Anyone cracked Portfolio-Wide SaaS Pricing project (+50 SaaS in 8 verticals)?

#2-pricing-questions
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Has anyone led or contributed to harmonizing pricing across a large SaaS portfolio ? PE-backed group with 50+ SaaS acquisitions in 8 verticals and tight integration targets.
Looking for real-world lessons or thoughts on four points:

  1. Common backbone – Which pricing objects had to be identical for Finance & reporting (metric taxonomy, discount types, ARR definition)?
  2. Vertical freedom – Where did you deliberately keep divergence without breaking consolidation?
  3. Sequencing – What order of workstreams avoided gridlock (catalog audit, value segmentation, billing/CPQ re-config, customer comms)?
  4. Battle scars – One pitfall you’d warn against and one quick win that made the program stick.

Any hard numbers, timelines, or tooling tips welcome. Thanks in advance!

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Awesome question @Laure_S!

I haven’t done this personally, but have some ideas on people who may be able to help:

@Jordan_Lieberman any learnings from EverPro that might be relevant?

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Thanks for the tag @Rob_Litterst

Hey @Laure_S - sounds like quite the ambitious project. I’m actually in a similar position, working to combine ~18 brands under one roof. I just joined the team 2 months ago so can’t say I have any substantive lessons learned just yet. That said, a couple observations from my time so far:

  1. Common backbone - this strikes me as more of a “nice to have”. In theory, all of these things should be consistent but it’s probably not critical if the Finance team has the right systems to aggregate and normalize for reports to the board, investors, etc. We have this problem now and it’s certainly not ideal but we’re making do.

  2. Vertical freedom - this is probably highly dependent on the products and their respective ICPs. In our case, almost all products serve the same ICP at varying levels of sophistication. Because of that, we are leaning into consolidation in almost all cases. I’d probably approach this from the angle of defaulting to integrate assuming there is/was a strong investment thesis in the first place and then making case by case arguments for why certain things should not integrate.

  3. Sequencing - this one I have semi-strong thoughts on and would argue that billing and CPQ is a critical first step. We have 18 brands on something like 10 different billing stacks, all with different capabilities, making it virtually impossible to create consistent pricing and packaging or bundled offerings, etc. This probably requires a catalog audit as well to understand current state but even that could come after getting everyone on the same stack.

  4. We’re still in early stage but depending on the pricing maturity of the companies (and the PE firm), I’d suggest starting by finding as many small pricing projects as you can that lift revenue. This builds credibility for pricing as a function and engenders buy in across the org for the work you’re trying to do. I haven’t experienced it yet but I will say I see potential for a battle scar in where pricing lives within the org. It’s best if the person/team reports to Product or Marketing (or maybe the CFO/CRO) so that there’s accountability for making things happen and executive ability to push things forward. When pricing exists on an island without real power, it will be near impossible to get anything done.

Hope this is directionally helpful. I’d love to stay in touch and hear how it goes as it sounds like you and I are in similar boats!

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