In our day-to-day lives, we think of a “bundle” as a way of buying several things together. You might bundle a car wash with your gas, or tickets to a tourist attraction with a stay at a nearby hotel. 

But when it comes to B2B purchases, bundling is a bit different. A B2B bundle does more than just bring products together: It also combines pricing structures into one streamlined offering. A typical bundle in B2B SaaS might see a customer pay a monthly subscription fee for one product, a flexible usage-based amount for a second product, and milestone-based charges for professional services.

Bundling in B2B has historically been complex and difficult to orchestrate. But companies of any size can now leverage turnkey solutions to bundle in ways that are easy-to-operate and easy-to-understand. And finding the right bundle design for your customer can greatly propel company growth. 

Drawing from a recent Nue Master Class about pricing innovation, let’s see how bundling typically plays out, some tips when it comes to strategy, and what technology you need to make it happen.

Companies face new problems as they grow, and many of those problems demand new bundle strategies to solve. The common trajectory looks something like this:

Early Startups Focus on Streamlining Over Bundling: When companies are just starting out, clients have limited patience and are likely risk-averse. Limited SKUs and/or usage-based pricing (depending on the business offering and model) is likely the best way to bring new business and avoid overwhelming leads with choices. 

Growing Companies Introduce Bundles: As startups grow, they increase the complexity of their pricing strategy — monetizing specific features or adding products to sell. For many companies, this is when bundled offerings become a key part of the pricing strategy, which may include professional services, physical goods, and more. Startups often need to pivot to adjust their market motion up- or downmarket as they grow, which can introduce additional wrinkles. For example, startups targeting upmarket customers will likely need to implement a bundle option with flat or predetermined pricing, because upmarket clients can’t handle unpredictable usage-based models.

"As startups grow, they start increasing the complexity of their pricing strategy — monetizing specific features or adding products to sell.” 

Mature Companies Expand Bundles Across Regions and Verticals: Mature companies have to handle the pressures of competitive markets, and often adapt by expanding internationally or introducing product configurations targeted at specific verticals. Many also introduce low-cost options to stave off competitors with budget pricing. Unfortunately, augmenting bundles with a range of country- or vertical-specific SKUs, packages, and price points can lead to logistical challenges, as detailed later on.

Companies with Commoditized Products Focus on Newer Offerings: Eventually your main product will likely no longer be sufficient to drive revenue, at which point many firms implement additional offerings (such as Zoom’s customer-support-center system). The core product will likely need to be re-priced to function as a loss leader, which will often push a greater reliance on bundles built around that core product.

No two companies have identical sets of customers, and each customer has their own preference for bundled pricing. The wrong bundle, or simply not offering one, can negatively impact growth. Here are a few examples:

Excessive Bundling Can Damage Perceived Product Value: Adding every new product feature in a “premium” bundle at no extra cost, ironically, can lead to a decreasing perception of value. Unless the customer fully understands the value of everything added to the bundle, they are now paying for more and more services they don’t want or need.

"Adding new product features to a bundle at no extra cost can, ironically, result in a decreasing perception of value." 

SKU Proliferation Can Hinder Company Scaling: Companies with inflexible tech pricing infrastructures may find themselves needing to create new SKUs for the sake of offering new pricing options. This often happens when companies don’t have a bundled approach or haven’t codified discounting or pricing variants. This can result in SKU proliferation that may well demand a full-time role solely for the purpose of managing the catalog. This is especially likely if a company uses a complicated bundling model (like the platform/module structure described later on).

Poorly Structured Bundles Can Hold Back Upsell Motions: Companies often rob themselves of the chance to offer upsells by employing bundle structures that don’t have a clear path to upsell. This is a competitive hindrance, given how much importance the modern SaaS market places on expansion motions. 

The best way for bundling to support growth is by finding the right model for what your customers want — while reserving the flexibility to adapt as the company grows. Some strategies with proven track records include:

One-Size-Fits-All Provides Simplicity at the Cost of Upselling: For companies that are looking to maximize momentum with a quick and compelling go-to-market motion, it’s worth possibly offering just a single bundle with everything you offer. It’s approachable and bypasses the risk of customer indecision regarding complex bundles — but on the flipside, does not offer upsell opportunities. This is best suited to young B2B firms, because as mentioned earlier, customers will likely find decreasing value in bundles stuffed with too many features. 

Divergent Customers Demand Use-Case-Driven Packages: Customers in different industries (for example, education versus medicine) have different price points they are willing to consider, along with different features that matter most. Offering dedicated bundles by vertical ensures that your customers will not be saddled with unnecessary features. One prominent example of this model is LinkedIn, which provides parallel but distinct packages for recruiters and sales teams.

"The best way for bundling to support growth is by finding the right model for what your customers want — while reserving the flexibility to adapt as the company grows.” 

A Web of Product Features Requires Judicious Good/Better/Best Pricing: Tiered bundles can take an array of product features and condense them into a simple choice. This structure is easy to understand, and offers a clear path to upselling. Moreover, these tiers can be implemented in ways that go beyond just subscription-based pricing — Plaid, for example, offers usage-based good/better/best tiers. 

A Core Product With Many Usage Permutations Demands a Platform/Module Model: For some companies, every customer calls on the same set of core features; the differentiation comes in the extra features they need. The best play here is likely to implement a platform-and-module strategy, so customers pay to access the platform and then customize with any modules they need. This type of bundling can be complex to implement, but has paid off greatly for companies like Salesforce.

If Highly Individualized Customer Experiences Matter More Than Anything, a la Carte Pricing Is Key: If every customer needs something distinct, a la carte is likely the best option. Despite the name, a la carte pricing is functionally custom bundling. This is highly complex logistically, and traditionally infeasible due to the rigidity of legacy CPQ and billing systems. That said, turnkey solutions are now making this possible for companies of all sizes. 

Hybrid and Dynamic Bundling: Even if no bundle alterations are imminent, SaaS companies should be prepared to support any kind of pricing in their bundles — including subscription- and usage-based pricing, milestone-based pricing, and the sale of physical goods. A company’s requirements and goals change over time and no one strategy will ever work reliably forever.

Rapid Price Adjustments, at Any Scale, Without More SKUs: Companies often have to change their bundle pricing to support growth, sometimes very quickly — for example, to respond to competition, or to prevent churn among specific customers. Yet an agile bundle structure can’t afford to introduce SKU proliferation, or any growth will likely be squandered through decreases in efficiency. 

"An agile bundle structure can’t afford to introduce SKU proliferation, or any growth will likely be squandered through decreases in efficiency.” 

Fluid Mid-Term Changes: If customers are interested in mid-term upsells or cross-sells, the upgrading process needs to be frictionless, or else this can cause record-keeping challenges that lead to billing problems later on. To prevent this problem, companies should implement pricing technology that can modify invoices in real-time to reflect mid-term changes.

A Unified Pricing and Billing System: Siloed product-led and sales-led growth motions can’t support each other or the creation of compelling bundles. A single source of truth can give you insights into the customer journey. In turn, revenue lifecycle intelligence can help you understand what is working and what should be modified.

Bundling is just one of many pricing considerations, but it is one of the most important for how customers view your product. Effective bundling can make complicated feature sets approachable, structure compelling upsell opportunities, and better align your company with customer needs. To learn more about how bundling and company growth intertwine, watch this Master Class on innovative pricing, and to learn more about the technology that makes a modern B2B bundling strategy possible, read about Nue’s Price Builder tool.