Enterprise SaaS Pricing Advice We Wish We had Known

p s kullar
4 min readNov 26, 2018

We found SaaS enterprise pricing to be quite confusing at first but having been through the process enough now, here’s our advice for our younger selves. We cover 3 main enterprise deals and how each turned out.

Related: How We Thought We’d Get Enterprise Buyers and What Really Happened

Also see: 10 Companies give you their Best Advice for Doing Demos that Sell

What’s an enterprise customer?

Any large company paying around $1,000+ per month is enterprise for Upscope.

Upscope is a co-browsing solution. They’re typically looking to buy our product for their customer success, account and support teams or to use our API to completely white label our solution for their own internal needs or as part of a product they sell to their customers.

Enterprise 1: Mid-sized company

They want to build Upscope into their own support tool so their staff can instantly screen share with customers.

They’ll need to use our REST API for the integration, which is only available with the enterprise plan.

What should we charge them?

Charge them the standard business plan fee + an extra $10 per agent.

Why?

They’re going to need an individual service level agreement and a whole raft of additional docs signed up.

They have lots of additional processes and procedures around data security.

They’re going to require a lot of support while they integrate it and get going.

They care about the pricing but don’t mind paying extra as long as they feel it’s for the right reasons as they wish to get good support over time, so be up front about it.

Lessons learned.

The size of the company has little do with the amount of support time they require. In this business, as data security is so important, some of the smaller companies have more processes than the larger ones when it comes to clearing a 3rd party product for use.

Enterprise 2: Billion dollar established company

They want to purchase our standard business plan for a large number of internal support and account management staff.

What should we charge them?

Our standard business plan pricing.

Why?

It works for them.

They want to trial it for a long time and see the ROI. After that, they just want the standard pricing until they decide otherwise.

Their primary concern is solving their own problem. The value we provide is far greater than our per seat pricing so they are not concerned with the price.

Lesson learned.

Some deals are simple, so let them be simple by being patient.

Good fast responses matter because they probably contacted a number of other co-browsing companies.

We answered all their key questions quickly and accurately and that may have been the primary reason they went with us.

They care about about data security because they have a department that cares about data security so the people who first signed up (the people really want the product) need to pass on the key data security related information to that department. Have the docs and answers listed on the home page and in help files and maybe in a pdf too.

Enterprise 3: Rapidly growing large new startup

They want to completely white label our product as part of their product which they’re selling to other large organisations.

What should we charge them?

The per seat pricing does not work for them because they don’t know how many seats will need it month to month, as it’s dependent on their growth.

Do usage based pricing.

Instead of charging per seat, charge per hour their customer’s support agents use it but have a minimum number of hours per month you’ll charge by default.

Also, get 6 months of payments in advance.

Why?

Talk to them, understand their situation and their potential ROI from using Upscope and remember that they’ll need extensive support in the early stages.

They don’t know how much their customer’s support agents need Upscope yet but it’ll minimally be X hours per month. Figure out X with them and charge for it.

They are quite used to paying annually for software though in this case they need to re-assess every 6 months so charge them 6 months in advance rather than annually.

Lessons learned

Companies like this need to know that our product will still work for them even if something happens to our company. On-premise licensed software which they can independently run if something were to happen to Upscope matters to them.

What questions will they ask? They’ll look for trust.

Where are you based? How many people in your company? They’re wondering if we’re for real and can be trusted. They don’t want to buy a product from lunatics running a scam. That about us page matters. That Linkedin profile matters.

Who else have you sold to before? Any big companies? Some of the business development guys ask if we’ve sold our product to large companies before because they’re evaluating us as an acquisition as much as tool to integrate. Damn odd experience the first time round. It’s a very long term process with these guys.

Are you funded? They’re asking if Upscope is about to go down any time because of a lack of money and the right response is to tell them that this is not our first startup and we’re self-funded, profitable and stable. If they’re looking to do an on-premise integration then tell them it will continue to function even if Upscope did somehow die.

Why are these companies interested in Upscope?

Onboarding and supporting customers badly, hurts revenue and churn.

There’s a growing wave of intense focus on onboarding but most of us are still using old broken technology to do it.

If you use Netflix, Spotify or Instagram and want to know why they buy Upscope then read this article on why you onboard people to Netflix better than to your own app.

Originally published at blog.upscope.io on November 26, 2018.

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p s kullar

Working on Upscope.io and Anymailfinder.com. Would like to play a game that teaches me lots of maths and physics.