In a recent video titled "How Monetizely Pricing Strategy Audit Works," Guru Akmia, Senior Pricing Consultant at Monetizely, provides an in-depth walkthrough of their comprehensive pricing audit process. The presentation reveals how Monetizely uses a structured 5-step framework to analyze SaaS pricing strategies and uncover optimization opportunities for improved revenue performance.
The Three Critical Data Sources for Pricing Assessment
When conducting a thorough pricing audit, Monetizely relies on three essential data sources to inform their analysis. According to Guru, "We conduct the pricing assessment by analyzing three data sources."
These sources include:
- An aligner survey - This contains broad questions about pricing goals, segmentation, packaging, pricing metrics, price points, and operational efficiency. The survey is distributed to key pricing stakeholders within the organization.
- Current packaging and price book - This reveals the existing pricing strategy and structure that the company has in place.
- Sales data - Monetizely requests customer-level data showing active ARR and the dollar per unit price points charged to each customer.
Guru emphasizes that once these three data sources are collected, "We're going to analyze and present our findings and recommendations in the form of an audit deck."
The 5-Step Framework for Pricing Strategy Assessment
Monetizely utilizes a proprietary 5-step framework to evaluate pricing strategy comprehensively. What makes this approach particularly effective is its sequential nature. As Guru points out, "Each step one after the other has a waterfall effect. Only when your goals and segmentations are set right and you're aligned on what they mean to you does going to thinking about packaging or the next steps make sense."
Let's examine each of these critical steps:
1. Segmentation Analysis
The first step involves assessing how well a company understands its customer segmentation. This includes evaluating:
- Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) definition
- Key buying personas
- Use cases
- Overall clarity on customer segmentation
Using a real-world example, Guru shares: "Our client understood their SMB segmentation quite well, but they lacked clarity on their mid-market and enterprise segmentation."
This insight immediately reveals a common challenge many SaaS companies face - understanding the higher-value segments that drive significant revenue.
2. Packaging Evaluation
The second step examines how the company packages its offerings. In the example provided, Monetizely found an opportunity for improvement:
"The client had one price book that they were using to acquire new clients for higher average selling price," explains Guru. "But after our assessment, what we found out was that they could use an additional price book for their existing customers to achieve high NRR."
This insight demonstrates how many companies leave money on the table by using a one-size-fits-all approach to pricing, rather than tailoring their offerings to different customer segments and lifecycle stages.
3. Pricing Metric Analysis
The third step examines whether the company is using the right pricing metric - the unit by which they charge customers. This can dramatically impact both growth potential and revenue capture.
"They were using dollar per user as their pricing metric which we thought was leading to under monetization and doesn't actually support the kind of scale that they were looking at," Guru reveals.
Monetizely's process involves evaluating multiple potential pricing metrics against seven specific criteria to determine the optimal approach for the client's specific product and market.
4. Price Point Assessment
The fourth step involves a detailed analysis of current price points based on the sales data provided. Two key analyses are performed:
Trend Analysis: Examining the relationship between ARR per customer and price per unit.
Guru notes a concerning pattern in their client example: "If you look closer, on average the dollar per unit for the mid-market segmentation is higher compared to an average enterprise customer, which goes against the principles of upgrading and paying higher for premium deals."
Comparative Analysis: Benchmarking price points against industry standards.
"The price points are converging and very tightly clustered," Guru observes. "What we recommended them was that they could increase their mid-market price point by 10% and enterprise price point by 20% and still be within the industry average but doing more revenue and higher ARR."
This insight reveals the potential for significant revenue uplift without any product changes - simply by optimizing pricing structure.
5. Operational Efficiency Review
The final step evaluates how well the pricing strategy is operationalized within the company. This involves:
- Assessing alignment among pricing stakeholders
- Identifying bottlenecks in the sales process
"On this graph, it shows that the pricing stakeholders had varied alignment on how their sales efficiency was," Guru explains. "And on the right, we highlighted the key pain points that most of the stakeholders agreed upon that were the bottlenecks for their sales process."
This step is crucial because even the best pricing strategy will underperform if it cannot be effectively executed by the sales team.
Turning Insights Into Action
The comprehensive audit deck presented by Monetizely provides a roadmap for SaaS companies to optimize their pricing strategy across all five dimensions. What makes this approach particularly valuable is its data-driven methodology combined with real-world expertise.
As Guru summarizes: "Once we have all the three data sources, we're going to do our analysis and present our findings and recommendations in the form of a similar looking deck with the similar depth of analysis."
Why Pricing Audits Matter for SaaS Companies
For SaaS executives, pricing represents one of the most powerful levers for improving financial performance. Unlike product development or marketing initiatives that may take months to impact the bottom line, pricing optimizations can yield immediate revenue improvements.
The Monetizely approach demonstrates how a structured, data-driven pricing audit can reveal opportunities that might otherwise remain hidden. By examining segmentation, packaging, pricing metrics, price points, and operational efficiency, SaaS companies can uncover the specific adjustments needed to capture more value from their existing product offerings.
Whether you're a startup looking to establish your initial pricing strategy or an established company seeking to optimize your approach, a comprehensive pricing audit following the framework outlined by Monetizely can provide the insights needed to drive sustainable revenue growth.