Why evidence-led pricing strategy should be on every CEOs radar
Running a company is not for the faint of heart. Under pressure from all areas of the business, you’re expected to drive growth and deliver results while keeping all parties happy. That’s a lot of balls in the air, we get it. It’s no surprise that pricing decisions often come down to gut feel. But here’s the problem: instinct alone can’t tell you what customers truly value, or what they’re really willing to pay.
From marketing to new product development, high-performing companies use research and data to guide their decision making in many key areas of business. So why not pricing?
Find out why we believe evidence is so important when it comes to making decisions on pricing strategy and how it could be the secret to unlocking untapped profit in your business long term.
Pricing strategy: gut instinct vs. evidence-based decisions
Whatever stage your business is at, evidence-led pricing gives you the clarity to act with confidence. It helps you understand your market, your customers, and where your true profit potential lies, so pricing becomes a strategic growth lever, not a shot in the dark.
Yet too often, pricing decisions are based on instinct or made in reaction to what competitors are doing. The result? Missed opportunities, misaligned offers, and avoidable revenue gaps.
By grounding your pricing in evidence, not guesswork, you put yourself back in control. You can make smarter, more deliberate choices that serve the bigger picture: your product, your positioning, and your long-term growth.
So, what is evidence-led pricing exactly?
Evidence-led pricing is the practice of using structured research insights—from customer interviews and surveys to real-world price testing—to guide pricing decisions.
By blending qualitative insight (how people think and decide), quantitative data (at-scale insight into what they’re willing to pay), and behavioural evidence (how they respond in real situations), you remove the guesswork and build a pricing strategy rooted in reality.
And it’s not just about price points. Research can inform every pricing lever from how you position your offer, present your prices, or plan promotions, to how your internal processes and mindset support smarter decisions.
Being truly evidence-led is not a one-off exercise. What worked last year may not work today. That’s why leading teams regularly refresh their evidence, ensuring pricing keeps pace with customer needs, market trends, and business goals.
Pricing research: how evidence-led pricing works.
At Untapped, our dedicated pricing research team helps turn pricing questions into confident decisions. Through a blend of qualitative, quantitative, and behavioural methods, we uncover the evidence needed to move from theory to strategy — and from assumptions to action.
Here are the top three approaches we use to gather insight and build pricing strategies that work in the real world:
1. Pricing interviews (Qualitative research)
See beneath the surface. Pricing interviews reveal how your customers think about value, what drives their decisions, and how your pricing stacks up against their alternatives. It’s a fast way to pressure-test your assumptions and spot early signals around willingness to pay.
Taking the form of one-to-one interviews, qualitative research is a valuable tool which allows you to test your pricing theories out on a small section of your customer base early in the process.
For the best results, consider third-party support to ensure customers feel free to speak their minds. Pricing experts (like us!), as well as performing the interviews, can help hone the right set of questions to draw out the most useful insights.
The value?
When you hear how customers talk about your product in their own words, you expose blind spots in your internal narrative. You understand not just whether people will pay, but what they believe they’re paying for. This is the antidote to guesswork. Most pricing mistakes come from assuming we already know what customers value.
Proof?
We worked with one technical integration supplier to develop an evidence-based pricing strategy. We ran a series of in-depth customer interviews, internal data analysis and collaborative workshops.
They gained the confidence to align their pricing strategy more closely with the real value they deliver to their customers. The process demonstrated that they had the potential to increase revenue by a minimum of £17,000 per project.
The founder and CEO summed up the experience:
“You will be amazed by how far this takes you in building your commercial strategy. This is not just about pricing, it’s about attitude, it’s about cultural change, it’s about methods and approach. It’s about keeping your values intact. It’s not about charging more for your services because you can. It is about truly capturing the value you’re bringing to customers.”
2. Pricing survey (Quantitative research)
Quantitative research is about evidence gathering and validating your pricing theories at scale. Start with a Market Survey if you need to clarify who your customers are, what segments exist, and how needs differ across the market. This gives you the foundation to design a more targeted and relevant pricing survey.
