmentation taken from a small, medium, and large to the next step. And what I'm hoping you guys will do is go on to that next step. So, what this company did, this company is a little tiny small company out of San Luis Obispo called Mindbody. And they started with a small, medium, and large and evolved their segmentation to something like this that completely unlocked their revenue growth. They said, "We need to look at customers a little differently. Let's look at how mature their businesses are and how fast they're growing. " And you can take those two vectors, how fast a business is changing, how complex a business is getting. And you can use that to help drive more behind your segmentation. Why? Because the amount of complexity they're dealing with and the amount of change they're dealing with generally drives more demand for your products. That's what they're paying for. So, taking a step away from small, medium, and large into something like this where they can clearly see, okay, thriving Thea, that's who we want to go after and that who is disproportionately willing to pay for the value. And then, just as important as identifying thriving Thea, is also identifying solo Steve, who is not my customer. And this gets really tricky in the early days as you're growing, expanding, and seeing which customers try out your product. You're going to get customers that are great fits, bad fits, everything in between. It's really hard to kind of draw a line and say no to customers that are high churn or that are problematic. But it's an important part of moving to the next step. And it gets really hard to monetize when you're monetizing a base that is just a whole mix of great fits and poor fits and so on. So, doing this exercise is a big unlock. All right, next one. I talk about structure. I talk about your packaging being too simple or too complicated. How many folks in here have like some type of tiered good, better, best-ish type stuff? It's okay. It's pretty common. 72% of companies do good, better, best. It's There's nothing wrong with it, right? If in theory, it sounds logical, right? You want less, you get less, you pay less. If you want more, you get more and you pay more, right? Very simple. But it's where do you draw the lines that make it really, really tricky. And what a lot of founders that I've worked with do is they've found a website that they really liked their pricing page and pretty much just copied what they saw there, right? And if you did it, that's okay. If you copied, if you guessed, that is okay. It's not a bad place to start, but you have to learn and iterate from there. So, what this is the five main, I would say predominant, structures in SaaS pricing. And they range from the most simple, all-in-one, right? Think of Basecamp or something like that, all the way to the most flexible, the a la a Datadog, AWS, all those guys. And what you're going to find is that the struggle between simple and

