Pricing
B2B pricing is not what the product costs. It's the structure that decides who self-selects as the right customer and who gets discouraged before even talking to sales.
“Pricing the prospect can't understand in two minutes is already working against your sales team, before the negotiation even starts.”
Otto GTM ObservatoryWhy the structure communicates more than the number
The choice between per-user, per-usage, per-outcome, or flat pricing implicitly communicates what the company believes is valuable to the customer: per-user pricing communicates that value scales with internal adoption, per-outcome pricing communicates confidence in measurable impact. This structural choice influences positioning as much as any marketing message.
Aligning pricing to how the customer internally measures received value (not to how it's most convenient to bill for the vendor) reduces negotiation friction: the buyer doesn't have to translate an arbitrary pricing model into their own internal ROI terms.
Anti-patterns
Common mistake: structuring pricing for internal administrative simplicity (e.g. per user) when the customer measures received value in a completely different way (e.g. per transaction processed), generating friction in every negotiation.
Second mistake: deliberately keeping pricing opaque to maximize negotiating power in every single deal, systematically lengthening the sales cycle because every prospect must invest extra time to understand the real cost.
Practical Application
A company with per-user pricing discovers that target customers internally measure value per transaction processed, not by number of active users. After restructuring pricing on a transactional basis, average negotiation time drops from 6 to 3.5 weeks, because the buyer can autonomously calculate expected ROI without having to translate a pricing model misaligned with their own internal logic.