Our discounting is out of control. What do we do?

What your realized price actually is, and a policy your pricing supports.

The situation

A CRO or CFO who has seen the average selling price drift and cannot say exactly why.

Every discount was defensible on its own deal. Together they have moved your realized price somewhere nobody chose, and the list price has quietly become a starting point for negotiation. The fastest defensible win in pricing is usually here, and it does not require changing list price at all.

albiagents.com
Realized discount vs. policy ceiling481 invoices · TTM
SMB · inbound6%
Mid-market13%
Enterprise27% · over
Renewals9%
Policy ceiling
What we establish

The evidence, before the recommendation.

Nothing here is a market average or a rule of thumb. Every number is computed from your own data or carries the source it came from.

The real number

Realized-vs-list across your own invoices, broken down by segment, deal size, rep and renewal cohort.

Where it leaks

The segments running past what your pricing supports, sized in revenue rather than described as a problem.

What the ceiling should be

A per-tier maximum derived from that tier's go-to-market position and your stance versus the market — computed, not guessed.

Outputs

What you get, and what keeps going.

One engagement produces something you decide on. What happens next — and on what rhythm — is the section below.

Lands once

The work product.

  • The discount policy: a ceiling per tier, with rep → manager → VP → exec approval bands
  • The fences that justify each band, so a deal review argues about one number
  • The revenue consequence of enforcing it, modelled on your live book
  • The push into Stripe, DealHub or Salesforce CPQ, once you approve it
The decision it supports

The ceilings, the approvers, and whether to enforce them at the deal desk or in billing.

Nothing reaches your billing system until you approve it.

What we run, and how often

A discount policy decays the month after you write it.

Policy holds until the first quarter-end it is inconvenient. What keeps it real is somebody measuring whether it is still being followed, and whether it still fits the pricing underneath.

BaselineYour own book

These read your own data, so they are current the moment a sync lands — no waiting for a reporting cycle to find out what you charged last week.

Live
  • Discount waterfall — list to collectedlead

    Every step between the price you publish and the cash you bank

  • Realized-vs-list by segment, tier, region and deal size

    Where discipline holds, and where it has quietly gone

  • Commercial audit of terms and concessions

    The non-price concessions that leak margin wherever discount policy is enforced

BenchmarkThe market

A tracked set of six to eight competitors changes something every two or three weeks. Monthly catches each move within weeks; daily would report nothing almost every day.

Monthly
  • Price-level comparison — is list wrong, or is discounting wrong?

    Whether reps discount because list is off the market, or because nobody stopped them

ResearchMeasured demand

Demand moves with the category, not the week. Simulated respondents are what make a quarterly re-measure affordable at all — a conventional study is priced to be run once.

Quarterly
  • Gabor-Granger — what the market actually clears at

    The price the market accepts, which is the honest ceiling above any discount floor

ValueWhat it is worth

A discount floor derived from a list price is wrong the moment that list price changes. So this one does not wait for the quarter — it is rebuilt whenever your own pricing moves.

Quarterly, and on any list move
  • The economic value floor — the least defensible pricelead

    The number below which a deal breaks the value case, not just the margin

The waterfall diagnoses the problem; the value floor is what makes a discount band defensible rather than a number somebody picked.

Your own book is live because it is your data — the analyses recompute as soon as a sync lands. The rest are cadences a person keeps, not alerts a dashboard fires: your pricing expert does the refresh and brings you the read. Each one either confirms the price you are charging or turns into a proposal, and nothing changes until you approve it.

Proof

Judge the method before you buy it.

We run this analysis on public pricing pages and publish what we find — outside-in, every claim bounded. It is the closest thing to watching us work before you hire us.

All teardowns →
Notion
Workspace software · outside-in

An $8 AI add-on worth about a dollar a seat — withdrawn, and replaced with a $20 tier boundary worth an estimated $120–165M.

Read the Notion teardown
Questions

Before you book a call.

What do you need from us to start?

Read-only access to your billing system, or an export of customers, subscriptions and invoices. Competitive and demand evidence we bring ourselves.

Who does the work?

A senior pricing operator, with Albi's agents doing the continuous groundwork on your data. You review a proposal — you are not being handed software to learn.

What if we disagree with the recommendation?

Then it does not ship. Every number arrives with the evidence behind it, so you can argue with the reasoning rather than the conclusion.

Does this end, or continue?

Either. A scoped engagement ends at a proposal you approve or reject. A standing mandate keeps the willingness-to-pay, value and competitive evidence current, and brings you a move when one is warranted.

Where you work with us

The Albi workspace

Your engagement runs in a workspace you log into. Your expert works there on your data; you review the evidence, read the proposal, and approve the move. Approved pricing provisions into Stripe from the same place.

  • One workspace per pricing initiative, with the evidence behind every number
  • The proposal, the working underneath it, and the approval in one surface
  • Nothing reaches your billing system until you approve it

Next: the answer where the question gets asked

Not built yet

Nobody asks a pricing question in a pricing tool. They ask it in the thread where a deal is being argued, on the record where the opportunity lives, or through an agent already halfway through a task. We are building toward Albi answering in those places, from the same evidence — and none of it changes who approves a price.

  • In the deal thread
    Chat, wherever your team argues deals — Slack, Teams, or whatever you actually use.
  • In your CRM
    The guidance on the opportunity record, where the rep already is.
  • To your own agents
    An MCP server, so agents you already run can read your pricing evidence directly.
  • Through the API
    Your own surfaces, your own workflow, the same evidence behind it.

Approval does not move. However the question reaches us, the answer comes back as a proposal a person signs off.

"Our discounting is out of control. What do we do?"

Bring us the question. A scoping call gets you the shape of the engagement, what your data makes possible, and a number.