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Frameworks, core principles and top case studies for SaaS pricing, learnt and refined over 28+ years of SaaS-monetization experience.
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You can’t price what you can’t explain. That’s the silent killer behind many SaaS pricing failures.
Founders and product teams often build something powerful, sometimes transformational, but when it comes time to price it, they hesitate. Lacking a structured approach, they fall back on gut instinct, competitor benchmarks, or hand the problem to a consultant who starts with: “So, what are your features?”
That’s where things break.
In many technically deep or fast-evolving products, no one has clearly defined what the product is, at least not in a way that’s legible to a buyer. What the customer sees is a vague label like “all-in-one AI platform.” Beneath the surface, there may be dozens of well-built, interdependent capabilities, but no coherent story that communicates their value.
This is where traditional pricing frameworks fall short. You can’t model willingness-to-pay around features that haven’t been clearly defined. You can’t segment customers or package offerings meaningfully if you haven’t articulated how different users receive value from the product.
Before you can monetize value, you need to surface it. And that’s what marketecture is designed to do.
In the sections ahead, we’ll cover:
- What marketecture really is (and isn’t)
- Why it’s critical for surfacing differentiation and pricing with confidence
- How companies like Medallia used marketecture to justify premium pricing
- A visual framework connecting marketecture to segmentation, packaging, and price
- Practical takeaways for SaaS leaders and GTM teams
Let’s start with the basics.
What Is Marketecture?
Marketecture, a blend of "marketing" and "architecture" is a business-facing framework for explaining how a product creates value. It breaks down a complex software platform into digestible components (modules, layers, features) and maps each part to the outcomes it delivers.
Unlike technical architecture, which explains how a product is built, marketecture focuses on why it matters to the buyer. It captures:
- Core functionalities
- Key differentiators
- Technical design elements, only insofar as they support a value narrative
A marketecture diagram “summarizes the differentiated value of an entire product and service portfolio into a simple, easy-to-understand graphic.”
The goal isn’t to represent every system detail with precision, it’s to clearly communicate the value proposition to customers, sales teams, and investors. Even if engineers object to the oversimplification (“that’s not exactly how our data pipeline works”), a simplified model is often essential to help stakeholders understand what makes the product valuable.
Why does this matter?
Because in crowded SaaS markets, surface-level feature lists tend to look similar. Marketecture cuts deeper. It helps uncover and elevate the often-overlooked capabilities that differentiate your product, integrations, automations, proprietary data flows, architectural advantages, and translates them into a coherent, buyer-friendly story.
Marketecture is not just a marketing asset; it’s a strategic tool that bridges the gap between product engineering and commercial execution. It enables:
- Clearer segmentation by linking value to customer types
- Stronger packaging, by showing which modules naturally belong together
- More confident pricing, by tying price points to clearly articulated value
In enterprise software especially, a well-crafted marketecture model can significantly improve positioning. It makes a complex product tangible, structured, and monetizable.
When Features Hide Value (The SaaS Positioning Problem)
If you’ve ever worked with a pricing consultant or run a pricing exercise, one of the first questions you’ll get is: “So, what exactly do you sell?”
It seems basic, surely the team that built the product knows what it is. Yet in practice, many SaaS companies struggle to answer this cleanly. Particularly in fast-growing or technically sophisticated startups, even seasoned teams can fail to clearly articulate what makes their product different, or why someone should pay for it instead of a competitor’s.
The reality is: Most pricing problems are actually positioning problems in disguise.
If you can’t clearly express your product’s value and differentiation, it becomes nearly impossible to price, package, or sell it effectively.
Generic Messaging Kills Differentiation
This becomes even more problematic when your product has deep technical sophistication or powerful “under-the-hood” innovation. In these cases, teams often lean on vague, copycat language like:
- “AI-powered platform”
- “End-to-end solution”
- “All-in-one stack”
The problem? Everyone uses the same buzzwords. Competitors mimic your phrasing, buyers hear the same pitch from multiple vendors, and suddenly your real advantages are invisible — leaving price as the only battleground.
