You don’t need to wait until acquisition is solved to work on pricing. Your pricing can help you solve it.
“We'll fix pricing later, just focus on acquisition”
“Wait, no. Every new customer consuming AI costs us money”
“It does not matter. Let’s lock customers in before competitors do”
“But competitors are faster than us. Without a pricing policy, every deal is a new negotiation. AEs lose 30% of their time on price talks”
Pricing is often treated as something you fix once you’ve acquired enough customers. First, build traction. Then, figure out how to monetize it.
But what if your pricing is already slowing acquisition down?
Every deal shouldn’t start from scratch
When packages are unclear, salespeople have to rebuild the offer for each prospect.
When your price metric is hard to understand, they spend time explaining how the bill works instead of showing why the product matters.
When discount rules don’t exist, every negotiation becomes a judgment call. How much can we give away? What should we ask for in return? Who needs to approve it?
You want your AEs to sell faster. Yet your pricing makes every deal harder to close.
And with AI, the cost of postponing these decisions can grow with every customer you acquire. Usage generates costs, whether you’ve figured out how to charge for it or not.
Pricing can help you acquire customers faster
The right choice of packaging, metrics and pricing logic can actually help you accelerate acquisition.
Packaging helps customers choose. Clear packages make it easier to understand what they need, what they get and which offer fits them. They also give salespeople a starting point for the conversation.
Your price metric makes the offer easier to assess. Customers need to understand what they’re paying for, how the price relates to the value they receive and how their bill could evolve.
A pricing policy helps salespeople move. Clear rules on discounts, commitments and exceptions let AEs negotiate with confidence, without escalating every decision.
These choices also help you decide how much you’re willing to invest in acquisition. You may deliberately accept lower margins to win customers. But you need to know what you’re committing to as their usage grows.
Fixing pricing does not mean raising prices
This is often the misunderstanding behind “we’ll fix pricing later.”
Founders hear “pricing project” and imagine higher prices, customer pushback and slower growth.
But fixing pricing means aligning pricing with your goals.
If your priority is acquisition, your pricing should make it easier to buy, easier to sell and easier to get started. That might mean simplifying your packages, changing your metric, creating an entry offer or giving salespeople clearer negotiation rules.
You don’t need to wait until acquisition is solved to work on pricing.
Your pricing can help you solve it.