### [10:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JUB5t1SuIMo&t=600s) Segment 3 (10:00 - 15:00)

flexible, right? Simple to sell, simple to buy, flexible to capture different types of value. That struggle, like that is the crux of most pricing and packaging problems. How easy do we make it? How flexible do we buy it? Do we actually use in our process? So, here's the key. How do you know which one to pick? It's actually not quite easy, but I'll give you a couple tips. The first one is how much TAM are you biting off? Right? If you take a look at your TAM in the span of customers that you can actually serve, are you serving a pretty broad spectrum or a narrow spectrum? Right? I would say the broader you are, the more you want to start moving towards the flexible side. The narrower you are, you want to stay a little more on the simple side. The next thing is your product maturity. How modular is your product? How many features do you have? How many problems and use cases do you solve? Relatively few? Yeah, you stay on the left side, on the simple side. If you solve a lot of different use cases, you can actually afford to move more into the right. All right? So, the product maturity and the amount of TAM that you bite off, those two things can help kind of guide you, and just try a few on for size to see which one works. This Do I need everything all in one? Am I solving one major problem for one major group, and I just they just need everything to get it done? Fine. All in one makes sense. Use case or unique use case means, like LinkedIn, I have a package for sellers. I also networkers, for recruiters. Very, very different, right? Good, better, best, again, very, very common you see out there. Um Slack does it super well, monday. com, all this etc. Core and more is where everyone at the beginning of the first when they start using your product need the same three to five things, but then after that, they start to expand in different ways. Zenefits does a good job with this. Everybody needs the core HR base, and then they can move on to other things uh such as um employee uh management and benefits and things like that. And the last one is a la carte. Again, if you solve problems very discreetly, you can sell those problems solutions to those problems piece by piece, and even bundle them, the ones that have relationships in order to drive revenue. Right? So, that's kind of the way the scale works. I I'm spending extra minutes on this slide cuz I think this is the one that you should really think about once you finish that segmentation exercise. All right? Next one. I talk about charging for the wrong thing. Now, this is the area that I would say should not be the first place you go. I would look at how you're framing your value, the segmentation, and I would look at structure before looking at this piece. Cuz this is where you actually need some data to kind of dig through this. But, I always think about well, what is the product doing, and what are humans doing in the product? And so, if the product is doing most of the work, like in the Snowflake example, and the human's not really doing much, right? Product versus person, you can see here on the chart, then typically usage or consumption-based pricing makes a lot of sense. Right? Throughput, GB, all those kinds of things. But, in an example where well, what if the product is just more of a tool, and the human is doing all the work, like in a Figma or in a Slack or something like that, then believe it or not, user or use user-based pricing actually still fits. I know it it's not fashionable to see it or use it or user-based pricing today. But, if you think about, you know, Slack, Atlassian, like all the major huge uh juggernaut SaaS companies out there, still charge by the user. I think there's still a place for it, but you really have to ask yourself how much is the product doing? And if the product starts to doing more, and the human is still doing in there, then your hybrid is the best approach. And what a hybrid is just a mix of models. It could be user plus some kind of usage, flat base limits. That's okay. It adds a bit of layer of complexity, but your product is getting a little more complex, right? You're driving more automation, integrations, all those things. And so, a hybrid model is usually where I a lot of companies start to break up. And then last one down here, obviously, if the product and the human aren't doing much, it's more passive, flat rates tend to work, and just move on. Okay? But, I just wanted to give you that construct because if you can ask yourself, is my product doing a lot more now than it was a few years ago? Are we taking more off the human plate? Start thinking more about a hybrid model. All right. Last one is about discounting uh reactively versus proactively. So, these are top 10 drivers of discounts. This is a simple chart that you can go on your flight home, create in a Google Sheet if you wanted to. But, think about what are the top drivers and set your limits intentionally first. And the point in doing this is you don't need all 10, by the way. You can pick three to five. That's okay. And the most common reasons to discount your deals, I'll give you three. The three big ones is more volume, more products, and more commitment. more

