Customer Value Analysis: How to Understand What Your Customers Actually Value

You cannot price based on value if you do not understand what your customers value. Customer value analysis is the process of figuring out what your customers actually care about and what they’ll pay for. Most SaaS companies skip this step entirely and price based on intuition. The ones that do it well gain an edge that only gets bigger.

Why most companies get value wrong

Ask your product team what customers value and they’ll say features. Ask sales and they’ll say whatever closes the deal. Ask the founders and they’ll point to the original vision. None of them are asking the customer.

Customers value outcomes. They value getting something done. The features, integrations, and vision are means to that end, not the end itself.

Jobs to be done

Jobs to Be Done is the most useful framework I have found for understanding customer value. The core insight is simple: customers do not buy products. They hire them to get a job done.

A “job” is something the customer is trying to get done. It is not a feature request. It is not a use case. It is the underlying motivation that drives them to seek a solution. And there are always three types: functional (what they are trying to accomplish), emotional (how they want to feel), and social (how they want to be perceived). All three matter for pricing. The functional stuff sets the floor. The emotional and social stuff is where the premium lives.

I worked with an IoT company that sold sensor monitoring for factories. The obvious job was tracking machine data. But what the plant manager actually cared about was not getting a call at 3am during peak production. A tool that delivers peace of mind is worth a lot more than one that just sends alerts.

The gap between stated and revealed value

Interviews reveal stated value. Behavioral data reveals revealed value. The two often diverge, and when they do, behavior wins. Which features do customers actually use, how frequently, and in what sequence? When do they upgrade? What were they doing (or not doing) before they churned? These patterns tell you more about what customers value than any survey ever will.

The real challenge is not understanding that customer value analysis matters. It is building a real process for doing this, not just a one-off conversation.

In my upcoming book, Pricing from the Core, I walk through the full methodology for customer value analysis, from interview techniques to behavioral analysis to translating insights into pricing architecture. If you want to be notified when it launches, get in touch.