For sales leaders.
Your sales team is spending its best time fighting internal approvals, not customer objections. We rebuild pricing into something sales can actually operate, with guardrails instead of gatekeepers.
A pricing architecture sales can actually operate. The value metric is intuitive enough to defend without a calculator. Packaging has clear boundaries reps can explain without escalation. Discount authority is tiered by real economics, so reps know what they can do today and what needs approval, with a sub-24-hour answer on everything above their threshold.
Post-design, LevelSetter becomes the sales-friendly operating layer. Pricebook on every device. Discount rules enforced at the quote stage. Margin alerts before quoting, not after. The guardrails protect the business; the system protects the rep’s time. Close velocity goes up because the internal machine finally matches the speed of the customer.
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.
cycle.
reduction.
from approvals.
Win rates climb when sales discounts. Approvals take days. Each quarter’s discounts become next quarter’s floors. Stricter rules will not stop the bleeding.
When the architecture
is fighting your sales team.
Every deal is a
custom quoting exercise
The pricing sheet is a starting point; actual quotes take hours. Reps duplicate each other’s exceptions. You cannot forecast what the list price for a typical deal actually looks like.
Approval chains
cost you deals
Customers want a quote today. Deal desk is 48 hours out. Finance is 72. Whoever responds first wins, and your competitor often does.
Reps cannot defend
the price they quote
When a customer pushes back, reps default to discounting because they cannot articulate what the number represents. Training material shows packaging; nobody trained the value argument.
Win rate goes up
only when you give more
Quarterly wins climb; attach rates climb; margin does not. Finance knows. Marketing knows. Sales owns the number, so sales owns the fix, but the real problem is the pricing architecture, not the sales team.
It’s an architecture problem,
not a discipline problem.
Sales teams discount because pricing architecture forces them to. The value metric doesn’t reflect what customers buy on, packaging tiers don’t match real segments, and discount authority is set to the lowest common denominator. Reps fill the gaps the architecture left, deal by deal. Tightening approvals only makes deal cycles longer. Tightening reps only makes them quit.
The fix is to rebuild the architecture so the team operates inside guardrails calibrated against real economics, not someone’s policy guess. Reps know what they can do today without an approval chain. Anything above their threshold gets a sub-24-hour answer. Sales velocity goes up; margin holds.
Diagnostic, rebuild,
and operate.
Three phases: diagnostic on actual deal behavior, architecture rebuild paired with rep enablement, and ongoing operation through LevelSetter.
Diagnostic on what sales is actually doing
Closed deals by rep, discount patterns by segment, escalation frequency, cycle-time loss. We do not interview the team. We look at the CPQ output and the CRM history. The picture the data paints is usually different from what leadership thinks.
Architecture rebuild + rep enablement together
New value metric, new packaging, and new discount-authority tiers ship with rep training. Not “here’s the new pricing, figure it out.” Training materials with the value arguments, objection handlers, escalation paths, all produced as part of the work.
Continuous operation through LevelSetter
LevelSetter holds the pricebook. Discount rules enforced at the quote stage. Mobile alerts on margin thresholds. Deal desk stops being a bottleneck and becomes a signal router. Reps close faster; finance gets cleaner data; pricing stops being a source of internal friction.
BDNA: Reps closing at price, not against it.
Hear Walker White, President of BDNA, on how rebuilt packaging and discount discipline let reps defend the number instead of negotiating around it — fewer escalations, cleaner cycles, and a margin story that held all the way through a 20% exit premium.
Read the case study →Reluctant rep.
264% of plan.
When SPP shipped BDNA’s new pricing architecture, one of Walker White’s reps was working a live deal on the old model. He asked for a concession to go back to the old ways to land it.
Walker held the line. The deal closed on the new model — same customer, 20% more revenue than the old model would have produced.
That rep finished the year at 264% of plan. The architecture carries the deal even when the rep pushes back on it.
Frequently asked questions
Your sales team should be selling, not chasing approvals.
If reps are spending more time inside the company than with customers, that’s the conversation. Renewable. Each renewal is one we earn.