### [15:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JUB5t1SuIMo&t=900s) Segment 4 (15:00 - 20:00)

More volume, more products, more commitment. Those are the big three reasons to discount. Now, especially when you're early stage, that big deal, they're going to throw their weight around, they're going to try to push you down, you know, use the a lot of tactics to get a really great deal from you or into discount. And the reason why you want this a structure in place is so you can navigate those a lot easier, and you could also do things like tier it or put expirations on it in order for you to recoup your value over time. All right. So, this is a very simple step. It'll take you 15 minutes in a Google Sheet, but just uh use this as a basis, and come up with a discount matrix uh that makes sense for you. All right? So, that way you can keep it surgical and strategic. All right. So, those are the big five stupid mistakes, and then ways around them, right? Let's make sure that your value and your pricing keep pace with your product. You're innovating, you're releasing, you're adding new value. I would guarantee that somebody in this room has probably built a feature and gave it away for free. Nobody? No? Okay. All right. Make sure that your value and your pricing keeps pace. Find those best-fit pockets. Not every customer is going to be that perfect fit. Find the pockets so you can double down and concentrate on those guys. And then you want to package What I say is low friction, but high conviction. All right? Just keep it easy. You don't need 15 packages, can have one or two. I'm going to show you an example a little bit later, but you want to make sure you can win, you're easy to adopt, and then you're right. You have to earn the right to be complex later, if you know what I mean. Next, keep your licensing familiar and flexible. So, the idea here is charge for something people can see, can understand. They know it. Don't get too fancy with the charging of the metrics just yet in the early days. Earn that trust, and then you can evolve from there, and use that person versus product uh to help you pick a model. And then lastly, just make a discount matrix. Again, you could probably do this on the flight home. Sketch it out, and just stick to it, and that's going to be kind of a way you can put some guardrails behind the discounts. If anybody in here has discounted more than they probably should have, that's a good one for you. Yeah. Okay. Let's keep going. Because what The reason why I exposed those mistakes is cuz those mistakes are the things that knock you off your journey to pricing power. Right? Everybody gets working hard. You're driving good software out there. You're solving problems. And these things can knock you off a little bit if you're not paying attention. So, now that I Now that I've shared with you a little bit of what can knock you off track, how do we stay on track in the first place? I'm going to give you a five-step framework to do that. All right. I'm going to expose this to you. I'm going to explain it, and I'm going to show you an example. All right? Let's do this. The five steps to pricing power. Okay. Before I get into the five steps, there's something important for you to know because I think this is a common misconception that I am early stage, I don't really need to worry about pricing just yet. Common misconception. You don't need to spend a million dollars in 6 months on pricing just yet, all right? But, you do have to make sure that whatever model you have out there makes sense, and that you're actively learning and iterating on that model. If you look at these companies here, I highlighted This is the ARR impact and net dollar retention impact of pricing changes for the companies that changed pricing. Look at the amount of ARR impact for companies that were 2 and 1/2 to 10 million in ARR or even under 2 and 1/2 million ARR. You can see that those big jumps matter. They were leaving money on the table. And so, you can actually gain and improve your economics even at an early stage with some smart pricing. All right? So, how do you do that? Like, what are the big things? I honestly think that if you don't look at pricing as a startup, you're going to leave a lot of money on the table. Your competitors will come in and beat you. They'll undercut you or offer more value for the same price. And your customers will pay less than they probably should. Does anybody feel any of these three things have occurred in the last year? Probably, right? So, pricing does matter, and I want to give you some tools to help you kind of adopt it a little bit more. Okay? So, you have to build what I call pricing confidence. In order to get pricing power, you have to have pricing confidence. If you're probably wondering, uh I'm not sure if I'm charging the right thing. Oh, I'm not sure if this package is the right one. Hmm, I might want to relook at my pricing page. All those things tend to creep in because there could be some confidence missing. So, we want to help with that. And the two ways to build confidence is simple. You need a framework to drive your decisions, and you need some data to inform your hypotheses and your ideas. You don't need a perfect data. framework, right? Just start somewhere and build. So, let's talk about the framework, and then I'm going to show you where you can grab some data on a scrappy and a quick way. So, the framework I call five Q. Five Q

