I am an Engineer by training and experience. Sales is a mysterious field for me. I had a learning curve when I was asked to monetize a Cloud offering at my company. Salespeople found it difficult to price the offering and needed someone from the Ops team to help with any deal. For Sales, every sale was bespoke, with a different cost structure. The dependency on the Ops team slowed the Salespeople down, and they felt that the pricing lacked maturity. These are the lessons I learned when helping Sales with a pricing strategy.

Provide Choices

Supermarkets have mastered the art of providing choices. There are so many options for all kinds of items. It's a very clever ploy, and it works. When was the last time you walked out with exactly the things you thought you needed? Providing choices is critical because of two reasons:

• You want to get people to say "Yes." It's just math. If you have only one thing to offer, you have a 50% probability of offer acceptance. If you have two options, you increase your odds of acceptance to 67%; it increases to 75% with three options; 80% with four, and so on.

• People have a psychological desire for control. If you offer no choice, it is a 'take it or leave it' proposition. When you provide options, you are putting them in control. You are saying 'decide for yourself'; then you can help them make their decision.

Align Choices with your Purpose

Simply providing more choices is not enough; they need to be well-crafted. The standard strategy is to price an option relative to its cost of production. For service, there is an additional factor of human effort.

There are some other considerations I learned.

• The pricing should also align with your business purpose and way of work. For example, we encouraged our clients to let senior DevOps engineers delegate maintenance work to a shared crew. While this approach reduced our recurring revenue from the client, it was the right thing for the client because they reaped the benefits of paying us higher upfront costs for the orchestration and automation.

• The most expensive choice can sometimes be the work that your team does with the lowest effort. The effort may be low because you invested in the right people, culture, processes, and technologies. The pricing is a way to get a return on those investments.

• Pricing options can be a multiple of some number (like 5K, 10K, 15K, 20K), but you need to help Sales get a sense of interpolation. What can they offer for 7.5K?

Sell more than you Produce

I faced a "chicken-and-egg" problem trying to get the service off the ground. Everyone in sales wanted to know the clients who had used the new products or services. Well, duh.

I made the mistake of building on the idea before selling it because I needed a way to convince Sales. I spent months working with peers in Engineering, working the supply side, working on skills, and building reusable components. I knew that was a bad idea, but it was hard to stop the momentum once I had started down this path.

In retrospect, I should have been more persistent with the Salespeople. If I had to do it all over again, I would report to someone in the Sales organization than stay in Engineering and throw strategy over the wall.

"We're all in Sales"

I know this is cliched and probably annoys people. However, the truth is there is a lot of whitespace in growing organizations. Everyone is selling their ideas to their boss, their direct reports, and their peers. The last cohort is the trickiest because you have no authority, and you may also not have functional alignment. Just because money is not changing accounts does not mean we are not transacting. I have found that the three lessons also help build alliances with your peers - give options, align options with purpose, and sell more than you produce.