AMA: Quickbase SVP of Product Marketing, Sarah Din on Pricing and Packaging

I led a big pricing and packaging overhaul at a previous SaaS company where pricing hadn’t been touched in like 10 years. The product had grown a ton but the plans were basically stuck in time, super messy, and way underpriced. What we did: Formed a cross-functional tiger team (product, sales, strategy, ops, PMM). Ran research to understand perceived value, price sensitivity, and what people would actually pay for. Learned we were massively undervalued. Spent ~6 months building and testing new p ...Read More

In a lot of B2B (esp enterprise segment) companies, pricing sits with Strategy or RevOps, esp when the deals are huge and tied to public tenders. So PMM ends up owning the value story, but not the actual numbers. The way to influence pricing is to bring insights those teams just don’t have. The easiest starting point is competitive pricing intel. If you already own competitive positioning, adding pricing signals is a natural step. You dont need exact numbers. Even patterns like how competitors b ...Read More

Deciding whether to charge for a new feature usually comes down to one big question: is this thing creating net-new value, or is it making the core product easier and faster to use? In SaaS, especially B2B, both are valuable, but they don’t always justify price the same way. For a feature that improves productivity and shortens time to value, I try to look at the tradeoff like this: If the feature helps more users get successful faster, that often grows conversion and retention, which can easily ...Read More

When you ship every week, you can’t change pricing every week. So you set guardrails. 1. Price to value buckets, not features - Small updates don’t trigger pricing changes. 2. Decide what’s “pricing-worthy" - Only big shifts in value or cost-to-serve justify a change. 3. Review pricing on a set cadence - (and you can have a committee for this) Quarterly or twice a year. Keeps things sane. 4. Keep packaging stable- Most new features just slot into existing tiers. 5. Sync early on big releases - B ...Read More

Yeah, this happens a lot. When everyone hides pricing behind a demo, you gotta get a little scrappy. 1. Start with customer intel - Ask prospects what they’ve seen from competitors. Buyers will usually share ranges, discount habits, and what felt “expensive vs fair.” It’s honestly the fastest signal. 2. Use sales call clues- Listen for lines like “you’re higher/lower than X” or “they charged us per seat.” Even vague hints help build a pattern. 3. Reverse-engineer from their packaging - Even with ...Read More

In the first 90 days, I’m mostly trying to listen way more than I talk and show people I’m here to make their lives easier, not add more process. Tactics that have worked well for me over theyears: Show up prepared, but not with an agenda Ask simple questions and actually follow through on what you hear Share small wins early so people see momentum Be Vunerable. Say “I don’t know yet” when it’s true Invite people into your work instead of presenting it at them Give credit loudly, ask for help qu ...Read More

If you’re shifting from selling a bunch of standalone apps to selling an actual platform, the big thing is you can’t just “relabel” what you already have. You’ve gotta help customers see the bigger picture and actually feel the value of the whole thing working together. A few things that usually work well: Start with the customer problems, not the platform story - People don’t wake up wanting a platform. They want a simpler way to run their work without juggling 10 tools. So frame it around the ...Read More

When you price by region, you’re basically trying to balance fairness, competitiveness, and revenue without turning it into a giant math puzzle. A few things I always look at: Local willingness to pay: Not every region values your product the same way. Some markets are super price-sensitive, others happily pay for speed, convenience, or brand. You want to understand what they actually care about, not just copy/paste pricing from your home market. Local alternatives Your real competitor in a regi ...Read More

When you are thinking about packaging and pricing APIs, the main thing to remember is that you are not really selling endpoints. You are selling access, scale, and something developers can trust will not break on them at 2am. So the pricing has to feel simple to start with, predictable as they grow, and flexible once they hit bigger volumes. A few things I always recomend: Start simple. Developers hate friction. Give them a free tier or a cheap starter plan so they can actually try the thing bef ...Read More

I usually think about value based pricing as working backwards from what the customer actually cares about, instead of starting with your cost or what competitors charge. At a high level, the steps are pretty simple: First, get super clear on the real problem you solve and how painful it is. Not the marketing version, but the honest “what breaks, what gets delayed, what gets expensive” version. Then, figure out the outcome you help them reach. Faster? Cheaper? Fewer people needed? Fewer mistakes ...Read More