What you’ll learn in this article:
Pricing is one of the highest-stakes decisions in B2B. Get it wrong and you’re either leaving revenue on the table or losing deals before they start. This article covers the most effective B2B pricing research methods, including Van Westendorp, conjoint analysis, Gabor-Granger, competitive audits, and segmentation research. You’ll learn how each method works, when to use it, and what the research process looks like from start to finish.
Pricing is one of those decisions that can make or break a product, a service, or even an entire business unit. And in B2B, the stakes are even higher.
Unlike consumer pricing, where you can test a $2 difference on a shelf and measure the result in a week, B2B pricing involves complex buyer committees, long sales cycles, multi-year contracts, and a lot of internal politics. Getting it wrong does not just cost you revenue. It can cost you relationships.
The good news is there are proven research methods designed specifically to take the guesswork out of price optimization.
Whether you are launching a new product, rethinking your tiered model, or trying to understand why your sales team keeps discounting, the right pricing research can give you the data you need to make confident, defensible decisions.
It is tempting to borrow from consumer research playbooks when approaching B2B pricing. But the dynamics are genuinely different, and the research design needs to reflect that.
B2B buyers are not making emotional decisions at the register.
They are building a business case. They are considering total cost of ownership, comparing against competitors, and often presenting options to a CFO or procurement team.
This means price sensitivity in B2B is less about raw dollar amounts and more about perceived value relative to alternatives.
B2B buyers are also harder to recruit for research.
Your sample might be VPs of Operations, Director-level IT buyers, or procurement leads at mid-market manufacturers.
This is something we think about a lot at Drive Research when designing B2B pricing studies. Recruiting the right respondents often requires more creative methods and a longer lead time than a typical consumer project.
B2B pricing decisions tend to involve multiple stakeholders.
The person evaluating your software is not always the same person signing the check. Good pricing research accounts for both the evaluator and the economic buyer, which can require different study designs for each audience.ppers make quick choices and have plenty of alternatives. When that is the reality, small changes in packaging, messaging, or price can influence what ends up in the cart.
There is no one-size-fits-all approach to pricing research. The method you choose should be driven by your objectives, the complexity of your pricing structure, and the kind of decision you are trying to support.
Here are the most widely used approaches.
Van Westendorp is one of the most popular pricing research methods for good reason. It is relatively quick to field, easy for respondents to answer, and produces an intuitive range of acceptable prices that teams can actually act on.
The method works by asking respondents four questions about a product or service:
Plotting the responses from these questions produces a price sensitivity meter that reveals an acceptable price range and an optimal price point.
For B2B clients who need to quickly establish a defensible pricing corridor without a complex modeling exercise, Van Westendorp is often our first recommendation.
⚠️ That said, Van Westendorp has its limits.
The biggest disadvantage is it does not capture how buyers trade off price against specific features or packaging options.
If your pricing question is less about “what range should we charge” and more about “how should we structure tiers and bundles,” you will want a different approach.
Conjoint analysis is the gold standard when you need to understand how buyers prioritize different features, services, or pricing options relative to one another.
Instead of asking people directly what they want, which tends to produce unreliable results, conjoint presents respondents with a series of tradeoff scenarios and infers their preferences from their choices.
For example, a SaaS company could use conjoint to understand how buyers weigh monthly price against number of user seats, customer support tiers, and contract flexibility.
The output tells you not just which combination wins, but how much each feature is worth in dollar terms. Researchers call this willingness to pay.
Conjoint is particularly powerful when you are building or rebuilding a product’s pricing architecture.
It gives you something most internal pricing conversations lack: a quantified model of value.
When a VP of Product walks into a pricing discussion with conjoint data, they are not arguing from intuition. They are showing the room what customers actually told them.
We recently ran a conjoint-based pricing study for a healthcare organization launching a direct-to-consumer service for patients with Inflammatory Bowel Disease. The team needed to understand what pricing structure would resonate with a highly specific patient population. By using a conjoint survey, we were able to pinpoint not just the right price range, but the features and framing that made the price feel reasonable to that audience.
Read the full case study here.
Useful resource
Want a deeper understanding of conjoint analysis? Start with our Guide to Conducting a Conjoint Analysis for a clear breakdown of how this pricing strategy works.
Gabor-Granger is a direct measurement approach where respondents are shown a price and asked whether they would buy at that price.
By systematically varying the price across respondents, you can build a demand curve that shows what percentage of your target market would purchase at each price point.
Advantage: It is a clean, straightforward method that works well when you have a defined set of price points you are already considering and want to estimate the revenue implications for each.
Disadvantage: It is less useful when you are in earlier stages of exploration or when the pricing structure itself is still in question.
Many B2B pricing research projects combine Gabor-Granger with Van Westendorp for a fuller picture. Van Westendorp defines the range while Gabor-Granger tests specific points within it.
