We’ve changed the pricing for Wistia probably 20 times in the last three years by listening to customer feedback. During the feedback process we monitor how similar groups respond to new pricing. What do videographers think of the pricing? How are medium sized software companies responding? What about life sciences? The funny thing is that we consistently see polarized reactions to pricing within every segment we look at.

We’ll always find a portion of the group who thinks that Wistia is either really cheap or really expensive while their cohorts find it the exact opposite. This was confusing. Then we found one question that helps us calibrate feedback consistently: How do you value your time?

It turns that how one values their time is an amazing indicator across all segments. You’d expect normal purchasing behavior to look something like this:

But if consumers value their time highly then they’ll happily pay for something that saves them time. It turns out that the opposite is true for businesses that don’t value their time highly.  Companies that pay employees very low salaries (like fast food chains) or companies without any money (read: early stage startups) will see business prices and jet in the other direction.

A perfect example of this is email.  Consumers don’t really pay for email….it’s just something that they use and it works.  Flip this to the business side, however, and businesses are more than willing to pay for email marketing tools to help them design emails, manage lists, and track email performance.  These are tools that, for businesses, save time and help them make more money.  However, this is not something that the normal consumer is willing to pay for.

Once you start segmenting pricing feedback based on the value of time it becomes much simpler to manage pricing. Then you can optimize pricing for the kind of benefit and type of buyer you sell to.