Case Study: Medallia’s Marketecture Wake-Up Call
This exact problem hit Medallia, a pioneer in Customer Experience (CX) software, during a pivotal moment in its growth.
Around 2013–2014, Medallia had already achieved category leadership and was pricing at a premium. A new enterprise sales team had been brought on board to scale the business, with ambitious targets for increasing ASPs (average selling prices).
But there was a growing problem in the field:
Prospects were saying: “Your competitors claim to do everything you do, so why are you more expensive?”
Internally, the team knew Medallia’s product was superior, especially in serving Fortune 500 organizations, but those differentiators weren’t obvious to buyers.
The competition had co-opted Medallia’s value propositions, and the language being used in sales pitches had blurred into sameness across the market.
This was a classic hidden value problem. The real differentiators, buried in architectural depth and enterprise-grade capabilities, weren’t showing up in the story being told.
The Solution: Marketecture and the Power of Naming
To address this, the pricing team launched a Marketecture exercise, not a pricing change, not a feature roadmap pivot, but a deliberate effort to re-architect how the product was described.
Here’s what they did:
- Broke down the monolithic platform into distinct modules, each mapped to specific business value
- Named each module to highlight a differentiated capability
- Created a new sales narrative around these components, showing what each module did, why it mattered, and which success stories supported it
One standout outcome was a module named OrgSync.
OrgSync captured Medallia’s unique ability to mirror highly complex, constantly evolving organizational hierarchies, a capability that allowed the platform to scale to tens of thousands of users at global enterprises.
Some deployments supported over 70,000 users, a scale no competitor could match.
By naming this capability and telling its story clearly, Medallia gave its sales team a way to make the invisible visible. Now reps had an answer to the “Why are you more expensive?” objection, and it was one competitors couldn’t easily copy.
Why Marketecture Works
This wasn’t just a messaging refresh, it was a strategy shift grounded in positioning discipline. As Dave Kellogg says: “Positioning must answer the question, ‘Why buy yours?’” Marketecture helps you build that answer into your product story
It forces teams to:
- Inventory the product’s real capabilities
- Connect them to personas and pain points
- Move beyond abstract language to concrete differentiation
Marketecture isn’t a one-off branding sprint. It’s a cross-functional, often contentious process, and that’s a good thing. Engineering, product, marketing, and sales all bring different lenses. It can take multiple whiteboard sessions and tough debates to land the final framework.
But once that shared map of value emerges, everything shifts:
- Sales stops relying on feature dumps and starts telling compelling value stories
- Prospects gain clarity on what they’re paying for, and why it’s worth more
- Pricing becomes grounded in visible, nameable capabilities rather than internal assumptions or guesswork
The end result is alignment: From CEO to SDR, everyone can say: “We have Module A, B, and C, each tied to a specific persona and outcome.”
When that alignment clicks, pricing becomes easier, packaging becomes smarter, and GTM execution becomes far more effective.
Marketecture in Action: How Medallia Turned a Hidden Capability into a Pricing Asset
To fully appreciate the power of Marketecture, let’s zoom in on how Medallia operationalized it, and in doing so, uncovered a pricing asset that had been hiding in plain sight.
At the time, Medallia’s product was a robust, monolithic platform for enterprise feedback management. Technically sophisticated, it could handle the scale and complexity of Fortune 500 clients like few others in the category. But the problem was this: those differentiators weren’t visible to buyers. They didn’t show up in the demo. They weren’t highlighted in the pitch deck. And because the competition had copied Medallia’s messaging, the platform’s advantages had become indistinguishable from the noise.
So the team made a strategic decision: break the platform down, name the parts, and surface what makes each one valuable. This is the essence of Marketecture, taking an engineering-first product and expressing it in buyer-first terms.
One of the most impactful outcomes of that exercise was a module they named OrgSync.
OrgSync: From Invisible Feature to Unique Selling Proposition
OrgSync wasn’t a new feature. It had always been part of the product. But until then, it had no name, and no role in Medallia’s differentiation story.
