The Price is Right: How Redesigning Signpost’s Pricing Boosted ARPU by 40%

OpenView prides itself on being a value-add venture capital firm. But, what exactly does that mean? For too many VCs, value-add is little more than marketing jargon. At OpenView, value-add is our life blood. We truly provide support to our portfolio when and where they need it. And we don’t just offer advice. OpenView’s value-add team provides deeply researched and actionable work plans to help our portfolio succeed across the board in functions including marketing, sales, recruitment and market insights.

OpenView’s Market Insights team recently teamed up with our portfolio company, Signpost, a provider of local marketing software, during a time of rapid expansion and growth. Signpost suddenly found themselves competing with a new set of companies and needed to get up to speed on several market dynamics including their newfound competitors’ pricing, positioning and discounting strategies.

“Our pricing plan was too complex, there were 16 to 24 permutations. It was just too confusing for the sales team, customers and everyone involved.”

– Rod Feuer, Signpost COO

Signpost worked with OpenView’s Market Insights team to answer the following questions in the hopes of streamlining pricing while capturing more value:

• How do Signpost’s competitors price & structure contracts for their products?
• How do competitors demonstrate value & position their products?
• How is this similar & different from the way Signpost prices & positions its products today?

To get started, the Market Insights team built six competitor product and pricing profiles to best identify how Signpost could optimize their own model.

Ultimately, based on OpenView’s findings, Signpost rolled out a pricing change that resulted in a 40% increase in ARPU in less than a year.

You can read more about the Market Insight’s research and resulting impact in the full case study here.