### [20:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JUB5t1SuIMo&t=1200s) Segment 5 (20:00 - 25:00)

stands for five questions. And I came up with this framework because I would go into an office, I would meet, you know, the C-team and I'll talk to them about their pricing and the first question they would ask me was Marcos, how much should we charge? Why? I don't know. I don't know how much you should charge unless I knew what value you were charging for, who's buying it, the pain they're solving and then sort of the why behind everything. Well, what are you trying to do? You trying to go up market? down market? And I need to understand all that context first before I could figure out how much to charge. And it dawned on me that a lot of the founders entrepreneurs that I worked with had that same first question. How much should I be charging? Well, there are a few steps important steps you have to take first before you can answer how much. So, the sequence here matters. Let me expose this and let me walk you right through it. This is the five Q framework and it starts with the why and goes all the way down to the which. Okay? And the reason why you start with why, not to be all Simon Sinek about this whole thing, right? But the point is that it gets really hard to make the tradeoffs you have to make if your why is unclear. And that is down to your strategy, your roadmap that really informs your value. What are you trying to do? All right, is is growth at all cost the thing for you? Are you trying to get EBITDA up? Are you trying to go down market? Are you trying to build a moat around your current market? What are you doing as a business? What's that strategy that you're trying to drive? How is your roadmap changing the product along with that, both past and future? And that should talk about what value you're trying to capture. And keep in mind that your value is changing all the time. So, you have to keep on reassessing and my capturing the right value. All right, nope, I'm clear. I am moving up market. I want to go to enterprise deals. I want to be this type of positioning and provider. Great. Now, you go to the who. And the who is all about which customers, again, really love you and which ones don't. And the point behind that is you have to understand what needs are the same and different across those groups and how much budget they have, willingness to pay. Some customers want the product, can't afford it. Some customers have way more than they need to afford the product. So, the key here is to understand where those overlaps and differences are in looking at your base. That's going to help you with the segmentation. And my favorite segmentation, like I mentioned earlier, that maturity complexity curve and how much they're changing, which drives the need for your product. So, now that the why and the who is clear, you can get to the what. What experience do I want to give to each of these groups that I identified? The experience to the audience. And this is the piece that is I would spend the most time on because you're actually not pricing your product. You're not. You're pricing the experience. That's the one big takeaway I want to also give everybody. How do they get configured? into it? Training. How do they get supported around it? It's not just a list of features. It's that experience you're trying to price. And if you solve for those pieces, you can have and craft one experience for each of these with the right value drivers and then you now you start the makings of a pricing model or structure. Then you get into Now, we get into the how. Right? So, we did all this work first, the why, the who. Let's make sure we got the what right. We did all that work first just to get to the how. Now, the how is so much easier. So much easier cuz now you understand what experiences you're trying to price, the willingness to pay for that experience, why it's important for you to monetize it. You bring you connect the dots backwards and that's how you figure out your pricing and packaging. So, how your go-to-market matters because you have to tie it with whether you're PLG, whether you're a sales-led enterprise. We have to make sure you again, the metrics are there that you're charging for, per invoice, per channel, per call, whatever that is. And your price levels are within market ranges. Then the final one is the which. Which part of my pricing is working and which part is not. And that's that iterative nature you have to keep on going back and challenging your assumptions. So, you need an owner and you need to make sure that Well, let me ask Does anyone here know who the owner of their pricing and packaging is? Does anyone know I should see a lot more hands here. Generally speaking, at your stage it should be you, right? Um if you have an owner and you have a north star, meaning what metrics am I really driving towards? Uh $500 of subscription per user, uh 10 million downloads. I mean, whatever it is you're trying to go after, that's the metric that as you make changes to your pricing and packaging should get you closer. Somebody has to own it and has to have a target. If they don't, then you're kind of making changes in the wind and not sure what's going to happen. All right? So, you can see the way this works here is a very methodical approach. You solve one before the other. But there's one last piece to this.

