In our book, The Go-to-Market Cheat Code, we spent a lot of time detailing the concept of ‘hyper-value’, both as a cultural maxim as well as operational imperative. I’ve been pontificating on this concept for over a decade, but let’s face it, it’s not a complicated concept – it’s just an incredibly hard one to deploy.
Buyers want to feel like they’re getting more than they paid for. Period, full stop.
Josh, Sean and I have all built businesses based on this simple concept and every time those elements proved to be, without fail, the most difficult to financially engineer. This is of course due to the fact that it’s often very difficult to maintain profit lines when you’re giving away value that you otherwise would have charged (handsomely) for.
Difficult, but not impossible.
In Revenue Capital’s VC model is an example of this. For 11 years we operated a consultancy that grew to over 30MM. Now, we provide those same services free of charge to our portfolio companies. And we leverage that value-add to gain access to deals we would never see otherwise, selecting only the top-tier organizations and pushing the monetization timeline out for what will be a greater win than had we simply charged for those services.
You see this same concept transforming every segment of B2B, driven both by the integration of AI technology and evolving buyer expectations.
Recently a report by our friend Kyle Poyar at Tremount surveyed 240 software and AI companies revealed that traditional seat-based and flat-rate pricing models are losing ground, with what I would term ‘hyper-value’ pricing—blending subscriptions and usage or outcome-based components. This model, adopted by 36% of responding companies, offers flexibility, creates natural upsell paths, and ensures predictable costs. Doesn’t sound like your grandma’s SaaS contract, does it?
I found the following takeaways to be most impactful:
AI-native products (14% of respondents) and SaaS-AI hybrids (36%) are reshaping monetization. Companies are experimenting with diverse hybrid structures to balance customer acquisition and profitability, yet 95% find outcome-based pricing—the “holy grail”—elusive due to measurement difficulties. But trust me, it’s coming.
Self-serve revenue is a game-changer for B2B SaaS, with companies generating even modest self-serve income ($100K-$500K) outperforming peers by 25.8% in pricing optimization. However, 36.3% of 446 analyzed SaaS firms report zero self-serve revenue, highlighting a gap in leveraging digital channels.
You can review the full survey results here, but the bottom line is simple. Be it software, service, or capital, it needs to provide demonstrable value, early, often, and priced in a manner that guarantees that promise.
