B2B SaaS Is Winging It On Pricing

Asked about their biggest pricing mistake, more leaders named underpricing and raising prices too late than any other category. The fear of charging too much isn't supported by the data. One VP GM of Product Management at a mid-market SaaS company captured it: "Not pricing for enterprise buyers high enough thinking we didn't provide enough value. Fixing that allowed us to both increase price and convert at a much higher and faster rate." Read that twice. Raising prices increased conversion, not the other way around. Price is a signal. A cheap price says commodity, negotiate me down. A confident price says we know what this is worth.

62% of companies named a cross-functional committee or some ad-hoc combination of roles as their pricing owner. The CEO, VP Product, and CFO each own it at under 15% of companies. When pricing is everyone's job, it's nobody's job. Find a B2B SaaS company with great pricing and you'll find one person who owns it. Find one with mediocre pricing and you'll find a committee. The companies in this sample with the cleanest pricing stories had one common trait: a single accountable owner.

Only 22% of leaders do anything that qualifies as rigorous pricing research (A/B tests, conjoint, willingness-to-pay studies). 62% either don't test at all or just ask a handful of friendly customers. One VP of Product Development at an enterprise SaaS company was painfully honest: "We haven't had the time/resources to run tests. We have been aware that we are not pricing optimally but haven't really known how to improve. It is painful for us." The data leaders wish they had is the data they could collect. They simply don't.

Only 10% of companies are fully transparent about pricing. The reasons for hiding cluster around three anxieties: competitors seeing prices, complexity in pricing structure, and heavy discounting that makes list price fiction. Each one is a tell. If competitors can weaponize your pricing, your positioning isn't strong enough. If your pricing is too complex to publish, your buyer thinks it's complex too and deals die in procurement. If you discount so heavily that list price is fiction, you've trained every AE to cave and every buyer to push harder.

Only 10% of leaders said competitor pricing barely or doesn't influence their own. Everyone else is calibrating to someone else's number. The problem with competitor-anchored pricing is that it's a closed loop. If three competitors look at each other and adjust, they converge on the same number. And that number, as the rest of this data shows, is almost certainly wrong. Competitor pricing is information, not strategy. 90% of B2B SaaS treats it as both. This is exactly how the entire category ends up underpriced together.