Ep. 140 - Treat Pricing Like Product Strategy - Chris Mele
In this episode, Chris Mele, CEO of Software Pricing Partners (SPP), dives into why pricing is often the most overlooked yet critical lever in software businesses. He shares how pricing decisions can carry enormous financial impact (he cites an $8.5 million case), why so many companies delegate pricing and treat it as a “black box”, and how turning pricing into a disciplined, data‑driven process can drive profitable growth, not just acquisition. A must‑listen for SaaS leaders who are ready to move from gut feel to clarity in pricing strategy.
Guest Bio
Chris Mele is CEO of Software Pricing Partners, a firm founded in 1982 that has pioneered pricing strategy specifically for B2B software companies. softwarepricing.com+2Executive Board | Fast Company+2 Before taking his role at SPP, Chris founded and led a SaaS company through cloud transition and has experience at Ernst & Young and in launching the first online banking solutions in the U.S. Forbes Councils+1 At SPP, he helps software companies build pricing as a repeatable, defendable discipline rather than an afterthought.
Takeaways
- Pricing decisions—even small tweaks—can have massive financial consequences. Chris mentions a decision shift equating to $8.5 million in impact.
- Many companies treat pricing as a meeting topic (“let’s change this discount moment”) rather than a process grounded in data.
- Frequently pricing is delegated to mid‑level teams (deal desk, Excel jockeys) rather than owned by the CEO or leadership — that delegating weakens accountability and rigour.
- The absence of clear transaction‑level deal data (net vs list price, discounting patterns, product SKUs) makes it extremely difficult to diagnose pricing leaks.
- The starting point: get clean deal‑data, understand what you sold, at what list price, discounts, net price, term lengths; this produces “low‑hanging fruit” to fix.
- Pricing must be treated like product management: continuously iterated, measured, governed — not just set once and forgotten.
- When done well, pricing becomes a major profit driver and business value creator — many software companies leave enormous value on the table by not treating pricing properly.
Chapters
00:00 Introduction – Vince welcomes Chris Mele of Software Pricing Partners
00:20 Chris gives background on his firm and how he came to pricing
01:01 The moment he realised pricing was the missing piece (deal closed for 1/10th value)
02:24 Why pricing is so hard: small decisions carry big risk
03:54 Typical scenarios where SPP engages (PE investment, new exec team, profitability focus)
05:18 Why many software companies ignore pricing as discipline
07:42 How pricing decisions are made (executive meetings, delegation, lack of tools)
09:25 The “fear” factor—lack of data, complexity, hidden risks
13:05 How to begin when your pricing is a mess: start with transaction‑level data
16:25 The upside: what happens when you get pricing right
19:08 Example: university dev‑license turned into a $300k per year deal
20:43 How to connect with Chris/Software Pricing Partners
Follow Chris Mele on LinkedIn.
Follow Vince Quinn on LinkedIn.
As Promised :
Software Pricing 3 Business Strategy Pivots for Evaluating your Pricing
Software Pricing - 4 Pivotal GTM Moments for Evaluating Your Pricing
Hashtags
#SoftwarePricing #PricingStrategy #SaaS #Monetization #ValueBasedPricing #Profitability #PricingProcess #PricingOptimization #PricingScience
