B2B SaaS Pricing Page A/B Test Examples and CRO Ideas

Getting organizational buy-in for pricing testing, tactics to build marketing/sales alignment and example pricing page a/b test ideas to start growing leads.

Getting Started with SaaS Pricing Page Testing

I’ve run hundreds of website a/b tests - pricing pages are the website area that consistently generates the most significant improvements in lead/form conversion rates and deal velocity (improved opportunity creation rates, increased total opportunity value, and improved win rates). Unfortunately, pricing page tests are often the most difficult to launch internally due to concerns about negatively impacting active sales deals, over-exposing pricing complexity, unknown Salesforce account/opportunity impact, or lack of cross-department alignment between sales/marketing teams. 

To successfully overcome internal objections to enable and accelerate pricing page testing requires effectively addressing these objections and mitigating risk. 

Concern: Negatively Impacting Active Sales Deals

Often the most significant (and valid) concern from sales leadership is negatively impacting deals in discussion or deals close to closing. This tends to be a significant sticking point, particularly for SaaS companies with new sales leadership, especially complex/lengthy sales processes, aggressive enterprise sales goals, and/or significant deal sizes.

The most effective way to address this concern is by overcommunicating the pricing page test project with full transparency. Clearly articulating the test hypothesis and actively communicating experiment data is key to building cross-department trust.

Build an Internal Pitch Deck, JIRA epic, or Internal Wiki

• Providing an executive business overview of the test with full-page screenshots, eligible traffic criteria/audiences and expected test timelines is key. Sharing these via an internal slide deck, a detailed JIRA epic, or a confluence project plan together with a kick-off / review call together with the recommendations below is often enough to mitigate concerns. 
• Lack of clear communication and visibility with sales teams is one the largest obstacles to successfully executing pricing/feature packaging tests. 

Depending on internal sensitivity to test experimentation, targeting a smaller traffic segment such as companies in consideration via account-based website segment targeting is another way to mitigate internal concerns.

Create And Deliver a Consistent Internal Reporting Cadence 

• Creating a live dashboard of pricing page data or a clear post-launch reporting cadence (ie. a 24-hour post-launch update and or weekly slack / executive email summaries) also helps to further establish trust and organizational buy-in to pricing page testing.

Build Internal A/b Testing Preview Links to Force Specific Experiences

• One of the frequent objections from sales leadership I've experienced consistently across organizations is the fear that BDRs and other sales team members have difficulty knowing what pricing version customers are seeing. By creating forced internal test links of specific price versions (default and challengers) and sharing these internally with customer-facing teams (sales/support), experimentation owners can make it easy to manually force experiences to align with what customers are seeing on the website.

Concern: Limited Salesforce Pricing Experiment Visibility

Efficient sales teams live by Salesforce reports to understand their current pipeline, deals at risk, and project sales revenue by month. Trying to run pricing page testing without integrating the test experience/version in Salesforce is a recipe for disaster.

Integrating a test experience flag in salesforce at the lead/contact object level ensures that influenced leads, accounts, and opportunities can be attributed to these specific pricing page testing efforts.

The easiest way to execute this is via custom fields in HubSpot or Marketo forms and integrating these into a custom Salesforce variable. This makes it easy to automatically track leads/contacts that see alternate pricing page experiences and makes pipeline impact obvious while also helping with historical reporting. 

Concern: Overexposing Pricing Complexity & Lack of Alignment Between Sales/Marketing 

Concerns about overexposing pricing complexity often boil down to fears about showing a price or explicit dollar value of the product tiers, thereby impacting sales teams’ ability to customize and own the overall pricing conversation (and potentially hit sales quota). I usually address this fear by clarifying that an effective pricing page strategy is really about optimizing overall value messaging and there are many ways to do this without explicitly showing pricing if that is a significant blocker.

In my experience, sales/marketing team misalignment is rarely about pricing page testing and is part of a larger, systemic organizational issue especially when new senior leaders haven’t built cross-department trust yet. This is most obvious when marketing and sales are looking at completely different metrics, not meeting weekly, or failing to report/prioritize metrics and percentage to goal. The easiest way I have personally found to overcome this is by analyzing and showcasing previous tests by the same metrics sales teams look at. Showcasing where previous tests or existing strategic website changes have improved MQL to Opportunity CR%, total deal size, or average. MQL to opportunity duration or time to close helps establish a common language and confidence that test success will be critically evaluated by these metrics. This ultimately instills confidence in sales leadership that testing will improve their success. 

