Nationwide Payment Systems
The Revenue You’re Missing: How Better Pricing, Packaging, and Onboarding Drive B2B Growth
B2B pricing strategy, packaging, SaaS growth, onboarding, payments, AI, and customer retention.
Presented by Allen Kopelman, CEO — Nationwide Payment Systems-Host of B2B Vault: The Biz2Biz Podcast
Roee Hartuv, Willingness to Pay
AI OVERVIEW
In this episode of B2B Vault: Biz to Biz Podcast, host Allen Kopelman sits down with Roee Hartuv of Willingness to Pay to talk about one of the biggest missed opportunities in B2B growth: pricing and packaging.
Too many software and fintech companies spend all their time chasing more leads, more demos, and more traffic, while ignoring the thing that can often create the fastest revenue lift — how they package their product, what they charge for, and how they onboard customers after the sale.
Roee explains why pricing and packaging often produce the highest ROI of any growth lever, why customers do not always buy the cheapest option, how usage-based and transaction-based pricing can outperform simple seat-based pricing, and why onboarding and implementation matter far more than many SaaS founders want to admit.
The conversation also covers a major shift happening right now: more software companies are turning into payments companies, and AI is changing how software businesses think about margins, value, and pricing models.
Why Pricing and Packaging Matter More Than Most Founders Realize
One of the biggest takeaways from this episode is simple:
It is not just how much you charge. It is how you charge.
Roee explains that in B2B, pricing and packaging can produce some of the fastest gains in revenue because they directly affect:
- conversion rates
- customer fit
- expansion revenue
- retention
- profitability
A lot of companies obsess over growth tactics like lead generation, sales outreach, and demand gen. Those all matter. But if the pricing model is off, the packaging is confusing, or the product tiers do not align with customer needs, the business leaves money on the table.
Roee’s view is that pricing and packaging are often the highest-ROI tools in the growth toolkit.
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The Old SaaS Playbook Is Getting Rewritten
Allen points out something every business owner can see right now: there is a software explosion happening.
Thanks to AI and faster development tools, new software companies launch every day. That lowers the barrier to entry, but it also creates more noise, more competition, and more pricing confusion.
Today, buyers are looking at endless SaaS options with plans like:
- Basic
- Plus
- Pro
- Premium
- Enterprise
The problem is that many of these tiers do not really help the customer understand:
- what they need
- why they should upgrade.
- what value they are getting
- how pricing connects to outcomes
Roee argues that the old “good, better, best” approach is no longer enough by itself.
Packaging Around the Customer’s Job to Be Done
Instead of building pricing around internal feature buckets, Roee recommends packaging software around the customer’s job to be done.
That means asking:
- What pain point is this customer trying to solve?
- What type of customer are they?
- How mature are they?
- What capabilities do they actually need today?
- What will they likely need next?
This approach creates packages that are easier to:
- understand
- sell
- expand
- justify
It also creates a better growth path, where customers naturally move up as their business grows and their needs become more advanced.
Allen ties that directly into what he sees with invoicing platforms, payment links, and smart billing tools. Many users start with a basic need, but as they grow more comfortable and more dependent on the system, they want more automation, more payment tools, and more flexibility.
That is how packaging should work.
The Best B2B Pricing Is Not Always the Cheapest
A big point Roee makes is that B2B pricing is different from retail pricing.
Consumers often compare products based heavily on price. In B2B, the buyer is usually thinking about a bigger picture:
- business value
- support
- implementation
- revenue impact
- integration
- workflow fit
- ease of scaling
That is why the lowest price does not always win.
If your product helps the customer:
- make more money.
- save time.
- improve collections.
- reduce friction.
- simplify operations.
then pricing should reflect that value.
This is especially important in software and fintech, where companies sometimes underpriced their product because they are afraid of losing deals. In reality, the wrong pricing structure may attract the wrong customers and leave the right ones confused.
Why Pricing Metrics Matter So Much
Roee breaks pricing down into another critical piece: what you are charging on.
That is the pricing metric.
For example, are you charging based on:
- users or seats
- transactions
- invoices sent
- usage
- outcomes
- revenue-related actions
He argues that the best pricing metrics are usually the ones most closely connected to the customer’s own business value.
That is why seat-based pricing can be problematic. More seats often feel like more cost, not more gain. Customers do not love paying more simply because more people on their team need access.
On the other hand, charging is based on things like:
- transactions
- invoices
- processed volume
- revenue-producing actions
can feel more natural because the cost rises as the customer gets more value.
This is one reason embedded payments and usage-based pricing are becoming so powerful.
Why More Software Companies Are Becoming Payments Companies
Allen highlights one of the biggest shifts happening in software right now:
many SaaS companies are starting to realize the bigger money may not be in software subscriptions alone.
It may be in payments.
That means a company that started as a scheduling platform, invoicing tool, or vertical software provider may eventually realize:
- the software is sticky.
- the users are transacting.
- the payment flow is where revenue scales.
At that point, they begin acting more like payment companies.
Instead of charging only for software, they may:
- bundle payments into the platform.
- reduce software fees.
- waive SaaS fees at certain processing volumes.
- earn a percentage of every transaction.
Allen gives examples from real-world implementations where software becomes low-cost or even free once the customer processes enough volume through the platform.
