Pricing
Ground Truth.
Where the pricing leaks, discipline drift, and licensing-metric mismatches in your transactions become visible — read with a pricing architect.
Pricing Ground Truth is SPP’s entry-point paid engagement. LevelSetter surfaces the pricing leaks, packaging boundary errors, and architecture-layer patterns living inside your transactions — read against SPP’s corpus of thousands of B2B software companies, the same day you connect, alongside a pricing architecture expert. Your transactions go in. Structural answers come out.
Most pricing diagnostics deliver somebody else’s opinion in a slide deck, untethered from your salespeople and customer behavior. Pricing Ground Truth pairs LevelSetter’s pattern matching with a pricing architecture expert — surfacing problems and opportunities the day you ingest, instead of a consulting team.
Won deals, lost deals, every line item, the whole record. Your team sees the patterns. The architect tells you what they mean, where the leverage sits, and what to fix first.
analyzed.
day
visibility.
or stay
baked in.
Pricing diagnostics fail the same way every time — framework, recommendations, slide deck, none of it grounded in the pricing leaks, discipline drift, and architecture-layer patterns your transactions actually carry.
Pricing Ground Truth flips the order. Transactions first, read through SPP’s framework against thousands of B2B software companies in the SPP corpus — interpretation no general-purpose LLM can replicate.
Chris Mele
Ranked #1 on OpenView’s list of B2B SaaS pricing experts. Chris leads every Pricing Ground Truth engagement, surrounded by a team that has held CFO, CPO, and CIO seats inside software companies. You get the pricing architect — not their associate.
LevelSetter does the heavy lifting on data ingest and pattern surfacing. The expert focuses on the calls only humans can make: what the patterns mean, what to fix first, how to scope the next step.
Read more about Chris →Three things that
change the engagement.
Same-day
reveal
You connect your sales system to LevelSetter. Your transactions go in. Pricing leaks, packaging boundary errors, and licensing-metric mismatches come out — surfaced against the SPP corpus the day your data lands. Not three weeks later. Not after a discovery sprint. The day you connect. No boutique pricing firm without comparable data infrastructure can match same-day visibility.
Teamed with
a pricing architect
Pricing architecture issues surface in LevelSetter — alongside the quantified upside of fixing each one. A pricing architecture expert reads the patterns with you: what they mean, where the biggest leverage sits, what to fix first. Your team is not asked to trust a framework in the abstract. Your team sees the truth in their own data, validated by someone who has been inside this problem before.
Walk or
continue
The engagement is structured with the exit ramp built in. Once the truth is surfaced, you can act on it independently. Take what you saw, use it inside your company, apply it to your next quarter. If what surfaced justifies deeper work, you continue. Both endings are designed in.
What you see when
the data lands.
Ground Truth surfaces pricing leaks across all three architecture axes — Licensing (metric drift, edition sprawl), Offering (packaging boundary leaks, capability bundling errors), Pricing (discount discipline drift, customer-mix mispricing) — simultaneously. The signals live in your transactions; LevelSetter reads them through the architecture lens; the expert tells you what they mean.
LIVES BELOW THE LINE.
← scroll to view full chart →
Licensing
Is your value metric capturing value? Are customers consuming far more (or far less) than the metric reflects? Are won deals carrying expansion potential the licensing structure will not capture? Is the meter pricing-in customer pain that is structurally invisible to your billing? You also see licensing-type sprawl, where the team invented variants per customer because the underlying structure could not anticipate the deals being closed.
Offering
Edition-mix patterns across won deals reveal which editions are doing the work, which are competitive shelfware, and which feature gates create buyer friction. The SKU-structure simplification opportunity surfaces directly from line-item evidence. Excess SKUs that never appear in won deals. SKUs that drive negotiation cycles disproportionate to their revenue. Cases where reps quietly stopped using the published package because the math broke under deal pressure.
Pricing
The real discounting picture with nuance, not “you discount too much on average.” Across deal size, customer group, sales rep, product line, and time. The discounts taken at quarter-end. The discounts taken to close named accounts. The discounts compounded on multi-product deals. You see pricebook structural problems, including what is missing. Where the published pricebook fails to anticipate the deal shape your reps encounter.