### [25:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JUB5t1SuIMo&t=1500s) Segment 6 (25:00 - 30:00)

There's one last piece. Is you always want to address the step before the area you think you have a problem. Let me give you an example. If you think your problem is the what, my packaging, the experience is off, don't focus on the what, focus on the who. If you're think your segmentation is off, don't focus on the who, focus on the why. The reason why I say is start a step ahead is to make sure that those areas are clear before moving on to the next phase. So, start a step ahead. This is a bit of a backwards approach, but it actually is far more effective in driving those behaviors that build pricing power over time. Cool? Makes that sense? Yes? Excellent. So, that's the framework. Now, let me give you an example. So, everybody here are familiar with Calendly, the scheduling tool? Okay. So, I did their pricing back in 2020. And so, Tope reached out to me and he said, "Hey, um we're having a tough time moving up market. I think we need to relook at our pricing and packaging. " So, all right, cool. So, got together with uh Tope and the Calendly team, great group of folks. And went ahead and started breaking down the pricing and packaging and realizing some interesting issues. And so, I said to Tope, "Well, back when you guys started in 2015, what was the goal? What were you trying to do? " His why was very simple. He's like, "Marcos, when we started, I didn't really care about trying to monetize every penny. I wanted to get Calendly in the hands of as many people as possible. My goal was full-on penetration of the market, get saturation, just get everybody using Calendly as much as I could. Was not really interested in making a lot of money. So, when you look at their 2015 pricing, and I know it looks a little funny cuz I used the Wayback Machine. I went like way back. So, this is the best picture I can get of it. They had two plans. Free and premium. That's it. Super simple, early days. And you can see here, it's eight bucks a month, right? I asked him, "So, where did you get the eight bucks from? Like, just curious. Like, how did that" He said, "No, I talked to a bunch of people and I asked them what would be a fair price and I got ranges all over the place. And then what I did was I started testing prices. " He said five, six, seven. And he said around eight seemed to be a good area where nobody really pushed back. It was less, you know, uh less than a cocktail, you know, back then. It was no big deal. And so, he was able to you know, just use some gorilla tactics talking to a bunch of customers and figuring out what range seemed to be fair, not optimal, just fair. Right? It was what he was after. And then what he did was he said, "I fence on event types because I thought that people who wanted different types of meetings, like real estate folks or folks that really wanted to use the tool, would be willing to pay more. So, I fence on event type. " So, he talked to a bunch of customers and he goes, "Great. So, my why, I just want as much as I much penetration, as many people using uh Calendly as possible. My who, we're entrepreneurs, personal and business. They tend to need to just one type of meeting. Great. Your what? " He went ahead and said, "You know what? I'm giving everybody an easy super viral way to get in here, right? You click on the link, you book a meeting with someone and right below is your ability to click right in and become a Calendly member once you accept. Super slick, super viral. " And that's what he really drove. The premium was only for those what he called uh prosumers, which were these small businesses, five people-ish or less that he really wanted to start monetizing later. Super clear why, who and what. His how, very clearly again, came in at the eight bucks. He chose per seat because he was debating, should I charge per calendar or person? And he ended up going with per person because it just was easier to relate with, made sense. A lot of people had just one calendar. There were people out there with multiple calendars, but those weren't his target primary audience because of the segmentation he did. So, one person, one calendar, easy to understand. I'm charging per person, less than two digits, eight bucks. Let's do this. And that's how we came up with that. It tied very well with his viral track as well. And then finally, the which, which part of my pricing is working? This is where he started adding the notifications. He started adding features. He started realizing like, uh-oh, some people aren't actually using this stuff. And he started running into problems. So, this pricing worked super well in the early days and his he connected all those dots from the why all the way through the which. But then something started happening. He started growing and SMBs and businesses started coming in and using Calendly and this is uh what led him to call me eventually a few years later. So, what did they end up doing? Right? They started off, again, two plans, just one fence, keep it easy, keep it familiar, low friction with high conviction. He did all those things. And now, this is I just took this from the other day. So, the perfect plan for your team. Notice that, right? So, he was starting off with that really small

