In a recent video titled "The #1 Reason SaaS Pricing Fails (Call Me Biased)" by Ajit Ghuman of Monetizely, the SaaS pricing expert reveals that the success of pricing initiatives depends more on internal alignment than on the actual numbers themselves. According to Ghuman, "The success of a pricing project is actually your alignment inside a company over where the company is, where it is going, the markets that it's addressing, and what changes in pricing are going to help move the company to the next level."
The Hidden Challenge in Pricing Projects
When you're tasked with leading a pricing initiative, you might be walking into a minefield of conflicting perspectives without even realizing it. Different teams within your organization carry distinct biases about pricing that can silently undermine your project before it even gets off the ground.
As Ghuman explains, "Eight out of 10 times, the reason pricing projects fail is everybody has a different understanding of the goal in their mind." This misalignment becomes evident six months into a project when progress stalls because stakeholders never had a shared vision to begin with.
Understanding Team-Specific Pricing Biases
Sales Team: The Recency Bias
Sales teams provide valuable ground-truth insights, but their perspective comes with significant limitations. Ghuman notes that "sellers are going to always have a very recency bias about pricing. They're going to always give you the feedback about what happened last quarter."
This narrow time horizon means they primarily remember:
- Recent deals and their outcomes
- The most impactful deals in their territories
- Current objections from prospects
While these insights can be valuable, they need proper context. Ghuman advises, "seller feedback is always to be taken with a grain of salt," especially from less experienced team members who may default to claiming "our price points are too high" when facing resistance that might actually stem from value communication issues rather than pricing itself.
CEO: The Growth-At-All-Costs Bias
CEOs, particularly those working with venture capital investors, often develop biases that can undermine effective pricing:
"If the CEO is talking to growth investors, venture capital is going to push your company to scale very fast, right? And as a result, the pricing that they are going to advocate for is pricing that is very simple, but that may not be the pricing that has actually been working at your company."
This simplification bias can create serious problems, especially for enterprise-focused companies. As Ghuman warns, "If you simplify it too much, you may start to see a decline in revenue. You may start to see your customers churning much more."
Finance Team: The Margin Obsession
Finance teams naturally focus on margins, but their calculations may not evolve with the business:
"Finance really cares about margin, especially in today's high interest rate environment. They care about margin, but they may care about so much about margin that they may not even improve how margin is computed."
This can lead to outdated profit assessments as the business scales. Ghuman shares a personal example: "I have personally had my finance team revise these calculations to find out the actual margin was around 97% to everybody's happy surprise."
While focus on margins is appropriate, it must be balanced with growth considerations.
Customer Success & Product Teams: The Effort-Equals-Value Bias
Teams that build or deliver your product often fall into a cost-based pricing mindset:
"This took me so much effort to build or I had to deliver so much service to these customers and hence we should price higher, which inherently is the bias of bias on costs."
This perspective misses a crucial reality: effort invested doesn't necessarily correlate with customer-perceived value. As Ghuman explains, "Something may have taken a lot of time to deliver for the customers and yet be perceived by customers as table stakes."
Conversely, features that required minimal development effort might deliver exceptional perceived value to customers.
Creating Alignment: The Path to Successful Pricing Projects
The key to overcoming these biases is proactive alignment before diving into strategy development. As the pricing project leader, your job is to "merge together all of these perspectives and align them across an agreed context for the company and make sure everybody buys into this before you actually create different strategies."
This means:
- Conducting thorough interviews across teams
- Identifying and addressing biases openly
- Creating a shared understanding of company context and goals
- Establishing clear success metrics
- Building consensus before presenting options
Ghuman emphasizes that "the more time spent in alignment is going to ensure that you are able to succeed in a project."
Moving Forward
When leading your next pricing initiative, recognize that the numbers are only one part of the equation. The human element—understanding and aligning stakeholder perspectives—often determines whether your pricing project succeeds or joins the 80% that fail due to misalignment.
By acknowledging and addressing these team biases early in your process, you create the foundation for a pricing strategy that not only makes sense on paper but also gains the organizational buy-in necessary for successful implementation.