What OrgSync actually did was powerful: It enabled the platform to mirror extremely complex and dynamic corporate hierarchies, think 30,000 to 70,000 users spread across dozens of regions, departments, and roles. OrgSync allowed feedback and permissions to cascade through those hierarchies with precision, adapting as the org chart changed.
No other CX platform at the time could do that at scale. But because it was embedded deep in the architecture, nobody had been talking about it, not marketing, not product, and certainly not sales.
Once defined and named, though, OrgSync became a cornerstone of the sales motion:
- It was positioned as the enterprise-grade scalability engine that competitors simply lacked.
- Reps were equipped with a crisp value story: What is OrgSync? Why does it matter? How does it solve pain at scale?
- Customer success stories and proof points, including real deployments with 70,000+ users, were packaged as supporting evidence.
The result? Sales conversations changed immediately. Instead of vaguely asserting, “We scale better,” reps could say: “Let me show you OrgSync, our capability for managing dynamic org hierarchies at Fortune 500 scale.”
And suddenly, Medallia’s premium price had a visible rationale. OrgSync became the “shot in the arm” the sales team needed, turning price objections into product differentiation conversations, and putting competitors on the defensive.
The Broader Takeaway: Every Product Has Hidden Value
The Medallia example isn’t unique. Nearly every complex SaaS platform has “nuggets of value” buried in its architecture, elements so embedded in the product that teams stop seeing them as assets:
- A unique way your AI model learns
- A proprietary dataset or integration layer
- An unusually flexible workflow engine
- A security capability built to meet regulatory extremes
These are not “features” in the marketing sense, they’re often infrastructure-level advantages. But unless you isolate them, name them, and build a value story around them, they remain invisible to the market, and unpriced. Marketecture is the act of surfacing those elements, naming them, and tying them to real customer outcomes.
That’s what transforms internal strengths into external pricing power.
From Modules to Market Segments: Packaging the Value
Identifying hidden value through Marketecture is only the first step. The real leverage comes in how you package that value for different market segments, and use it to justify your pricing strategy.
In Medallia’s case, the OrgSync module emerged as a clear differentiator. But not all customers valued it equally. For a 5,000-person financial services giant, OrgSync was essential. For a 50-person SaaS startup? Probably not. That insight created a strategic opening: rather than bundle OrgSync into every deal, Medallia could position it either as part of a premium “Enterprise” tier or sell it as an add-on, effectively segmenting customers by the level of organizational complexity they needed to manage.
This is the power of Marketecture: it makes value differentiation visible, not just to customers, but internally to your packaging, pricing, and product teams.
A Blueprint for Segmentation and Packaging
A well-structured Marketecture doesn’t stop at naming modules. It maps each capability to customer segments, use cases, and willingness to pay. You go from asking “What does the product include?” to “Who needs what, and how much are they willing to pay for it?”
Ajit Ghuman, in Price to Scale, outlines a clear methodology:
- List all notable features of your product.
- Map those features to specific use cases.
- Estimate how much value each customer segment derives from each use case.
The result is a value map: a blueprint connecting product capabilities → use cases → buyer personas → pricing strategy. This was visualized in Figure 12 of the book, using a fictional SaaS CRM whose modules aligned differently with SMB, mid-market, and enterprise segments.
For example:
- Module A may be indispensable to financial institutions but irrelevant to retailers.
- Modules 1–3 might serve SMBs well, while enterprises require layers 1-7 of the stack.
- One segment values speed, another compliance. That shapes not just messaging, but what you include in which edition.
This layered understanding lets you build intelligent, modular packaging:
- Core tiers like “Essentials,” “Pro,” and “Enterprise”
- Add-ons for niche but high-value features
- Bundles tailored to verticals or use cases
Instead of arbitrary feature bundling, you offer curated combinations of value, priced to match what each segment is actually solving for.
From Value Mapping to Premium Pricing
Once you’ve aligned modules to segments, value-based pricing becomes possible. With OrgSync now clearly positioned as critical for enterprise-scale clients, Medallia could confidently charge more for its enterprise tier. That premium was no longer aspirational, it was defensible.
