For marketing leaders.
Your positioning says outcomes. Your pricing meters credits. That mismatch costs deals before marketing ever gets attribution. We align packaging, metric, and positioning so the buyer hears one story.
SPP redesigns the value metric to match what marketing is already saying about outcomes. Packaging boundaries get redrawn so tiers correspond to customer segments marketing actually addresses. Pricing pages become conversion assets instead of drop-off points.
Pricing becomes a living part of marketing’s toolkit via LevelSetter. Changes to packaging cascade into website, pricing page, sales enablement, and campaign copy without marketing doing the coordination manually. Positioning and pricing stay in sync by design.
Former B2B software CEO — built an angel-backed company ($13M raised) recognized as an Intuit Top 10 Developer. Business of Software keynote speaker. Hired SPP as a client in 2008. Joined the firm in 2013 and built LevelSetter from the problems he’d lived firsthand.
not discount.
not the assumption.
one source of truth.
The website talks transformation. The pricing page talks credits. Buyers hear two stories and walk away from the second one. Your pricing page is the conversion blocker.
When positioning and pricing diverge.
Positioning and pricing
tell different stories
Your website talks about transformation outcomes. Your pricing page talks about seats. Buyers get whiplash between the promise and the purchase. Deals stall at procurement because the story changes.
Competitors win on a better
metric or smarter packaging
Customers tell you the competitor’s offer just “fit better.” The product comparison is irrelevant when their value metric maps to the outcome buyers are buying for, or their packaging matches the buying motion. Yours does neither.
The pricing page is your
highest-traffic conversion blocker
Analytics say buyers visit pricing, then disappear. Marketing cannot fix it because the underlying packaging logic is not marketing’s to change. You need a pricing partner to rebuild what the page communicates.
The category is shifting and
your packaging is one shift behind
AI is rewriting how software gets priced. Competitors are migrating to outcome units buyers can translate directly. Your credit-metered packaging is starting to feel one shift behind, and marketing is the team getting asked why.
Marketing cannot fix
pricing from the outside.
Most positioning is correct. Pricing is what’s lagging. Marketing has spent quarters refining the outcome story while pricing stayed credit-based, packaging stayed overly complicated, and the pricing page kept saying something different than the homepage. Buyers feel the gap before they understand it.
The fix is to bring pricing architecture up to where the brand already is. Change the value metric to reflect the outcome marketing has been selling. Redraw packaging around real customer segments. The pricing page becomes the logical continuation of the homepage, not a separate document written by a different team.
Align, catalog, cluster,
build, validate.
Most software companies don’t have a shared model of who they target or how those customers perceive value. The five phases below align the team on the customer mix, catalog the value drivers, define Customer Groups, redesign the architecture, and validate continuously through LevelSetter.
Validate the ICP and model the customer mix
Marketing, sales, and product rarely agree on who you should be attracting. SPP guides a customer-mix discussion grounded in your transaction data and our competitive price intelligence — competitor price points, discounting patterns, and deal movement across the market. The team lands on a shared model of who you target and who you actually serve. Everything downstream (value drivers, Customer Groups, packaging) rests on that alignment.
Build the library of value drivers
Catalog the drivers your customers actually buy against: how the organization currently perceives value through customers’ eyes, separate from product features. This is what marketing has been speaking against in campaigns. SPP makes it explicit and operates it as a living artifact in LevelSetter.
Define Customer Groups
Different customers value different drivers. SPP maps each driver against your customer mix and surfaces the natural clusters. Those clusters are Customer Groups, the canonical SPP unit for pricing decisions. They cluster more coarsely than the buying personas traditional consultancies use — and the segmentation marketing’s campaigns can finally point at.
Build the architecture; identify what needs validating
With value drivers and Customer Groups documented, the value metric, packaging boundaries, and pricing structure get redesigned to match. The architecture surfaces the assumptions that need validating — where the organization’s perception of value may not match how customers actually behave.
Validate continuously through LevelSetter
LevelSetter operates the architecture day-to-day. Each customer interaction produces validation signal; areas where the perception-vs-behavior gap is biggest get refined first. As product priorities shift or an acquisition expands the customer mix, the library and architecture iterate against new signal — pricing keeps pace with what marketing is saying.
Customer Groups are not buying personas. Traditional consultancies segment to maximize willingness-to-pay; similar buyers pay very different prices for the same product.
Continuous monetization deliberately groups more coarsely. The pricing surface stays smooth and fair across similar buyers, and LevelSetter recovers the revenue simpler grouping would otherwise concede. The trade-off between simplicity and margin protection isn’t a spreadsheet problem.
A smooth pricing surface is easier to sell. Buyers don’t negotiate confusion. They leave it.
OSIsoft: Pricing that stays aligned with marketing’s story.
Hear Sagar Thakur of OSIsoft on the SPP process — building the value-driver library, defining Customer Groups, and operating the architecture before, during, and after launch. Pricing kept pace with marketing’s story by design.
Alfresco simplified the metric.
Hyland acquired the company.
At $100M ARR in 2019, Alfresco’s pricing mixed named users, virtual cores, storage, and instances. Containerization made costs unestimable for enterprise buyers. Deal desk lived in exceptions, and partners discounted heavily on the named-user metric to close deals.
SPP modeled retiring virtual cores and instances in LevelSetter, including the impact on legacy customers, and shipped a simpler metric set.
Enterprise penetration accelerated at higher ASPs. Sixteen months after rollout, Hyland acquired Alfresco — funded by a $664M incremental term loan, per S&P Global.
The depth, the presentation, the knowledge — genuinely impressive work. Jay, our CEO, came out of the readout calling it one of the most worthwhile projects we’d run.
Frequently asked questions
Your positioning deserves a pricing page that backs it up.
If buyers hit your pricing page and disappear, that’s the conversation. Renewable. Each renewal is one we earn.