Why Your Startup’s Pricing Is Hurting Your Sales

Multi-tiered pricing is a simple way to grab quick market share, but it might dampen your enterprise ambitions

image by freepik

You’ve seen it a million times and it might already be a staple on your own website. I’m talking about a website’s price page with the standard three or four boxes of tiered offerings. That price menu might just be undercutting your entire enterprise business.

Multi-tiered pricing is a popular model because of its simplicity. That simplicity has in turn spawned ubiquity, and now the multi-tiered price menu design is used by everyone from Slack to Zoom to just about any SaaS company trying to grab both B2C and B2B market share.

• The leftmost box(es) offer a free or low-priced tier, acting like a Trojan Horse to get individual customers to try the product with little risk.
• The middle box is always either the “Most Popular!” option or offers the “Best Value!” But it’s really just a tier for bulk sales designed to get maximum penetration into teams without triggering a scrutinized corporate purchase. It’s just enough money to slap on a credit card each month without raising eyebrows.
• The right-most box is always the brass-ring enterprise sale, and in most cases, you’ll need to call a…