As Ajit notes, Marketecture can “enable you to set a premium price for a product whose differentiators were previously not apparent.” Pricing, in this sense, becomes a signal of product quality and specialization, not just a number.
VC Tomasz Tunguz echoes this idea: “Pricing is a positioning tool.” A high price implies high value, but only if the buyer understands what justifies it. Marketecture makes that justification explicit. Without it, even your best capabilities are underpriced because they’re invisible.
Beyond Strategy: Embedding Marketecture into Execution
A strong Marketecture doesn’t just live on the whiteboard, it shapes how the entire company talks about the product. Once modules are defined and named:
- Sales decks get structured around them
- Demo scripts focus on capabilities aligned to use cases
- Website pages can showcase platform diagrams that highlight each value layer
- Demand gen content educates prospects about pain points they didn’t know you could solve
- Analyst conversations can begin to orbit around your terminology, framing the category in your terms
This is when Marketecture becomes a company-wide asset:
- It gives the sales team new weapons to handle objections and drive urgency.
- It helps marketing tell a sharper, more differentiated story.
- It guides product teams toward the modules that deserve further investment.
- And crucially, it aligns every function around a consistent, value-centered understanding of what the company sells.
Bottom line: Marketecture is not just about storytelling. It’s about aligning pricing to real, segment-specific value, and building a product narrative strong enough to command a premium.
Would you like a slide-ready visual to represent this value chain from “modules → use cases → segments → packaging → pricing”?
Key Takeaways for SaaS Founders and GTM Teams
- Marketecture = Marketing + Architecture for Value: It’s a structured way to break down your product and reveal the value of each part. A Marketecture framework highlights not how your product is built, but why it matters, mapping technical capabilities to customer-facing value propositions.
- Not Fluff - Foundational: Far from being “fluffy” marketing jargon, Marketecture is a rigorous exercise that can surface hidden differentiators. It forces clarity on the question “Why buy yours?” by unveiling what truly makes your product unique. In complex SaaS products, these differentiators are often buried; Marketecture brings them to light.
- Surfaces Hidden Differentiators: Nearly every product has underrated features or engineering feats that could be game-changing for positioning. By naming and framing these as distinct modules (e.g. Medallia’s “OrgSync” for massive user hierarchy mapping), you turn hidden strengths into visible differentiators that buyers understand and value. This can revive your competitive edge and justify premium pricing.
- Supports Segmentation & Packaging: Marketecture naturally leads to modular thinking. Different modules align with different customer profiles, making it easier to design tailored packaging:
- Core capabilities can be grouped into a base offering
- Advanced or niche capabilities become add-ons
This modular structure prevents both underpricing (by giving away niche value) and overcomplexity (by overwhelming smaller buyers). It allows customers to pay for what they truly need, improving alignment between price and value.
- Enables Value-Based Pricing: When you can clearly articulate the unique value each part of your product delivers, you are positioned to practice value-based pricing. Instead of pricing by feature count or against competitors, you price according to the differentiated outcomes you deliver. For example, if Module X saves a Fortune 500 company millions, that module can command a high price. Marketecture provides the rationale for premium pricing by linking price to unique value. Conversely, it may also reveal which product elements are commodity, those you might include in all plans or compete on price if needed.
- Strengthens Sales and GTM Execution: The output of a Marketecture exercise becomes a shared narrative across sales, marketing, and product:
- Sales reps gain a simple, visual structure for storytelling, improving consistency and confidence
- Onboarding new team members becomes faster and clearer
- Marketing campaigns and investor messaging become more aligned and effective
In enterprise sales, a well-articulated architecture can often be the difference between vague value promises and a credible solution story that lands.
Final Thought: Marketecture Is a Differentiation Engine
If your team struggles to explain your product clearly, or if prospects don’t immediately “get” what makes you different, it’s time to invest in Marketecture.
It helps you:
- Uncover hidden value
- Align pricing and packaging strategy
- Build trust with stakeholders
- Turn pricing friction into confident value conversations
Think of it this way: you’ve spent years building an amazing kitchen. Marketecture helps you plate and present the meal, so customers see and savor the full value of what you’ve created.