This article also appeared on Forbes.com

If there’s one lever every SaaS company should pull harder, it’s pricing. According to the Harvard Business Review, a 1% improvement in pricing can drive up to an 11% increase in profits. Yet nearly half of SaaS companies have never conducted a formal pricing study. Why?

Because finding the answer to a deceptively simple question—“What will the customer pay?”—is much harder than it looks.

What Is Willingness To Pay?

Willingness to pay (WTP) is the maximum amount a customer is willing to spend on a product based on the value they perceive it provides. Sounds straightforward, right? You’re willing to pay $10 for a slice of red velvet cake if it’s as good as your friends tell you. If it’s priced at $15, you might walk away. Pardon the pun, but your sweet spot for the piece of cake is pretty clear, and the stakes are pretty low. Though you might be a little sad, the success of your day will not be determined by that slice of red velvet.

Now try that same exercise when the stakes are higher, when the decision could change the success, efficiency or profitability of your work. How much are you willing to pay for an enterprise SaaS platform with AI features, multi-cloud integration, compliance tooling and a six- to 12-month sales cycle? Suddenly, determining WTP becomes an exercise in ambiguity, negotiation and guesswork.

Five Reasons WTP Is So Difficult In Enterprise SaaS

After over a decade working in pricing and commercialization, I’ve seen five recurring friction points that make WTP especially elusive in B2B SaaS:

1. Too Many Cooks In The Kitchen

In an enterprise deal, there are often many decision-makers, all with different motivations. Procurement wants to stay on budget. IT wants something scalable. Business users want it to be easy to use. This fragmented buying committee makes it hard to pin down a single perception of value.

2. Value Is Hard To Quantify

Many SaaS platforms, especially those with AI or ML features, promise future value, but customers often struggle to assess what that means today. As one pricing strategist put it: “Buyers don’t know how to value what they can’t yet measure.”

3. WTP Isn’t A Number; It’s An Interval

Pricing strategist Emanuel Martonca said it best: WTP isn’t a fixed figure: it shifts based on time, context and perception. A $200K product that seems too expensive today might suddenly feel like a bargain if new regulations make it mission-critical.

4. Customization Breaks The Model

Products like Databricks or Snowflake scale dramatically, which can make per-unit pricing models unreliable. Every enterprise wants tailored deals, creating friction between price standardization and customer expectations.

5. Volatile Markets = Shifting Value Perception

When OpenAI dropped prices on GPT-4o, for example, it forced entire pricing teams to reevaluate their value proposition overnight. WTP is never just about your product; it’s also about what your competitors and the market are doing in real time.

A Practical Playbook: How To Assess WTP When You’re Not A Pricing Scientist

While there are many academic methods for pricing studies, including conjoint analysis, Van Westendorp, Becker-DeGroot-Marschak (BDM), most enterprise SaaS companies don’t have the luxury of time or resources to deploy them regularly. In my experience, the most effective pricing teams use a practical, data-informed approach tailored to real-world constraints. Here’s a five-part playbook:

1. Start With Your Own Data

Dig into realized prices, not just list prices. Look across customer segments, regions and usage tiers. What are customers actually paying, and where are the discounts deepest? Internal data is the lowest-hanging fruit and often the most underutilized.

2. Track Competitors Like A Hawk

Competitor pricing changes are often the fastest way to reset customer expectations. Set up alerts. Study their feature launches. Understand not just their list prices but their actual deal terms. I personally keep daily tabs on primary competitors and check in less frequently on the rest.

3. Run Focused Customer Interviews

Don’t default to broad surveys. Instead, run targeted interviews with decision-makers across procurement, IT and the users. Focus on uncovering what success looks like for them to understand what they’re willing to invest to get there.

4. Use Beta Pricing To Simulate Value

One method I’ve seen work well is offering a short-term, bounded-use contract. For example: $100K for three months, up to X units. This lets you test price elasticity in a real-world context and set benchmarks for future deals.

5. Leverage Third-Party Signals

Platforms like Gartner, G2 and niche analyst firms sometimes provide insight into what target customers are willing to pay. These aren’t always available or cheap, but when used correctly, they can be a powerful way to triangulate internal data with broader market benchmarks.

Don’t Forget The Seller’s POV

While product teams debate pricing frameworks, sellers live in the reality of live deals. They’re the ones fielding procurement calls, countering pricing objections and negotiating contracts. That’s why every pricing team needs a tight feedback loop with sales.

Instead of asking “What would you pay for our tool?” sellers can ask, “What’s your budget to solve this problem?” The difference is subtle—but powerful. It reframes pricing around outcomes, not just cost.

As Martonca notes, the concept of a “fair price” is often more important than the cheapest price. Customers want to feel like they’re paying appropriately for the value they’re receiving. Pricing teams can help sellers frame that narrative and sellers, in turn, can help teams refine what “value” really means in the field.

Meaningful Pricing

At the end of the day, getting to the right price is about understanding the value your product delivers, the perceptions that shape customer decisions and the dynamic context in which those decisions are made. WTP isn’t a static figure pulled from a spreadsheet. It’s a moving target informed by data, shaped by psychology and conversation.

As product managers and pricing leaders, our job is to build the systems, feedback loops and field intelligence that help take the guesswork out of the equation.