SaaS packaging and pricing case study

Years of acquisitions had left LiveTiles selling seven separate products, and nobody, inside the company or out, could explain how they fit together. Every deal opened with a tour of the catalog. Buyers could not tell what to start with, sales cycles dragged while reps explained the lineup, and there was no obvious next purchase, so the expansion revenue that makes SaaS economics work had nowhere to go.

The deeper cost was strategic. Enterprise buyers were consolidating onto platforms, competitors sold one integrated suite, and analysts could not place a seven product vendor in any category at all.

What I did

I argued the opposite of what a nervous finance read would suggest: simplifying the lineup would grow revenue, not shrink it, because the confusion was suppressing both new deals and expansion. That was a claim, and nobody acts on a claim, so I went and got the evidence.

It came back clear. Customers valued the platform working as one thing but could not hold seven products in their heads. Working with the product and operations teams, I modeled usage and pricing benchmarks, and enterprise willingness to pay clustered around advanced integration and security.

The two obvious alternatives both failed the test. Repricing the seven products just polished a broken structure. Bundling everything into one all inclusive platform erased the reason anyone would ever expand.

So we cut seven products down to three tiers: a core platform, a mobile edition, and Active Directory as the premium step up. Land on the platform, grow into the capability every enterprise reaches for eventually.

The pricing made that next step feel like progress rather than a tax, which is systems thinking pointed at revenue, growth built into the shape of the offer. The repositioning fell out of the packaging. I retired the vague “intelligent workplace” line for “Enterprise Intranet for Microsoft 365,” a category with a budget line and a named set of competitors. Positioning that specific feels narrower and sells wider, the distinction I pull apart in positioning vs messaging. Then sales enablement moved reps off “which of our products do you need” and onto the customer’s business outcome, with pitch decks, battle cards, and demo scripts rebuilt around the platform.

The results

ARPU rose 15-20% over the next 12 months, most of it from existing accounts stepping up into Active Directory, exactly the motion the packaging was designed to create. Conversion improved too, because sales stopped narrating a catalog and started selling one platform.

A coherent portfolio also made LiveTiles legible to analysts for the first time, which set up its first Gartner Magic Quadrant inclusion as a project of its own. And when Omnia later acquired LiveTiles, the simpler lineup made the integration far easier, so the packaging decisions outlived the company that made them.

The hard part was never the modeling. Teams were attached to the products they had built or bought, and the consolidation held because customer evidence made the call, not my opinion. I go deeper on the pricing side of this in my SaaS pricing strategy guide.