Next, use a Pricing Survey to go deeper. A well-structured survey allows you to understand your target segments, validate willingness to pay, and refine your offer based on real data. Using methods like Gabor-Granger or Van Westendorp, you can pinpoint actual price thresholds and identify the price range where customers are most likely to convert.
The value?
A pricing survey gives you statistical confidence in decisions that impact hundreds or millions of customers. It reveals the pricing sweet spot – the zone between value and cost—where both your customers and your margins win.
According to Marn and Rosiello (1992), “Even a 1% improvement in pricing can lead to an 11.1% increase in profit. No other lever gets close.”
Proof?
We worked with one leading biodiversity monitoring company to help them shape a pricing strategy ahead of their Series B. Growing in a nascent market with no clear benchmarks, they needed evidence to guide key decisions. We designed a bespoke market survey and paired it with targeted customer interviews to provide the team with an evidence-based understanding of the target customer: pain points, concept appeal, most important features, purchase preferences and more.
The result?
A pricing strategy that not only supported commercial decisions but also strengthened their investor narrative.
Their CEO later shared:
“For the first time we’ve been able to capture significant amounts of data from the market, which gives us vital proof points when it comes to fundraising for future growth… [evidence-led pricing] has given us the confidence to know that we are building what the market wants and (crucially) is willing to pay for.”
3. Price testing
Price testing is the process of putting different pricing options in front of real customers to observe how they behave — not just what they claim they’ll do. This can take the form of online A/B testing, where two price points are shown to similar audiences, or sales-led pilots, where sales teams test different offers across customer segments or regions.
By watching real purchase behaviour in real conditions, you can uncover which prices, formats, or bundles drive the best results — and where small changes can lead to big shifts in uptake or margin.
The value?
Price Testing gives you concrete data to shape and refine your final pricing decisions. Evidence which can also be used to share confident revenue predictions with key stakeholders and investors.
Proof?
We worked with one market-leading online gift supplier using an evidence-led approach to turn their profits around, fast. After collecting insights from a Pricing Survey, we identified a set of live pricing experiments with the potential for big impact. Six weeks of discreet, small-scale pricing trials helped us identify new ways to generate a significant increase in revenue and profit, without eroding sales volumes. The results:
+18.4% increase in Revenue Growth
+21.1% increase in Gross Margin Growth
-31.1% reduction in Discounting spend
Their Performance Marketing Head said:
“We can now be more courageous with our pricing & discount strategy, adjusting how we communicate pricing and value with confidence.”
It’s never too early in the life of a business to turn to an evidence-led pricing strategy.
One forward-thinking beauty brand turned to Untapped’s pricing strategy specialists for product launch advice. They were preparing to introduce a bold new vision for the beauty category.
The problem? With no direct competitors or similar brand models to follow, how could they be sure what to charge?
The answer? Research in three parts:
- We began with a Market Survey to define the brand’s market and target segments — a crucial step in a nascent category with no prior benchmarks. Through this survey, we learned the addressable market was 20x bigger than initial estimates.
- This was followed by in-depth Pricing Interviews with potential customers to shape product bundles and build a pricing framework grounded in real perceptions of value.
- A subsequent Pricing Survey verified that the brand’s soon-to-be core segments were willing to pay 50% more than previously expected.
The results shifted their entire go-to-market strategy and gave them the confidence to launch with a clearer understanding of where the greatest revenue opportunities lie.
Turn pricing strategy theory into profitable practice
Gathering evidence offers you the opportunity to make confident decisions about your pricing (and beyond). Through a robust set of data and insights, you can understand genuine customer value perceptions and make the smart, strategic pricing decisions needed to build sustainable, far-reaching future growth.
Whether you choose to run a Pricing Survey internally or partner with a dedicated pricing research team like ours, investing time and care into validating your assumptions and testing your hypotheses at scale is a huge step towards pricing confidence.
Interested in discovering more about evidence-led pricing? Talk to our pricing strategy experts and let’s see how we can help.
