Pre-Shock
Read.
See your future state before you ship the change: every historical deal re-run under your proposed pricing, read with a pricing architect.
Pre-Shock Read is SPP’s forward-looking engagement, powered by LevelSetter’s Pricing Architecture Roll-forward. The same deal-level reveal as Pricing Ground Truth, projected forward: your transactions and your proposed model go in, the customer-by-customer future state comes out, read the same day alongside a pricing architecture expert.
Most pricing changes are approved on a blended model: an average uplift, a projected curve, a sensitivity table. Pre-Shock Read replaces the average with the actual base. LevelSetter re-runs every historical deal under the proposed architecture, so the approval conversation starts from what each account will actually pay.
Won deals, lost deals, every line item, priced twice: once as history, once under the model you plan to ship. Your team sees the differential. The architect tells you what it means, which accounts need a designed path, and whether the model is ready.
deal patterns.
forward read.
is still open.
A pricing change is modeled on blended averages and announced to named accounts. The spreadsheet spreads the increase across the base; each customer experiences only their own line. The gap between those two views is where launches break.
Pre-Shock Read prices the change customer by customer, while the design can still be adjusted.
Chris Mele
Ranked #1 on OpenView’s list of B2B SaaS pricing experts. Chris leads every Pre-Shock Read engagement, surrounded by a team that has held CFO, CPO, and CIO seats inside software companies. The pricing architect runs your engagement, not an associate.
LevelSetter does the heavy lifting on ingestion and the re-run. The expert focuses on the calls only humans can make: what the impact means, which accounts need protecting, whether the model is ready to ship.
Read more about Chris →The same reveal as Ground Truth,
pointed forward.
Pricing Ground Truth reads the pricing you have already shipped. Pre-Shock Read prices the change you have not shipped yet. The ingestion, the pattern library, and the expert in the room carry over; the direction of the question flips.
Same-day
forward read
You connect your sales system to LevelSetter, the same ingestion as Pricing Ground Truth, and hand over the proposed model. Every historical deal is re-run under the proposed architecture the day the inputs land. No modeling sprint, no interview phase.
Read with a
pricing architect
The impact lands as a landscape: who pays more, who pays less, where revenue concentrates, where it leaks. A pricing architecture expert reads it with you and names which of the three decisions is driving each shift. Your team sees the future state in its own accounts, guided by someone who has priced this kind of change before.
Ship, fix,
or hold
The read ends in a decision with evidence attached: ship as designed, fix the specific axis producing the damage, or hold with a named reason. The optional optimization pass adds an SPP-adjusted variant of your model, re-run beside the original for a side-by-side comparison.
Two inputs,
four steps.
Connect the deal record
Won and lost deals from your sales system, line items intact, twelve or more months of history. The same pipeline that powers Pricing Ground Truth; if you have already run Ground Truth, this step is done.
Hand over the proposed model
The candidate architecture in whatever shape it exists: a rate card, packaging rules, value-metric definitions, discount governance, or the recommendation an outside firm delivered in slides. The intake does not require a finished pricebook.
LevelSetter re-runs every deal
The Pricing Architecture Roll-forward recasts your entire historical record under the proposed model and computes the differential each account would face, sliced by any dimension you brought: vertical, geography, channel, customer group, product line, deal size, tenure.
Read it with the architect
A pricing architecture expert walks the landscape with your team: where the model performs, where it damages accounts you need, and what the fix looks like on the axis that is causing it.
Have a model on the table? Twenty minutes scopes the read against your deal record and your proposed design.
Schedule a Pre-Shock orientationThe hardest pricing change is not a new price level. It is a new value metric. Pre-Shock Read swaps the metric live, in the working session, so the riskiest move in pricing gets simulated before anyone commits to it.
How the swap runs.
The swap happens in the room
Combine usage, billing, or win/loss deal data with your deal record, and LevelSetter swaps the candidate metric in live. The result is simulated on the spot instead of promised in a follow-up deck, and the next candidate metric can be swapped in the same session.
Simulated backward and forward
Historically, the swap shows what every existing customer’s spend would have looked like under the new metric, the backbone of a customer transition plan. Forward, it projects the same swap onto your growth assumptions, so the forecast under the new metric is a number your CFO can defend rather than a modeled guess.
Three ways companies
arrive here.
Designing the change internally
Your pricing, finance, or product team drafted the new model, and the exec room wants more than an internal spreadsheet before approving it. The re-run gives the recommendation an external evidence base built from your own record, calibrated against the SPP pattern library.
Handed a recommendation in slides
A strategy firm delivered the direction. The strategy holds the why; the re-run supplies the what-happens. Pre-Shock Read prices that recommendation against your actual deal record, account by account, before you commit the installed base to it. The work complements the strategy engagement rather than re-litigating it.
Already shipped, absorbing the reaction
The change is live and the support queue is warming up. The same re-run works as triage: which accounts were hit hardest, what portion of the reaction is architectural, and what to adjust versus hold. The earlier it runs, the more options stay open.
Who Pre-Shock
Read is for.
Right fit when
- A candidate model exists. An internal draft, a rate card in a spreadsheet, or an outside recommendation. The re-run needs a proposed architecture to price.
- Transaction depth. Twelve or more months in your sales system, won and lost, line items intact. Twenty-four is better.
- The decision is expensive to get wrong. Board-level approval, a PE sponsor watching, or a large installed base that will carry the change.
- The value metric is moving. Per-seat to usage, consumption, or outcome-aligned structures change what every existing customer pays. That impact deserves to be priced before it is announced.
Probably not a fit if
- No candidate model yet. If the question is still what is wrong with the pricing you have, Pricing Ground Truth is the right first rung: the backward read that establishes the baseline.
- Pre-revenue or pre-launch. Nothing to re-run yet. The free Pricing Architecture Assessment scores the design itself in four minutes.
- Looking for a market study. The read runs on your own transactions and pattern-matches against the SPP library. It does not price competitors or survey a market.
Yours to keep,
whichever way you decide.
Customer-by-customer revenue impact
Every historical deal, re-priced under the proposed architecture. You see which accounts pay more, which pay less, and by how much, at line-item resolution rather than blended averages.
A forecast against your real customer mix
A revenue projection built from your actual accounts and their actual buying shapes. The forecast the board sees is grounded in the record, with the assumptions visible.
A customer-transition map
Which accounts move cleanly to the new structure, which need a designed path, and which the new packaging does not yet accommodate. Rollout sequencing follows from the map, not from a cutover date.
The architectural read
Which of the three decisions is producing each shift: the value metric, the packaging, or the price level, with the fix named on that axis and stress-tested against the SPP pattern library.
Price shocks are
a public pattern now.
The last two years produced a running public catalog of pricing changes that shipped as modeled and landed as customer shocks: AI metering resets, credit-model conversions, consumption cutovers. Our usage-based pricing backfire field guide documents the pattern and the architecture failures underneath it. Every one of those launches had a deal record that could have priced the change first.
Backward read,
forward read.
Pricing Ground Truth
The backward read. Your shipped pricing, revealed in your own deal patterns: leaks, drift, metric mismatches, and the quantified upside of fixing each. The natural first rung when no candidate model exists yet.
Pre-Shock Read
The forward read. Your proposed pricing, priced against the same record before it ships. If the read justifies a rebuild, the work continues into a full pricing architecture engagement. If it does not, you ship with evidence. Both endings are designed in.