Pricing interviews.
What your buyers weighed, what your sellers concede, and what each of your executives believes the product is sold on.
Your transaction record holds the outcome of every negotiation your company has ever run. It holds almost none of the reasoning. Why the buyer chose the edition they chose, what they were weighing it against, which concession ended the argument, and whether the value they expected ever arrived: none of that survives in a CRM field.
Pricing interviews put the reasoning on the record. We interview your executives, your sellers, your customers, and your competitors’ customers, with every conversation run as disclosed market research, in the interviewee’s own language. The findings are read against your deal record before a single architecture decision gets made.
inside one engagement.
never through a translator.
behind the pattern library.
A pricing team reading only its own transactions is reading the scoreboard of a game nobody watched. The deals that closed are all there. The reasons they closed at that number, in that package, on that metric sit in the heads of the people who were in the room and the people on the other side of the table.
Interviews are how that reasoning gets on the record, in language specific enough to design against.
Four populations.
Each holds something the other three cannot.
The interview set is deliberately wider than customer research, because pricing problems rarely sit in one population. When five executives are asked what the product is sold on and five different answers come back, the disagreement is already a finding. It shows up a year later as a value metric nobody can defend in a negotiation and a pricebook the field has stopped quoting.
So all four populations run inside the same engagement and get read against each other. Where your sellers and your customers describe the same deal differently, that gap is where the design work starts.
Your executives
What leadership believes the company sells, and where they disagree with each other about it. Disagreement at the top propagates downward into packaging that contradicts itself and a discount policy renegotiated in every deal.
Your sellers
What happens in the room when price comes up. What the rep gives away first, which objection ends the conversation, and which part of the pricebook they have stopped putting in front of buyers at all. Where you record your calls, on Gong or a similar platform, we read the recordings as well, so the pattern comes from what was said on the call as much as from what the rep recalls.
Your customers
What they thought they were buying, what they use, and where the invoice surprises them. Renewal conversations expose the distance between the value story your team sells and the value your customers report receiving.
Your competitors’ customers
The alternatives they weighed, the deal they negotiated, and the verdict they reached on the money. This is the population the Real Deal framework is built around, and it runs under the same disclosure standard as the other three.
Chris Mele
Ranked #1 on OpenView’s list of B2B SaaS pricing experts. Chris runs the interview program on every engagement, alongside a senior team that has held CFO, CPO and CIO seats inside software companies and specialists who work to the SCIP code of ethics in the interviewee’s own language. The pricing architect is in the room with you, not an associate.
LevelSetter validates what the interviews surface against your transaction record at a scale no spreadsheet reaches, so the experts spend the engagement on the calls only humans can make.
Read more about Chris →Open identity.
Native language.
The interviewer says who they are. Identity, organization and the purpose of the call are disclosed at the top of every conversation. The interviewer never has to name the client we are working for, so your confidentiality and the disclosure standard hold at the same time. This is SPP’s own code of conduct and it governs all four populations, including the half of the work that reaches a competitor’s customers. The full standard, and what to demand of any firm you hire to do this work, lives on the competitive pricing analysis page.
The conversation happens in the interviewee’s language. Interviews run in seven native languages with no translator in the middle. Pricing is a high-context subject: the hesitation, the hedge, the qualifier a buyer puts in front of a number, and the exact words they reach for when they describe value carry as much information as the number itself. Those are the first things to decay in translation.
An extended, transparent conversation reaches things a disguised one structurally cannot. A buyer who knows who is asking and why will walk through the alternatives they weighed, what the seller flexed on, and whether the value arrived. That is why the standard holds on the competitive side of the work as well as the first-party side.
Where the interview record lands.
Interviews produce inputs to four architecture decisions. Every input gets read against what your transaction record independently says about the same question, so neither source is trusted on its own.
Candidate value metrics
Which units buyers accept as a fair basis for the bill, and which ones they will ration around. Interviews move the value metric decision more than any other input, because acceptability is something buyers can only tell you in their own words.
Customer Group boundaries
How value actually gets derived across your base, which is rarely the same shape as company size or vertical. The interviews name the candidate groups; the deal record tests whether the groups hold up.
Packaging boundaries
Where an edition line can land without stranding a capability buyers treat as table stakes. Sellers and customers routinely disagree about which capabilities those are, and mapping that disagreement is most of the work.
The value story sellers can defend
The language your customers used, handed back to the field. A value story assembled from customer phrasing gives the seller words the buyer has already accepted.
The interviews are human work and they stay human work. LevelSetter holds what they surface next to your transaction record, so every claim an interview makes can be tested against what the deals did, and so the record stays current as the next quarter of deals lands instead of going stale six months after a deck gets delivered.
Four questions to ask yourself first.
Ask yourself these four questions before you commission a single interview. They cost nothing and you can run all four this week. If the answers come back clean, your evidence base is in better shape than most. If one of them lands uncomfortably, describe it to a pricing expert and see what comes back.
Ask five executives what the product is sold on. Do you get one answer?
Five answers is a common result and a serious one. The architecture inherits whichever answer was loudest in the room the day packaging was drawn.
On the last deal your team discounted, what went first?
Whatever goes first is what the field believes has no defensible value. Find out whether anyone decided that on purpose.
Name a customer who would describe your value in the words on your pricing page.
If the name takes a while to surface, the pricing page is written in language the market has never confirmed.
On the last deal you lost, who else was on the shortlist?
Then ask where that answer came from. A rep’s account of the choice set and the buyer’s account of it are different things, and pricing built on the first one is pricing built against imaginary competition.
Frequently asked questions
Tell us the pricing decision you are closest to making.
Describe the problem in a few sentences and a pricing expert replies. If the evidence behind the decision is thinner than you would like, say so, and we will tell you who we would go and ask.
Would rather talk it through on a call? Book a working session.