Cross-axis
patterns
Quantified upside from fixing the architecture, scored against your historical transactions. Not directional. Systemic patterns in sales and customer behavior: seasonality, end-of-quarter timing, cohorts behaving differently. Multi-year trends in discount discipline drift and customer-group mix shift. Drill-down by any dimension you bring: currency, channel, geography, vertical, customer segment, product line. Your team configures the slices that matter to your operating model.
Curious what your own iceberg looks like? Twenty minutes scopes the engagement against your transaction record.
Schedule an orientationThe engagement,
in four steps.
Free orientation
call (20 min)
We confirm fit. You leave the call knowing whether Pricing Ground Truth is the right next step and what data we need from your side. No prep required.
LevelSetter portal
provisioned
Your team gets accounts. We connect your sales system. The data-ingest pipeline runs against your transaction record — won and lost, line items, last twelve to twenty-four months — plus any pricebook, contract-amendment, and renewal-history data you can surface.
Same-day reveal,
expert-led
Once ingest completes, the patterns are visible in LevelSetter that day. A pricing architecture expert walks you through what the data shows, what it means, and where the leverage sits. Your team drills down into the dimensions that matter to your business.
Walk or
continue
You decide. The Ground Truth read is yours regardless of what comes next. If the data justifies deeper work, the next tier is a full Pricing Architecture engagement scoped to the specific axes Ground Truth surfaced.
Engage at the depth
your data supports.
Pricing Ground Truth adapts to your transaction record’s state on day one. If your data needs cleanup, you can correct at your pace and engage the expert when you’re ready — the engagement runs on your timeline, not ours.
Quick read
When. Day one, even when the transaction record still has gaps.
What surfaces. The first-order pricing leaks and the highest-leverage architecture axis to fix.
Output. Direction. Where your team focuses correction work next.
Comprehensive read
When. After your team has corrected gaps and re-ingested.
What surfaces. Every cross-axis pattern. Architecture-layer signals across Licensing × Offering × Pricing.
Output. Quantified upside per lever. Specific architecture recommendations.
LevelSetter performs dozens of automated integrity checks for the data issues common to B2B software companies — so normalization is rapid rather than a months-long blocker. You aren’t stuck cleaning the record before the expert can engage; you can read the data with the expert as you clean it.
Who Pricing Ground
Truth is for.
Right fit when
- Transaction depth. Twelve+ months in your sales system, ideally twenty-four — won and lost, line items intact.
- External validation needed. You’ve done internal pricing work but want external evidence grounded in your own transactions, not a framework conversation.
- Considering a metric shift. Per-seat to usage, consumption, or outcome-aligned — and you need to model the impact against your own won-and-lost history before committing.
- Architecture suspicion. You suspect something’s broken but can’t tell where, or your internal analysis says one thing while the discount, sales-cycle, or renewal data tells a different story.
- Speed matters. You want the truth this week, not next quarter.
Probably not a fit if
- Pre-revenue or pre-launch. Nothing to ingest yet — a 20-minute pricing call can scope a different starting point.
- You want a framework lecture, not a working session.
- You want benchmarks that average everyone and explain no one.
- You want the senior partner in the pitch and you’re OK with a junior associate running the actual workstream.
Yours to keep,
regardless of what’s next.
LevelSetter visibility
LevelSetter view of your own transaction-level monetization architecture in operation through the engagement window, with the option to continue access if you continue with SPP.
Quantified upside
A quantified read of the dollar opportunity in fixing the broken architecture, scored against your historical transactions. Not directional. Dollarized.
Specific insights
Specific insights from a pricing architecture expert anchored in what your transactions revealed — pricing leaks, discipline drift, and architecture-layer patterns called out individually across Licensing, Offering, and Pricing. Yours to act on independently.
Team-owned drill-down
Your team can drill down further independently because the deliverable is software access, not a slide deck. Yours to revisit when business conditions change.
Pricing architecture
built from the data.
$300M+
When SPP redesigned BambooHR’s architecture (packaging, pricing, and discount guardrails around customer groups identified through usage analysis) their CRO raised the sales forecast 15% month over month during rollout, and they beat plan for 18 consecutive months. BambooHR has since grown past $300M ARR — without needing another round of outside funding after our engagement.
Frequently asked questions
The fastest way to see your own pricing truth.
Twenty-minute orientation. Few days of ingest. Same-day reveal.
Not a sales claim — the engagement structure. Your transactions read against SPP’s corpus, alongside a pricing architect, with a walk-or-continue exit ramp baked in.