### [30:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JUB5t1SuIMo&t=1800s) Segment 7 (30:00 - 35:00)

personal or single business and then the four to five prosumers. Now, it was small teams and SMB and mid-size companies. So, he shifted his target up and that was the new main target. You can even see his teams is the recommended plan. He still has the free, by the way. And if you look, the free hasn't really changed that much from 10 years ago. It's still the same one with the one event type. He just added a few extra features in there to grab a little more stickiness. And then the standard plan is what's called a bridge plan, which kind of pulls people into the paid world and then he's using that to drive further up into teams and even to enterprise. And you can see a very almost like disjointed jump from 16 bucks to like $15,000. Um he didn't take my advice. I actually wanted to discolor it. I put that on a different page. But either way, the point was is that now he's tackling different personas. Remember that whole solo Steve to thriving Thea and he's driving different experiences for each one within Calendly. Right? So, he's driving this 5Q all the way through, but it changes over time, which is why you have to keep revisiting and connecting those dots as your business changes. Okay? So, that's clear example of how Calendly did applied 5Q. Cool? Excellent. So, never too early for pricing and packaging. Think about it. Again, you don't need to spend, you know, again, a million dollars or 6 months. Just grab a cup of coffee or a glass of wine, spend a few hours on a Saturday. That's what I'm asking. Right? Think about it there. Narrative before the numbers. Know what you're trying to do before you develop the model. Know what you're doing. Now, focus in on those customers. What experience do they need? And then price that. That's the way to go about it through that angle. And then connect the dots and then iterate from there. The dots will move. That's what entrepreneurship and being a founder's all about. So, keep on it and keep connecting over time. All right? So, that's 5Q framework. Helpful so far? Yes, I see nods. Perfect. So, I have a bonus mistake. mistake, right? I have to go I have to give a nod to the Super Bowl and everything just happened here. The bonus mistake that entrepreneurs make with pricing is they do nothing. You just I just gave you a bunch of tools, a bunch of angles, a bunch of things to think about and I am deathly afraid that you will go back and do nothing. Right? Don't be like that guy. So, I want you to make sure you do something. So, let me give you a couple tools to help motivate you to be able to change your pricing. I want you to make money and DM me on LinkedIn, not in a creepy way. Just DM me on LinkedIn and tell me I made some money. Okay? Cool. Here's what we're doing. Let's get the ball rolling. First, there's context all around you. Context around how they try and buy and how they stay and pay. Just think about it in those two buckets. Try and buy, stay and pay. You don't need a 100K survey or anything like that to get this kind of information. And I highlighted in orange to kind of the few ones that I noticed that around this stage tends to be a really nice um golden nugget of information. Right? Early adopter programs and feedback on new features. You probably do have customers that are willing to try out your new stuff. Talk to them about it. What's fair to be a premium premium? What's fair that you should include in every single plan? Just ask them simple questions. Sales demos, if you're maybe a little more on the five, six figure side or you're selling bigger products. Demos. What actually drove their trigger or willingness to buy it? What do they like? What do they not like? Don't forget to ask for the negative as well. It's okay. That's feedback. Usage and satisfaction. More and more modern platforms, at least today, really are do well at tracking usage, volumes, frequencies. How often are they doing something? How many different somethings are they doing? And start to drive some correlations from there. A customer advisory board. So, customer advisory board, this is something that is a extension of your beta or early adopter program. So, this is a small group of customers that just want to see you win. I know you all have them. Everybody has a few good customers. You get happy when you're on the phone with them. They smile. They want to see you win. Grab a handful of those and use those guys for feedback. Hey, I'm thinking about this bundle. a new structure. Get them to give you feedback. They would love to do it. And then support cases. This sounds weird on the bottom. But those that call care. They use your product. They're calling because they're trying to resolve an issue. If you're able to help them and resolve them, they're happy and on their way. But look at those cases. What are they asking for? What's blocking them? How are they using your product? Maybe in ways that you probably haven't expected. And there could be some a value to unlock. All right? So, those four There's a bunch of others, but those four I wanted to key in on because at this stage, these are things you can probably grab on Monday from a simple report or data pool.

