When you’ve brought a new product or service to market, you may feel like you’ve just finished a marathon. It’s an endurance challenge that demands immense effort on behalf of everyone involved. But just like a veteran runner, this isn’t your last marathon. You’ll need to prepare new launches, or tweak what you’re already offering. And that’s where go-to-market agility comes into play.

Go-to-market agility is the ability to be flexible and adaptable while bringing products and services to the market. It’s the joint responsibility of marketing, sales, customer success, RevOps, product, engineering, and finance teams. Companies with high go-to-market agility adapt and augment their offerings in line with market conditions faster than competitors do, increasing customer satisfaction and expanding market share.

"Companies with high go-to-market agility adapt to market conditions faster than competitors." 

While GTM agility should look elegant in motion, many companies stumble because of behind-the-scenes complexity. You can’t avoid complexity — it goes hand-in-hand with agility — so you need to face it head-on and adapt to it. Yet even if you are ready to handle most kinds of complexity, one obstacle can undo even the most well-planned efforts: the complexity of pricing changes.

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It’s important to first clarify what it means to enact “pricing changes,” since it’s more than just raising the price of a product. You might configure a new bundle, introduce new tiers and discounts, make price adjustments mid-way through a subscription term, or offer customers a new pricing model (such as usage-based pricing).

Pricing Change Complexity Is ‘Damned if You Do, Damned if You Don’t’

It often seems like there’s no way to win when it comes to changing prices or not changing prices. On one hand, deciding against pricing changes limits agility. Many companies don’t have dedicated pricing teams. And in turn this means there’s no one expert on how to operationalize and optimize pricing. If no one is confident enough to enact pricing changes, then the company’s go-to-market motion will not be agile. 

"If no one has the confidence to enact pricing changes, agility suffers." 

On the other hand, moving forward with pricing changes doesn’t automatically make companies more agile. If pricing is hard to change, many companies will default to creating new SKUs as a workaround, which results in massive SKU catalogs that take full-time staff to maintain. And while custom-built infrastructure may provide a solution for a company’s pricing needs at a given time, it often causes as many problems as it solves in the long run. 

The media surrounding B2B pricing makes this issue worse, by presenting a narrative that simultaneously encourages and discourages change. The B2B SaaS industry has seen some recent pricing missteps, most prominently the intense backlash for VMware after owner Broadcom made some major changes. But recent research also shows the necessity of pricing changes; for example, one widely discussed study noted that frequent price updates lead to much higher revenue per user on average. 

What You Need To Win When Pricing Changes Seem “Unwinnable”

The source of all the problems mentioned above isn’t the intrinsic act of changing prices. It’s the complexity that comes with implementing and operationalizing those price changes. If you can streamline the relevant logistics, you can modify your pricing at will while supercharging your GTM agility.

Here's how you do it.

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Legacy CPQ systems cannot easily adapt to new pricing models — which is a problem any time sales reps want to get creative on pricing to win a customer. To be agile on pricing, revenue teams need to be able to manage and change pricing themselves. But the pricing rules in traditional CPQs are often a black box, difficult to manage, and require expensive architects to make any change. Given how challenging this is to do, it’s hard to make any pricing change happen with speed and at scale. And in turn, companies can’t readily adapt pricing to meet customer preferences in ways that maximize revenue. 

Even if companies accept the limitations of legacy CPQ systems in the short-term, they won’t be able to do so once they begin expanding into multiple regions and countries. Different regions have distinct pricing preferences and regulations, and new countries require pricing in new currencies — both of which make pricing agility a necessity.

"Simply working around legacy CPQ won't work once companies expand into new regions and countries." 

What to Keep in Mind: Your CPQ should be able to implement new pricing models quickly without heavy customizations. Moreover, sales reps should have dynamic (but easy-to-understand) controls for pricing, so they can adapt to any given situation without needing extensive support.

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A rift has historically existed between CPQ systems and billing systems. Finance operations teams need to translate the CPQ system’s sales orders into invoices that billing systems can handle. This dependence on an intermediary is a liability. 

Critical details can easily slip through the cracks before customers get billed, and this is especially true when customers need to make changes mid-way through their subscription. Even if everything gets relayed properly, sales orders can have ambiguities that are hard for finance to parse. The rift between CPQ and billing can even result in invoices being entirely lost, driving revenue leakage — where customers are underbilled or unbilled, often without the company knowing anything is amiss.

"The rift between CPQ and billing can result in invoices being entirely lost." 

What to Keep in Mind: You need to enable your CPQ and billing systems to communicate directly with each other to establish a continual and accurate flow of data across the quote-to-revenue process. This means implementing CPQ and billing systems that were built with each other in mind — or better yet, choosing one platform that includes both CPQ and billing to ensure reliable calculations between both components.

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The legacy tools that fuel the quote-to-revenue process (like Salesforce CPQ) were designed for a different era — one that emphasized the value of obtaining as many new customers as possible. But we live in more complex times, where ongoing economic challenges have made acquiring new customers more difficult. In turn, this has required increasing the total lifetime value of current customers wherever possible.

Unfortunately, the hallmarks of expansion — mid-term alterations, upsells, and cross-sells — often break legacy CPQ and billing systems, which aren’t prepared to handle expansion at scale. As a result, expansion demands manual intervention, often becoming a clunky and un-agile process that leaves customers frustrated at precisely the moment they need to feel confident. 

"The hallmarks of expansion revenue often break legacy CPQ and billing systems." 

What to Keep in Mind: The CPQ and billing tools you adopt need to be capable of fully handling the customer lifecycle, prioritizing “land” and “expand” equally. The instant a customer requests more seats, for example, that request needs to be updated across the quote-to-revenue process in a way that immediately gives customers what they need and updates invoices accordingly. 

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Achieving high GTM agility opens the door to pricing experimentation, which is critical for gaining a modern competitive advantage. Whether that means introducing new pricing models, offering custom discounts for specific customers, or trying a new bundle configuration that better meets customer needs, companies need to be able to assess the success of any given approach, try alternatives, and quickly pivot as the situation demands.

Companies often have trouble getting experiments off the ground because such experiments require comprehensive analytics that they don’t have. Sales and Customer Success teams know what pricing customers will respond best to, and finance brings an understanding of pricing that would accelerate revenue goals and policies, but a lack of unified data between the two creates translation issues, and prevents companies from knowing which experiments are worth starting (or stopping). 

"Pricing experiments require comprehensive analytics many companies don't have." 

What to Keep in Mind: Experimentation requires having access to some key metrics at any time. These include (but are very much not limited to) projected annual recurring revenue (ARR), average contract value (ACV), and net revenue retention (NRR), plus measurements of churn and contraction. In turn, evaluating the success of company strategy requires robust analytics. At all times, you should be able to assess which pricing models are working well and which aren’t, which sales channels are driving the most revenue, and which accounts are using your products in ways that point to large upsell opportunities.

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The only way to efficiently bring together siloed data is to use a platform that creates a unified stream of data and analytics from start to finish. This ensures that there are no siloes that can isolate data in the first place.

It’s time for every company to improve its agility by facing the problems caused by pricing change. A fully integrated revenue lifecycle intelligence platform — one that unifies CPQ and billing, maximizes expansion revenue, facilitates experimentation, and supports comprehensive analytics — is the best way to deftly navigate the risks of pricing changes. GTM agility drastically improves when go-to-market teams are liberated from the risk of breaking systems, the risk of failing to align with customer needs, and the risk of sluggish expansion.