In a recent educational video titled "Conducting Primary Research For SaaS Pricing Projects" from the Monetizely channel, an expert presenter shares valuable insights on how to validate pricing hypotheses through customer interviews. The video walks through practical methods for collecting and synthesizing customer feedback to guide SaaS pricing strategies, particularly for enterprise customers.
Why Qualitative Research Matters for Enterprise SaaS Pricing
Qualitative research serves as a foundation for making informed pricing decisions, especially in complex enterprise environments. Unlike quantitative methods, qualitative approaches allow for deeper insights into customer preferences, perceptions, and priorities.
"This works better for Enterprise customers where there may be accounts you may have to visit them, you may have to call them, there may be a group that has to come, and the complexity may be much higher," the presenter explains, highlighting the unique challenges of enterprise customer research.
The fundamental objective remains consistent: testing hypotheses against real customer feedback to build empathy and understanding of what truly matters to your target audience.
The Core Components of Effective Customer Interviews
The interview process described in the video follows a structured approach designed to elicit meaningful responses:
- Begin with a clear hypothesis about customer pain points
- Force customers to make choices between options
- Have customers rank benefits, value propositions, and features
- Assess their reactions to various pricing metrics
- Determine what they perceive as differentiators
This approach effectively functions as a form of conjoint analysis, where customers must make trade-offs that reveal their true preferences and priorities.
Sample Size and Interview Structure
How many interviews are enough? According to the presenter, the answer depends on your customer base size:
"If it is in sort of Enterprise environment, from 5 to 15 calls depending on how big your Enterprise business unit is or group is… if it's roughly like two to 300 customers, by 10 plus interviews you will have a good idea of what you're hearing."
The video demonstrates a sample interview template that guides the conversation through several key exercises:
Force-Ranking Pain Points
Begin by presenting your hypothesis about customer pain points and asking them to prioritize which issues matter most. This reveals whether your understanding of their challenges aligns with reality.
Value Proposition and Feature Prioritization
The presenter suggests creative approaches to determine feature value: "I'm showing them different plans and saying you have $100 to pick to spend on the one that you really like."
This budget allocation exercise provides clear signals about which features customers genuinely value, which can directly inform your pricing tiers and packaging strategy.
Pricing Metric Selection
Enterprise customers often have strong preferences about how they want to be charged. The research should include questions that help you determine the optimal pricing metric.
"When you aggregate this across customers and their reason for the selection, you will understand what the market prefers," notes the presenter, emphasizing the importance of finding patterns across multiple interviews.
Simplified Van Westendorp Method
One particularly valuable approach mentioned is a simplified version of the Van Westendorp Price Sensitivity Meter:
"We are asking at what price is it the product going to be so cheap that you think it is not going to be of value to you, and what price is it going to be so expensive that you don't think that is going to be ROI enough."
This modified approach helps establish price boundaries while keeping the discussion straightforward enough for qualitative interviews.
Feature Roadmap Prioritization
The same forced-choice methodology can be applied to your product roadmap. The presenter observes:
"Most of the companies will have so many things on the roadmap that they will say, but to really sort out what exactly is the—if out of the four things that are coming, what are the really important things—this sort of approach will help come up to the answer."
This provides invaluable guidance for development priorities, ensuring you focus on features that will actually drive customer value and potentially command premium pricing.
Synthesizing Research Findings
After completing the interviews, the next critical step is synthesizing the results to determine:
- Customer willingness to buy
- Budget availability
- Product-customer fit
- Feature and benefit prioritization
The presenter recommends creating frequency distributions of prioritized features and benefits to identify patterns: "What was the top rated benefit? What was the top rated feature? Now that should ideally match your differentiator."
Perhaps most importantly, this research often reveals gaps between company perception and customer reality: "Companies have the bias of thinking that everything that they do is valuable, but customers don't think that way."
Conclusion: Validating Your Value Hypothesis
Qualitative research for SaaS pricing serves a critical purpose: validating or correcting your assumptions about where and how your product delivers value. When your pricing strategy aligns with genuine customer priorities, you create a win-win scenario where customers feel they're receiving fair value and your company captures appropriate revenue.
By following the structured interview approach outlined in this video, you can gather the insights needed to develop pricing that resonates with your enterprise customers and reflects the true value of your solution. The results of this research should directly inform your pricing metrics, tier structure, packaging, and even product roadmap—creating alignment between what you offer, what customers value, and what they're willing to pay for.