### [35:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JUB5t1SuIMo&t=2100s) Segment 8 (35:00 - 40:00)

Cool? So, that's the context. Let's grab some context. Put the context in motion. I call this the countdown. 5 4 3 2 1. Talk to five customers. Just talk to them. What do you love? What do you not love? Why'd you buy this thing? What else do you use beside it? If you guys want a script, just hit me up. I'll give you a script. Four sales interviews. Could be sales or partners. Win, loss, doesn't matter. Just try to get some context as to why you're winning and losing. Three competitor reviews. Typically somebody down market, up market or at your same level. Doesn't matter. Just pick three and look at how they're going out to market, messaging, potentially positioning against you, things like that. This was the tough one. Two years of data. And it could be 2 years of sales data. Most of us have been in business for, I would say, 2 years plus. If not, then just get what you have. That's fine. And just start looking at the patterns and trends of your price points, your units, unit economics, how's it changing? And then 1 year value roadmap. And what I mean by 1 year, it's not 12 months in the future. It's actually 6 months back and 6 months forward. What value have you delivered that you're probably not monetizing right now? And what value is coming up in the next 6 months? Look at it from that angle. If you do this countdown 5 4 3 2 1, take that context on the previous slide, grab some wine and on Saturday, you could start thinking and shaping your new pricing. Make sense? There's more. Couple formulas here for you. I know that some of you love formulas, so I have to put a few in here. So, the first one is a framework I have called REAL. R E A L. And REAL stands for revenue, expense, avoidance, and lift. When you're driving value and especially in B2B, it's really about how much revenue you're making me, expense are you taking down, how much risk or new expense am I avoiding, and how much work is it going to take on me to get this value? Okay? So, I have a worksheet on this, too, if you want to hit me up. But the point is calculate the revenue, calculate the expense that you're saving, calculate how much you're risk you're avoiding, and there's a probability in there, and then subtract the lift, which is the amount of time it takes for them to get to value. The more time it takes to get to value, the less of it you can capture. Let me say that one more time. The faster they get to value, the more of it you can capture. So, if any of you in here have worked on your customer success and made it super quick to adopt a product or super quick to value, and you didn't really look at your pricing, there's an opportunity for you. Right? So, plug it into this formula. And I have another formula. Take that number and divide by this. And this is the general value exchange that we've seen. We looked at 400 different companies. We looked at the value exchange. What are they paying versus the value they claim to get. And we got some of these multiples out. All right? And you notice something interesting when you see this. Why are the ROI returns bigger for SMB than they are with enterprise? It shouldn't it be the other way around? But think about an SMB buyer and the value of that dollar to spend on your software or to hire another engineer or to do something else. Right? That opportunity cost is so high at that stage. Their sensitivity is higher. And I know you felt it, right? Smaller customers can sometimes just be more budget conscious. Bigger customers, yep. Yeah, we're spending a lot of money in a lot of places, right? But the point here is that you take your real value, the revenue, the avoidance, the expense, the stack lift. That's the net value impact you have on the company. Divide by this number, 15, 10, or 5x. And that gets you a ballpark price. All right? Take the number, add it up, and then divide by this. Gets you a ballpark price. And then you can use that to start testing, start talking to your customers, and start comparing with the data. Cool? I just gave you a formula to figure out your price. I can see the excitement. All right. So, do those things. That'll get you pretty far. I want to give you one more, which is what do you measure? So, what like what actual things do we have in place to measure? And the key here is you want to measure across the lifecycle. So, you have acquisition, expansion, and retention, right? Normal for any subscription based or SaaS company. I have these nine dimensions in the middle. So, you make sure you could slice by product, slice by segment, slice by size. And then you have your measures at the end. These are the metrics of things you should be calculating and capturing. All right, And you could slice. And the point about this is yes, I can blow this up to like a hundred different metrics, but start here just so you can understand in these different areas of acquisition, expansion, and retention, and then you can build from there. Heck, even start with one metric in each bucket. That's okay. As long as we start and you can build up. But now you can

### [40:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JUB5t1SuIMo&t=2400s) Segment 9 (40:00 - 42:00)

see if you're getting closer or farther from the goal. Okay? So, how do we take it forward? Collect the contacts that you have off the shelf. Don't need to manufacture anything. Just look at that try and buy and that stay and pay I just showed you. Grab a couple things, support cases, talk to somebody. Go start from there. Apply it on the countdown. 5-4-3-2-1. Five customers, four sales, three competitors, two years of data, and one year roadmap. And then you want to calculate the price with the real cash formulas. Again, if I have worksheets for all this stuff. If you want to reach out to me, I'll give them to you. Free. It's all good. Uh do that and then you want to measure and adjust uh at least every 90 days, maybe even quicker for those that have super fast sales cycles. Cool? You do that, you'll be on your way to pricing power. Sound good? I see the wheels turning. I see it. Excellent. So, in closing, I did want to make sure that I gave you some value. So, I promised you I would show you those five stupid mistakes. I promised that I will give you some steps to build your pricing power and some tools to actually go and do it. Did I meet my promise? Excellent. I'm going to give you guys one more thing. So, as I close here, I want to make sure that I can give you something tangible. All right, so there's a QR code here. If you take a picture of that QR code, it's going to take you to a scorecard. This is a 5-minute scorecard you fill out. There's four sections to it, 5 minutes, and it gives you a pricing index score at the end of it. And it tells you where your pricing probably needs a tune-up or where there's something that isn't quite driving. And it actually gives you a 30-day plan and a 90-day plan. So, built this stuff. Took me freaking two years to build it, but I built it. So, go in, punch in your stuff, and then see where your score is and see where you need to focus. You take that, everything I just gave you, you now have enough to increase your pricing power. —

---
*Источник: https://ekstraktznaniy.ru/video/50697*