That changes the economics of the business entirely.
Bundled Pricing Works When It Feels Simple
A strong theme in this episode is that customers do not want to be nickel-and-dimed.
Allen explains how Nationwide Payment Systems packages some offerings with:
- one monthly fee
- bundled tools
- no separate statement fee
- no separate PCI fee
- no surprise add-ons
That kind of clarity matters because business owners want to know:
- what they are paying
- what they are getting
- whether they can trust the model
Roee adds an important nuance here: simplicity is powerful, but complexity can also be used strategically.
For entry-level customers, simple is usually best.
For more advanced customers, some added pricing complexity can be appropriate if it helps the company better capture each customer’s willingness to pay.
In other words, not every pricing model needs to be flat and simple forever. But the complexity has to make sense.
Why Onboarding Is the Revenue Lever Too Many SaaS Companies Ignore
This was one of the best parts of the conversation.
Allen talks about a problem he sees often with software founders:
they focus on demos and sales, but not on activation.
A company might do:
- 20 demos
- close 10 customers
- activate only 1 or 2.
That is not a leading problem.
That is not even really a sales problem.
That is an onboarding and implementation problem.
Allen makes the point that if you sell the software, you also need a clear path for:
- setup
- training
- data migration
- user adoption
- first usage milestones
Otherwise, customers stall out before they ever become real users.
The Case for Implementation Fees and Customer Commitment
Allen shares a practical tactic: charging a setup fee that gets rebated back after the customer starts processing or using the platform.
Why does this work?
Because it creates:
- skin in the game
- accountability
- commitment to onboarding
- better activation rates
That can be especially valuable when the provider has to do manual work like:
- importing data
- migrating inventory
- configuring workflows
- training users
- setting up payments
Roee agrees that this is an important shift in thinking. For years, many SaaS investors wanted products to be completely self-serve and service-light. But in real B2B environments, especially with smaller businesses, that is not always realistic.
Support and services may have lower margins than pure software, but they often produce:
- better retention
- more stickiness
- higher lifetime value
And that matters more than founders sometimes admit.
Architecting profitable software models: An actionable framework for transition away from static flat seats to usage-based metrics, value-driven tiers, and AI-adjusted margin protection.
The Five Core Areas Roee Helps B2B Companies Fix
Roee lays out five major areas his company works on when helping businesses improve their go-to-market strategy.
-
Packaging
How features are bundled and how plans align with customer needs.
-
Pricing Metric
What the customer is actually being charged for, and whether that metric tracks real value.
-
Testing
Pricing changes should usually be tested before they are rolled out broadly.
-
Quote-to-Cash Process
Changing pricing means the billing, collection, and payment workflows also need to adapt.
-
Existing Customer Migration
One of the hardest parts of repricing is moving current customers to the new model without causing backlash.
That last point is a big one.
It is one thing to launch a better pricing model for new customers. It is another thing entirely to change the rules for people who have already bought into the old one.
AI Is Changing SaaS Economics Fast
Roee closes with a smart point about AI:
it is not just changing how software is built. It is changing the economics of software.
Traditional SaaS often had extremely high gross margins because serving an additional customer cost very little.
With AI, which is no longer always true.
Now businesses may be paying real usage costs for:
- computing
- API calls
- model access
- infrastructure
That means the cost to serve a customer may be significantly higher than it used to be.
So, companies need to rethink:
- flat pricing
- unlimited plans
- bundling logic
- margin assumptions
- how usage and value are measured
This is going to create a lot of pricing experimentation across software and fintech over the next few years.
Buyers Can Compare Everything Faster Now
Allen makes another great point:
AI is also changing how buyers’ shop.
In the past, someone evaluating four software vendors might manually build a spreadsheet and compare them over hours or days.
Now they can use ChatGPT, Claude, or Perplexity to generate comparison tables in minutes.
That means companies need to assume buyers can quickly compare:
- pricing
- features
- integrations
- value propositions
- limitations
- support models
So, if your pricing and packaging are confusing, inconsistent, or weak, buyers will spot it fast.
Human Support Still Wins in B2B
Despite all the talk about automation and AI, Allen and Roee land on something refreshingly practical:
people still want human support.
A lot of software companies have over-automated customer contact:
- no phone support
- no real person
- everything pushed into chat or email.
- long delays for basic answers
That may reduce cost, but it can also hurt trust and conversions.
In B2B, buyers often want confidence as much as they want features. Real support, clear onboarding, and helpful implementation can still be a major competitive advantage.
Final Thoughts
This episode of B2B Vault is a great reminder that growth does not always come from more traffic, more demos, or more sales calls.
Sometimes it comes from fixing what happens after someone says yes.
For B2B and SaaS companies, which means looking closely at:
- pricing
- packaging
- onboarding
- payment strategy
- implementation
- retention
Roee Hartuv makes a compelling case that pricing and packaging are not just finance decisions. They are growth decisions.
And Allen adds the practical operator’s perspective:
if the software is hard to adopt, hard to understand, or poorly aligned with how customers actually use and pay value, you are going to feel it in churn, support, and lose revenue.
In a crowded software market, the winners are not just the companies with the most features.
They are the ones that make the product easy to buy, easy to adapt, easy to grow with, and easy to justify.