Building Internal Testing Interest and Momentum

Pairing pricing page test ideas with additional qualitative data (ie. pricing feedback surveys) and quantitive data (% deals lost to pricing sensitivity/objections) is often a great strategy to drive experimentation urgency for very risk-averse organizations.

Additionally, including a key product marketing team member for their competitive, feature, and market expertise can also help build internal buy-in as the sales team often already has existing relationships with these individuals who may support or even create sales enablement collateral. 

Optimizing The Standard Good / Better / Best Pricing Model

The majority of SaaS pricing pages today show 3 or more pricing tiers with bullet points near each product tier and pair higher cost product tiers with some variation of “This tier includes all the features in basic plus X,Y,Z…”.  This is a really poor way to showcase the full capability of enterprise features since it implies that all tiers are relatively similar rather than incremental in value and functionality.  

Instead, listing all features and effectively highlighting those available by tier immediately shifts the pricing experience by making it clear that going to a lower-cost product tier means sacrificing functionality. In the example below, by visually differentiating the highest product plan the organization I worked with not only saw a significant increase in demos submitted from the highest tier, but also significantly accelerated opportunity creation and win rates.  

For more examples, see Saas Pricing Page Best Practices.

Traditional Good / Better / Best Feature Tiers

Exclusion-Based Good / Better / Best Feature Tiers

Testing Messaging on How Pricing Is Calculated

While knowing total product SaaS costs is critical to closing deals, for many prospects understanding how pricing is determined is just as critical and frequently one of the biggest blockers that comes up in a deal win/loss analysis.

In the below example for a major SaaS subscription service, we tested replacing the standard good / better / best pricing approach with one that exposed the key pieces of total software pricing. Ultimately this better highlighted our competitive differentiators such as low monthly software costs and flat-fee credit card processing. 

Traditional Good/Better/Best Feature Tiers

"How We Determine Pricing" Version

Ultimately by testing and optimizing pricing messaging that exposed the primary criteria of total software pricing, we saw a 266% improvement in qualified pricing MQLs against the traditional good/better/best feature version. Additionally, our opportunity creation and close rates were also significantly higher as the previous default pricing page costs didn't accurately reflect total software costs. 

Pricing Discount Messaging And Targeted Personalization

I've been a buyer or primary stakeholder in the purchase process for MarTech SaaS technology and discounts of 10% to 20% on yearly enterprise software subscription costs are fairly standard. Most sales teams are authorized to offer up to 20% discount off a yearly package - the best sales teams know to introduce artificial urgency with a deadline to accelerate the decision process. Often the discount availability is presented as tied to the end of a quarter or operational yearly end to create a deadline (“I can only offer this discount if you sign by X date”). 

I’ve tested discount messaging on several SaaS pricing pages - the most significant lead and opportunity improvements I've analyzed leverage a similar sales strategy.

Always Set a Deadline for Urgency

Discount terms should always be set with a limited eligibility window ("Discount offer is valid until 1/31/24"). Sometimes I've required that users successfully book / attend a demo by a certain date - this is easy to do by integrating Calendly meeting booking on lead forms.

Introduce Dynamic Design To Re-Enforce Urgency

Adding dynamic messaging around discounting ("you have 3 days left to take advantage of this offer") or even better - using a dynamic count-down display frequently drives significantly more leads near the expiration date. 

Test Positioning Discount As A Waived Fee

Positioning a global discount sometimes is not as effective as messaging what costs are saved. In especially complex sales processes or custom implementations, positioning the discount as “Waived setup fees worth $X” or "For a limited time: receive free professional training worth $Y" can yield better results. This is especially true when competing against larger legacy competitors that pair a complex product with significant implementation or training costs. 

Effectively Set Discount Terms & Conditions

Any discount messaging should include a legal terms and conditions page that clarifies the eligibility requirements of any discounts. Messaging that clarifies discount conditions (ie. "Offer only valid for net new customers purchasing enterprise plans between XYZ dates") is something I always recommend including to avoid negatively impacting existing customers.  

Sometimes organizations will balk at discount messaging. In these cases, experimentation leaders will need to validate the pricing discount test against a smaller customer segment. Limiting this testing to unauthenticated traffic, only users in a free trial, or targeting users whose plans are about to expire are good ways to approach this. Using a product data layer is an effective way to target these users.