pricing

name	pricing
description	B2B pricing as a surgical discipline. Diagnose willingness-to-pay distribution across PSPs, engineer value-metric alignment, design three-tier contrast sets with decoy effect, build reference-frame stacks (inertia / opportunity cost / replacement cost / competitor), apply Prospect Theory loss aversion to pricing copy, run pocket-price waterfall analysis to plug discount leaks, and operate quarterly pricing reviews as the compounding moat. Anchors every recommendation on Hermann Simon's foundational frame: a 1% price improvement drives ~11% profit improvement on average B2B economics. Based on the JMC Pricing Surgery course (jaymountconsulting.com/learn). Triggers on: "pricing strategy", "raise prices", "pricing tiers", "price testing", "willingness to pay", "value metric", "pricing page", "discount", "pocket price", "decoy pricing", "anchor pricing", "loss aversion pricing", "B2B pricing", "SaaS pricing", "services pricing", "renewal pricing", "expansion pricing", "outcome-tied guarantee", "pricing review".
allowed-tools	["Read","Write","Grep","Glob","Bash"]

Pricing — JMC Pricing Surgery Skill

Comprehensive pricing orchestrator for B2B operators. Treats pricing as a surgical discipline — small precise cuts in the right place compound; sloppy cuts hemorrhage margin.

Quick Reference

Slash	What it does
/pricing	Interactive mode — detect intent, route to a sub-skill
/pricing diagnose	Three-surface diagnostic: WTP distribution, value-metric, packaging
/pricing audit	30-point pricing program audit → 0-100 score + top 3 levers
/pricing tiers	Three-tier design with decoy + anchor architecture
/pricing anchor	Reference-frame stack design for pricing copy
/pricing waterfall	Pocket-price waterfall — find where margin is leaking
/pricing value-metric	Pick the right price unit (per-seat / per-API / per-outcome)
/pricing tribunal	Capstone workflow for high-stakes pricing decisions
/pricing review	Quarterly pricing review cadence + agenda

Core principles (the JMC stance)

1. Pricing is surgery, not strategy. Diagnose first. Cut last. Operators who lead with "let's just raise prices 15%" hemorrhage margin and trust. Find the leak, then close it.
2. A 1% price improvement = ~11% profit improvement on average B2B economics. Pricing is the highest-leverage lever in the business and the one most operators give the least attention. (Hermann Simon, 50+ years of empirical work.)
3. Inertia is the real competitor. Buyers anchor on what they currently do — not on competitor prices. Beat the inertia frame, not the competitor frame.
4. Loss aversion dominates size-of-win. For the 95% of buyers not in cycle, de-risking the purchase matters more than the ceiling of upside. Kahneman + Tversky's Prospect Theory is load-bearing in pricing copy.
5. Value-metric alignment beats price-point tuning. The wrong unit (per-seat when the value is per-API-call) leaks more margin than any discount policy.
6. Three-tier contrast-set with a real decoy outperforms two-tier or four-tier in 80%+ of B2B SaaS / services tests. (Ariely, asymmetric dominance.)
7. Discount discipline > headline price. The pocket-price waterfall surfaces where margin is leaking after the line-item price. Plug the leaks before tuning the headline.
8. Quarterly review prevents drift. Pricing that doesn't get reviewed gets eroded. The operating practice IS the compounding moat.

Workflow router

When invoked, detect the user's intent and route to a sub-skill:

User says	Route to
"Should I raise my prices?"	skills/pricing-diagnostic (then pricing-tribunal if material)
"Redesign my pricing page"	skills/pricing-contrast-set
"My discounts are eating margin"	skills/pricing-pocket-waterfall
"Should this be per-seat or per-something-else?"	skills/pricing-value-metric
"How do I anchor my pricing?"	skills/pricing-reference-frames
"Audit my pricing program"	skills/pricing-audit
"Big pricing decision — help me decide"	skills/pricing-tribunal
"What should we check at the pricing review?"	skills/pricing-quarterly-review
"How do I price renewals / expansion?"	skills/pricing-renewal-discipline

If intent is ambiguous, ask one clarifying question — never two.

Variables (sub-skills inherit these)

The pricing surgery discipline operates on these variables. Capture once from brand-config.json + diagnostic output, reuse across all sub-skills:

Variable	Source	Example
psp	Pain Signal Profile (from companion claude-psp pack)	"Series-B SaaS, demand-gen lead, pipeline gap"
currentTiers	Operator's pricing page	"$99 / $299 / $999 monthly"
valueMetric	What scales with customer success	"Active records / API calls / seats / outcomes"
wtpDistribution	Discovered via Van Westendorp / Gabor-Granger / conjoint	"P10=$50, P50=$200, P90=$800/mo"
referenceAnchor	Strongest plausible reference frame for this segment	"Inertia: 'building it in-house' at $80K/yr fully-loaded"
discountWaterfall	Pocket-price waterfall steps	"List → ramp → volume → bundle → annual → effective"
riskTier	Decision stakes (review-level required)	"Routine / Material / Strategic"

If any are missing for a real recommendation, ask — don't fabricate.

References

Load these on demand for deeper context:

• references/pricing-framework.md — The full JMC pricing surgery framework
• references/pricing-banned-patterns.md — Pricing moves that fail predictably
• references/pricing-lineage.md — Simon / Kahneman / Ariely / Christensen / Ramanujam
• references/reference-frame-stack.md — Strongest-to-weakest anchor types
• references/value-metric-catalog.md — Common B2B value-metric patterns + failure modes
• references/decoy-effect-patterns.md — Asymmetric dominance in three-tier design

Sub-skills

• skills/pricing-kickoff — Adaptive router; detects state + picks next-best step
• skills/pricing-onboarding — Interactive setup → brand-config.json + SOUL.md
• skills/pricing-diagnostic — Three-surface diagnostic (WTP, value-metric, packaging)
• skills/pricing-audit — 30-point pricing program audit
• skills/pricing-tribunal — High-stakes pricing decision workflow (Hypothesize → Test → Adjudicate → Audit)
• skills/pricing-reference-frames — Anchor design + loss aversion application
• skills/pricing-contrast-set — Three-tier + decoy architecture
• skills/pricing-pocket-waterfall — Discount-leak detection
• skills/pricing-value-metric — Price unit selection
• skills/pricing-quarterly-review — Operating cadence
• skills/pricing-renewal-discipline — Renewals + expansion as continuous surgery

Specialist agents

• agents/pricing-reviewer — Pricing-page + tier scorer (0-100)
• agents/pricing-tribunal-judge — Adjudicates pricing hypotheses against the verdict matrix

Full course

This skill is the agent-form of the Pricing Surgery: The Hermann Simon Discipline course in The Compounding Engine. The full course covers 40 lessons across diagnostic discipline, reference frames, value-metric engineering, contrast-set architecture, operating practice, deep cuts on common failure modes, and the capstone Pricing Decision Tribunal sprint.

→ jaymountconsulting.com/learn/courses/pricing-surgery

Operator Pass — the 52-tool API

Pricing diagnostics and the pocket-price waterfall run as hosted API endpoints in Operator Pass (/api/v1/tools/pricing-*). Cross-runtime install via claude-operator-pass.