Sometimes the most important pricing data is not about your customers at all. It is about your competitors.
A competitive pricing audit involves systematically collecting pricing information across your competitive set to understand how you are positioned in the market.
This is especially valuable in industries where pricing is not published online and requires a more active research approach.
For one client in the home care industry, Drive Research placed calls to competitor locations across the US to gather rate information. The project involved 347 completed calls across competitors the client identified, giving them a comprehensive picture of what the market was actually charging and where they had room to move.
One of the most underused approaches in B2B pricing research is segmentation. Most companies treat their customer base as a single audience, which leads to a single pricing model that does not serve any segment particularly well.
Segmentation-based pricing research identifies meaningful clusters within your buyer population, including groups who differ in how they evaluate value, what they are willing to pay, and how they use your product or service.
From there, you can design pricing tiers, packages, or strategies that speak directly to each segment’s priorities.
In our experience, this approach pays the biggest dividends for companies with diverse customer bases.
Think about a B2B software company selling to both mid-market operations teams and enterprise procurement departments. Those two groups almost certainly have different price sensitivities and value drivers. Serving them with identical packaging is leaving revenue on the table.
When our B2B market research company is talking to a new client about pricing research, the first question we ask is: what decision are you trying to make?
The method should always follow the objective, not the other way around.
| Your Objective | Pricing Method We Recommend |
|---|---|
| Setting a price for the first time on a new product | Van Westendorp or Gabor-Granger |
| Redesigning your pricing architecture or building out tiers | Conjoint analysis |
| Need more market context | Competitive audit |
| Understand different value drivers for diverse customer base | Segmentation research |
The best pricing research studies often combine methods.
Qualitative research, such as focus groups or in-depth interviews, can surface the language customers use to think about value before you run a quantitative study.
That is not just academically interesting – it makes for better surveys. When respondents recognize themselves in the language of your questions, you get more accurate data.
B2B pricing research projects typically run anywhere from four to eight weeks depending on methodology, recruitment complexity, and the number of markets or segments in scope.
Here is the typical process our pricing research company follows.
Kickoff meeting
The process starts with a kickoff conversation to align on objectives, target respondents, and the key decisions the research needs to support.
Design
From there, the study is designed, including writing questions, building out the conjoint structure if applicable, and establishing quality benchmarks for the sample.
Fieldwork
Fieldwork follows, which in B2B often requires more lead time than consumer work given how hard it can be to recruit qualified business buyers.
This is also where sample quality can make or break a study.
Drive Research combines broad reach with hands-on validation, using fraud-risk screening and manual review to help ensure responses are authentic, usable, and decision-ready.
Reporting
Once data collection wraps, Drive Research moves into analysis and reporting. Our deliverables typically include an interactive dashboard and a presentation-ready report with specific, actionable recommendations.
The goal is to give your team something you can walk into a leadership meeting with and use to make a case for a pricing decision, with clear connections between the data and your next steps.
Drive Research is a full-service market research firm with experience across pricing methodologies including Van Westendorp, conjoint analysis, Gabor-Granger, competitive audits, and segmentation research. If you would like to talk through your pricing research objectives, we would be happy to put together a custom proposal.
There is no single best method — it depends on what decision you are trying to make. If you need to establish a general price range quickly, Van Westendorp is a great starting point. If you are designing a tiered pricing structure or want to understand how buyers weigh specific features against price, conjoint analysis is typically the stronger choice. For companies that already have a shortlist of price points and want to estimate demand at each one, Gabor-Granger is the most direct approach.
Most B2B pricing research projects run between six and eight weeks from kickoff to final deliverable. The timeline depends on a few factors: the methodology you choose, how difficult it is to recruit your target respondents, and the number of markets or segments in scope. Conjoint studies tend to take a bit longer to design than a Van Westendorp survey, and recruiting senior B2B decision-makers almost always takes more time than a consumer panel. If you are working toward a product launch or a board presentation with a hard deadline, it is worth flagging that upfront so the research can be scoped and scheduled accordingly.
Both methods measure price sensitivity, but they answer different questions. Van Westendorp asks respondents directly about price thresholds — at what point something feels too cheap, a good value, getting expensive, or too expensive. Instead of asking about price in isolation, conjoint analysis presents respondents with tradeoff scenarios that include price alongside other variables like features, service levels, or contract terms. The result is a model that tells you not just what people are willing to pay, but how much each feature or option is worth relative to the others. Van Westendorp is great for getting oriented on price range.
Pricing research costs vary quite a bit depending on the methodology, the complexity of your target audience, and the scope of the study. As a general reference point, most quantitative pricing studies start at $20,000 and can go higher for more complex designs, larger sample sizes, or multiple audience segments.
