Pricing
Ground Truth.
Where the pricing leaks, discipline drift, and licensing-metric mismatches in your deal patterns become visible, read with a pricing architect.
Pricing Ground Truth is for a B2B software company that wants to know what its pricing is really doing before it changes anything.
You send two exports: your price list and your closed deals. Once both are loaded into LevelSetter, the same day, a pricing architecture expert walks you through what you actually charge, where realized price leaks, and which of the three pricing decisions your upside depends on. You get a verdict and its priorities; the working model stays in your tenant.
A fixed fee, credited forward to whatever comes next.
deal patterns.
visibility.
baked in.
Your own numbers,
read the same day.
In your own LevelSetter tenant, the day your deal record is loaded: one figure for what the record supports, where it comes from by layer, and the floor under it.
LevelSetter · Pricing Ground Truth read on a demo tenant, where fixing the pricing is worth about $3M a year. Illustrative.
FIG 01
Pricing diagnostics fail the same way every time: framework, slide deck, recommendations, none grounded in your deals.
Pricing Ground Truth flips the order. Transactions first, read against patterns SPP has gleaned from $481B+ of deal patterns across thousands of B2B software companies: 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 himself, with a team that has held CEO, CFO, CMO, CPO and CIO seats inside software companies.
Read more about Chris →Start Pricing
Ground Truth.
A fixed fee, credited in full to whatever comes next. You send two files. You get your current state back the same day, measured from intake-complete, walked through with you in one session.
What you send
Your price list and your closed deals, exported as they are, customers coded. Intake is complete when both files are loaded and the LevelSetter integrity checks pass.
What comes back
A verdict and its priorities, walked through with you the same day in your LevelSetter tenant.
Name, email and company. The intake instructions come back by email, and the two files follow when your team is ready.
Rather talk it through first? Book a working session.
Three things that
change the engagement.
Same-day
reveal
Connect your sales system to LevelSetter and the pricing leaks, packaging boundary errors and licensing-metric mismatches come out the same day.
Teamed with
a pricing architect
A pricing architecture expert reads the patterns with you: what they mean, where the leverage is, what to fix first.
Walk or
continue
The exit ramp is built in. Act on what you saw, or continue into deeper work.
What you see when
the data lands.
Ground Truth reads pricing leaks across all three pricing-architecture axes at once: Licensing Metric (the unit you bind customers to), Packaging Boundary (how capabilities group into editions) and Price Level (list price to net price). Most drift originates in the Licensing Metric.
below the line.
Frameworks · Pricing matrix · Playbooks · Best practices · Recommendations · Slide deck · Maturity model
- licensing-metric mismatch
- licensing-type sprawl
- missed expansion potential
- packaging boundary errors
- edition shelfware
- true discounting picture
- discount drift across reps
- reps off-pricebook
- pricebook structural gaps
- discipline drift
- unrecognized Customer Groups
- Customer Group divergence
- customer behavior patterns
- sales behavior patterns
Licensing
Whether your value metric captures value: customers consuming far more, or far less, than it reflects; expansion the structure cannot capture; licensing-type sprawl.
Offering
Which editions do the work, which are shelfware, which feature gates create friction, and the SKUs that never appear in a won deal.
Pricing
The real discounting picture by deal size, customer group, rep, product line and time, and where the published pricebook fails to anticipate the deal shape your reps encounter.
Cross-axis
patterns
Seasonality, quarter-end timing, cohorts behaving differently, multi-year drift in discipline and mix. Drill down by any dimension you bring.
Twenty minutes scopes the engagement against your own deal record.
Schedule an orientationThe engagement,
in four steps.
Free orientation call (20 min)
We confirm fit and name the data we need.
LevelSetter portal provisioned
Your team gets accounts and we connect your sales system: won and lost, line items, twelve to twenty-four months.
Cleanup + self-serve explore
Patterns are visible in LevelSetter the moment data is loaded; your team explores while it cleans up.
Expert review, on your schedule
You schedule the expert session when your team is ready. It is yours regardless of what comes next.
Engage at the depth
your data supports.
Pricing Ground Truth adapts to the state of your deal record on day one.
Quick read
When. Day one, gaps and all. Output. Where correction goes next.
Comprehensive read
When. After the gaps are corrected. Output. Every cross-axis pattern, upside quantified.
Three ways to add the market and your customers, each credited forward:
Pricing Ground Truth with the competitor read
When. You know who you lose to and want their pricing read beside your own.
What surfaces. Live interviews with a cohort of each competitor’s customers: their pricing architecture, where it works and where it does not, and the net prices paid for software and services, set against your own deals.
Pricing Ground Truth with the customer conversations
When. The read names the Customer Groups where price and value have come apart, and you want to hear it from them before you redraw anything.
What surfaces. Structured conversations with four to six customers in each named group, about the value they get and the basis they pay on. No surveys, no willingness-to-pay questions. The read stays same day; the conversations run in the weeks after it.
Sized by the Customer Groups the read names, quoted with the read.
Second Opinion with the competitor read
When. You already have a model, in house, with AI or from another firm, and you want it checked against the market before you commit.
What surfaces. The verdict with ranked fixes from the Second Opinion, plus the competitor reads, priced per competitor and quoted with it.
Who Pricing Ground
Truth is for.
Right fit when
- Transaction depth. Twelve+ months, won and lost, line items intact.
- External validation needed. Evidence from your own transactions.
- Considering a metric shift. Modeled against your own won-and-lost history first.
- Architecture suspicion. Your analysis and your deal data disagree.
- Speed matters. You want the truth this week.
Probably not a fit if
- Pre-revenue or pre-launch. A 20-minute pricing call can scope a different starting point.
- You want a framework lecture rather than a working session.
- You want benchmarks that average everyone and explain no one.
- You want the senior partner in the pitch and a junior associate running the work.
Five scenarios route into the same diagnostic:
- In a pricing crisis: the symptoms in your deal patterns, not the slide deck.
- Comparing pricing consultants: why same-day data beats slide-deck strategy.
- PE or VC running portfolio analysis: reading one portco vs. cascading the lens.
- Repackaging your offer: the cohorts the new packaging will actually hit.
- Moving from per-seat to consumption: the metric-transition baseline read.
For a PE operating partner, Pricing Ground Truth runs inside the deal and across the portfolio. The investor page has both.
Yours to keep,
regardless of what’s next.
LevelSetter visibility
A LevelSetter view of your own monetization architecture, exportable and permanently yours.
Quantified upside
The dollar opportunity in fixing the architecture, scored against your transactions.
Specific insights
The expert’s findings across Licensing Metric, Packaging Boundary and Price Level, yours to act on.
Team-owned drill-down
Software access, so your team keeps drilling down when conditions change.
Pricing architecture
built from the data.
$300M+
After SPP redesigned BambooHR’s pricing architecture, their CRO raised the sales forecast 15% month over month during rollout and they beat plan for 18 consecutive months.
Start with your own numbers. A fixed fee of $15,000, credited in full to whatever comes next.
Start Pricing Ground Truth Or talk it through first