For CEOs and the C-Suite.
No budget was set aside for pricing this year. It rarely is. But every other lever has been pulled, and the architecture is what’s left. We work on the changes that compound multi-year, not the quarterly discounting debates.
Pricing becomes a CEO-owned asset rather than a cross-functional debate. The three-decisions architecture (licensing, packaging, pricing) gets designed as one coherent system, grounded in transaction evidence, modeled customer-by-customer. The architecture becomes defensible in the board room because it’s not assembled from functional opinions.
SPP ships the architecture into LevelSetter, and your team operates it continuously across the multi-year horizon that matters to a CEO, not the quarterly horizon that draws everyone else in. Pricing becomes a boardroom narrative with compounding numbers behind it.
Former B2B software CEO — built an angel-backed company ($13M raised) recognized as an Intuit Top 10 Developer. Business of Software keynote speaker. Hired SPP as a client in 2008. Joined the firm in 2013 and built LevelSetter from the problems he’d lived firsthand.
designs against.
Team progress on every change.
CEO logs in directly.
architecture intact.
Pricing showed up on the board agenda for the first time. Every function has a different theory about why. The architecture is what we work on, not the quarterly debate. Pricing as an asset, not an agenda item.
When pricing reaches the CEO.
Pricing on the board
agenda for the first time
Efficiency work is done. Go-to-market investments have plateaued. Pricing is the remaining lever, and it needs an architecture-level answer, not a quarter-end discounting program.
Every function blames
a different cause
Sales says the price is too high. Finance says it is not high enough. Product says packaging is wrong. Marketing says positioning cannot carry the gap. They are all partially right because the real problem is architectural.
AI is reshaping your
category’s cost structure
Compute-per-transaction costs have moved by orders of magnitude. Customer expectations on what AI-delivered outcomes should cost are unsettled. The monetization architecture you built two years ago is no longer defensible.
Something new is
about to ship
A new product, module, business unit, AI capability, or consumption tier. The existing licensing and packaging won’t capture what it’s worth. The architecture has to be in place before launch. Otherwise the first 50 deals teach the wrong lessons and you spend two years undoing them.
Discounting feels under
control. The data says otherwise
Most CEOs tell us discounting isn’t a serious issue. Then we read the evidence and the picture is almost always different. Concentrated discount bands, edition arbitrage, persistent give-backs that nobody owns. Truth on the ground rarely matches truth in the deck.
A senior hire is
supposed to fix it
A new CMO, CRO, chief monetization officer, or senior pricing lead just landed, or starts in a couple of months. The instinct is to wait while they read in, build a plan, and run their first playbook. Add it up: weeks before they start, a quarter to read in, another quarter to ship a plan. Now a year is gone. By the time the playbook reveals whether it worked, you’ve lost the horizon you were trying to defend.
Architecture decision.
Made at CEO speed.
Most CEOs already sense the issue. They’ve read enough to suspect it’s licensing and packaging, not just the price points. But the system feels brittle. Touch the wrong thing and a lot can break. So the architecture stays whatever it accidentally became, and discounting fills the gap the design should have addressed.
And the deferral usually has a respectable name. “Once the portfolio transition is further along.” “Once the new commercial lead is settled in.” “Once we close the funding round.” Each rationale is defensible alone. Each is also exactly the moment architecture work has the most leverage, before the wrong shapes harden.
Action comes from a CEO-only diagnostic that maps what’s load-bearing in the current architecture, what would break if you changed it, and what the path forward looks like before the leadership team is mobilized. It moves at CEO speed. Weeks, not the year-or-more of waiting for a new senior hire to read in and execute their first plan. From there, the rebuild is sequenced against your initiative calendar, not bolted onto it. Stasis breaks when the complexity gets bounded and the timeline gets honest.
Three modes,
calibrated to CEO time.
CEOs need to know what’s actually wrong before deciding whether to mobilize the leadership team. Each mode below is calibrated against CEO time and the company’s strategic horizon.
Strategic diagnostic
A CEO-only read, sprint-based, paced to your timeline. We use existing data: no broad internal survey, no all-hands workshops. The deliverable is a CEO-ready view of the real problem, the real opportunity, and what an architecture-level fix would look like, before pulling the rest of the team in.
Architecture rebuild
The three-decisions redesigned as one coherent system, sprint-based, paced to your team. Install base modeled before anything ships. Sales, finance, product, marketing brought in at the right moments in the right sequence, not all at once in a committee that never converges.
Continuous operating partnership
Architecture tunes to the market continuously rather than at quarter-end. Your team operates LevelSetter day-to-day: pricebook, approval governance, uplift pacing, architectural drift flags. Competitive price points and packaging shifts get monitored continuously, so the architecture responds before the market does. The CEO has direct dashboard access: pricing health live in LevelSetter, plus team progress on every architecture change in flight. SPP stays on call for renewal sprints when the market shifts or strategy evolves.
OSIsoft: Exec reviews where consequences come first.
Hear Sagar Thakur of OSIsoft on how SPP structures the executive pricing review. Each choice gets modeled against how it plays out in the field; the exec team sees consequences before committing, and better decisions follow.
The CEO view.
Live in LevelSetter.
A CEO three years into a fast-growing SaaS had pricing on the board agenda for the first time. Every function had a theory. SPP ran the diagnostic, rebuilt the three-decisions architecture, and shipped it into LevelSetter. The CEO now sees pricing health live, plus only the deals that need CEO sign-off. The team operates the architecture day-to-day. No waiting for the monthly board pack.
Frequently asked questions
Pricing should be a CEO asset, not a quarterly debate.
If pricing reached your board agenda for the first time and every function has a different theory, that’s the conversation. Renewable. Each renewal is one we earn.