skills/pricing-strategy/SKILL.md

---
name: pricing-strategy
description: Interrogate pricing, packaging, tiers, discounts, willingness to pay, margins, anchors, price objections, risk reversal, and price-positioning fit.
---

# Pricing Strategy

Interrogate pricing until the price logic is explicit and testable.

Ask one question at a time. Do not recommend unless explicitly asked.

## What To Challenge

- Pricing by fear instead of value, market evidence, or strategy.
- Pricing by cost while ignoring willingness to pay and alternatives.
- Premium positioning with discount-led behavior.
- Cheap pricing that increases perceived risk.
- Tiers that segment features but not buying situations.
- Discounts that train buyers to wait or negotiate.
- Price objections treated as copy problems when they are trust, proof, timing, fit, or risk problems.
- Margins that ignore acquisition, onboarding, delivery, support, churn, refunds, or switching costs.
- Competitive pricing copied without matching category, audience, value, or business model.

## Pricing Basis

Clarify which logic is being used:

- Cost-based: price follows cost plus margin.
- Market-based: price follows comparable alternatives.
- Value-based: price follows economic or emotional value created.
- Strategic: price is used to signal position, acquire a segment, create structure, capture margin, or build image.
- Risk-based: price is adjusted because buyer uncertainty is high.

If more than one applies, force the trade-off into words.

## Core Questions

- What exactly is being sold: access, outcome, time, confidence, status, reduction of risk, or transformation?
- Who pays, who uses it, and who feels the risk?
- What is the buyer comparing the price against?
- What would make the price feel cheap, fair, expensive, or suspicious?
- What proof would justify the price?
- What risk reversal is needed before changing the price?
- What metric would tell us the pricing hypothesis is working?

## Competitive Pricing

When competitor or alternative pricing matters, use `competitive-research` first.

Do not treat pricing as verified unless it was checked against a current source during the task.

## Value Proposition

When willingness to pay is unclear because the job, pain, gain, promise, mechanism, or proof is unclear, use `value-proposition` before changing price.

## Live Documents

Use or create these documents only when there is real content to record:

- `consultor/strategy/pricing-strategy.md`
- `consultor/strategy/pricing.md`
- `consultor/strategy/value-proposition.md`
- `consultor/strategy/business-model.md`
- `consultor/experiments/pricing-experiment.md`
- `consultor/sales/objections.md`
- `consultor/sales/risk-reversal.md`
- `consultor/assumptions.md`
- `consultor/decisions.md`
- `consultor/risks.md`

Use the shared [`pricing-strategy.md`](../../templates/pricing-strategy.md) template when creating a new pricing document.

## Pricing Output

Prefer a concise structure:

- Pricing decision or hypothesis.
- Pricing basis.
- Buyer and user.
- Current alternative.
- Value metric.
- Packaging or tiers.
- Margin constraints.
- Price objections.
- Proof needed.
- Risk reversal.
- Experiment and success metric.

## Pricing Experiments

When pricing is uncertain, create a pricing experiment instead of treating the chosen price as final.

Use the shared [`pricing-experiment.md`](../../templates/pricing-experiment.md) template and record hypothesis, audience, package, price or anchor, risk reversal, test design, success metric, decision criteria, result, and decision.

## Done Threshold

Pause when the pricing basis, buyer, alternative, value metric, packaging, proof gap, risk reversal, margin constraint, and next pricing experiment are clear.