Proposify Pricing Library, Lead Product Designer.
Mid-market reps didn't trust Proposify with their prices. The v2 Pricing Library couldn't bundle, tier, apply conditional discounts, route approvals or sync with an outside price source, so reps built every quote in a spreadsheet and pasted the result in. Nobody downstream could see what had happened to the number.
"I discovered two reps were quoting different prices for the same product. There was no way to enforce consistency."VP Sales, B2B services provider
| Item | List | Rep discount | Quoted |
|---|---|---|---|
| Enterprise License | $24,999 | 15% | $21,249 |
| Enterprise LicenseSame product, different rep | $24,999 | 28% | $17,999 |
| Pro Services | $5,000 | 0% | $5,000 |
| Analytics ModuleFormula referenced a deleted row | $7,500 | - | #REF! |
"We want the system to update prices, but only if we know when it happens. Surprises would erode our clients' trust."Account Director, marketing agency
I turned that into four principles the team used for every trade-off:
The brief was a full CPQ product: configuration, pricing, quoting, approvals and guided selling. Four sprints of interviews argued against building it that way. Reps weren't losing time to configuration logic; they were losing it to not trusting the price they started from. So Phase 1 narrowed to the Pricing Catalog, with the rest of CPQ to follow on top of it.
The catalog replaced the flat fee list with folders, search and inline editing, and billing frequency travels with each item instead of being retyped into every quote.
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Cost | $8,000 |
| List Price | $24,999 Suggested: $11,200 avg. |
| Default Quantity | 1 |
| Lock Price | Enabled |
| Item | Price | Qty | Subtotal | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Enterprise LicenseEPL-001 | $24,999 | 1 | $24,999 | ⋮ |
| Pro ServicesCustom line, not in catalog | $5,000 | 2 | $10,000 | ⋮ |
| Managed SupportMS-220 | $1,200 | 12 | $14,400 | ⋮ |
| Onsite TrainingOT-050 | $1,200 | 1 | $1,200 | ⋮ |
| Analytics ModuleAM-310 | $7,500 | 1 | $7,500 | ⋮ |
| Total | $58,099 | |||
Customers were asking for live sync between Proposify and their own sheets, and I argued for it. A feasibility spike with engineering found what I'd missed: if both sides changed the same price between syncs, every way of resolving it silently overwrote one of them. That broke the no-silent-automation principle, and a pricing tool that changes numbers without telling you is worse than none, because people stop checking.
Impressive on a roadmap, unresolvable in the one case that matters: a price on a contract.
Still two-way, but a person makes every move, one row at a time, so there is never a conflict to resolve.
Killing sync made the catalog the source of truth inside Proposify, and that tested our second principle. It turned out to be a hypothesis. We'd assumed customers needed Proposify to defer to a pricing system they already had. In reality, smaller companies were happy to build their catalog from scratch, and others were fine uploading a CSV to start. What most companies actually used to track pricing was an Excel sheet, so the eventual answer was simply letting them link it as the source.
| Item | Disc. | Total |
|---|---|---|
| Enterprise License | 25% | $18,749 |
| Pro Services | 0% | $5,000 |
| Item | Disc. | Total |
|---|---|---|
| Enterprise License | 25% | $18,749 |
| Pro Services | 0% | $5,000 |
Every time we chose to show more, whether a log, an icon or one more confirmation, people trusted the system more.