Ask most software and technology leaders whether they understand their customers, and they’ll say yes. Ask whether their pricing reflects that understanding, and their confidence evaporates.

Our Monetisation Mastery research, which surveyed over 270 senior UK business leaders, found that only 32% of Software & Technology companies say their prices genuinely align with the value they deliver. And only 24% can tailor their service levels and pricing to the needs of different customer segments. That gap between customer insight and pricing is where revenue quietly slips away.

This isn’t primarily a research problem. Most tech companies have data. They run net promoter score (NPS) surveys, analyse usage patterns and talk to key accounts. The breakdown happens downstream, when that knowledge is turned into offers, packages and communications that justify price to customers.

There are two key issues to overcome here. The first is a communication problem: companies understand the value they create but cannot articulate it in their pricing. The second is structural: they haven’t built offers that reflect different customer needs at different price points. One is harder to fix than the other, but both are costing revenue today.

Avoid the features fog

Communication clarity often means putting yourself in the customer’s, value-driven, shoes.

Walk into most product planning sessions and you’ll find engineers debating capabilities, not customers. Roadmaps are built around what’s technically interesting, what’s already in development, or what a handful of vocal enterprise clients requested six months ago. The result is offerings that are technically impressive but commercially unclear.

“Identifying that certain features should be deprioritised in order to communicate a clearer message is often the hardest conversation to have. Engineers become attached to products and ideas, having often spent years developing them.”

– Jason Carley, Managing Director, Pearson Ham Group

When offer design starts from the product rather than the customer, pricing ends up anchored to the cost of what was built, not the value of what was solved. Customers can’t see what they’re paying for. Sales teams can’t articulate it. Revenue suffers, quietly.

Facing up to the seat-count reckoning

AI is accelerating this problem in a specific and structural way. For years, software pricing relied on a simple proxy: users. More seats, more revenue. It was never a perfect measure of value, but it was close enough and easy to administer.

That logic is under serious pressure. Klarna reported revenue per employee approaching $1M in mid-2025, up from $575k the previous year, as AI drove efficiency gains across functions, most significantly in customer service. In short, each person and each workflow was delivering significantly more. 

That’s because companies using AI-powered tools need fewer seats to generate the same output. The value being delivered is therefore growing. The problem is, the headcount-based pricing model isn’t keeping pace with that growth.

The 2026 Revenera Monetisation Monitor captures the wider picture: 80% of software companies already offer AI-enabled products or features, yet 70% say delivery costs are undermining profitability. They have built the capability. They haven’t worked out how to make it pay.

Moving from access to value

This structural shift has moved us into the Value Era. In the Access Era that preceded it, software companies charged for a licence to use a tool. In the Value Era, customers expect to pay for what the tool does for them.

This isn’t a small shift in pricing mechanics. It’s a fundamental repositioning of what the product is.  It requires rethinking how offers are designed around customer needs and how those benefits are communicated in a way that makes customers want to pay for them.

Some companies are already making the move. Intercom repriced its AI product, Fin, away from a per-agent model toward a per-resolution model, charging for outcomes delivered rather than users licensed. Salesforce launched Agentforce on a per-conversation basis, later evolving to a credits model, generating over 8,000 deals in its first months and pushing its AI and Data Cloud revenue past $1bn. These aren’t experiments; they’re responses to customers who have already started questioning whether seat counts have anything to do with the value they receive.

However, most companies aren’t following this lead., They’re refining their products positioning. Our research found only 22% of Software & Technology companies say their customers are aware of all the features and advantages of their proposition. And only 27% deliver consistent value messaging across all channels.

“What companies believe about their customers and what customers actually experience are often two different things. Our research makes that gap visible. Knowing where it sits in your business is the starting point for everything else.”

— Guljeet Sahney, Head of Insights, Pearson Ham Group

This is what we mean when we talk about the gap between knowing and earning. Understanding your customer isn’t enough. You have to translate that understanding into offers, tiers, and messaging that customers can act on. In Software & Technology, that translation is where most of the opportunity sits.

What closing the gap is worth

Businesses that tackle these monetisation gaps systematically – from how they design offers to how they price and communicate them – consistently unlock revenues inside their existing customer base.

The numbers compound. Small improvements in how value is structured, priced, and communicated affect every transaction, not just new ones. Even on a relatively modest revenue base of £10M, improving how value is captured across just a handful of offer and pricing decisions can realistically generate £1-2M in additional annual revenue on new products. No new markets, just better alignment between what already exists and what customers are willing to pay for it.

Our research found that only 18% of businesses demonstrate high capability across all four dimensions of monetisation. For the remaining 82% this is an opportunity. In Software & Technology, the data suggests how companies design and communicate their offers is the key to taking it.

That means getting the monetisation sequence right – starting with customer needs, then shaping offers, setting prices, and finally communicating value. 

PHG is a specialist pricing and monetisation consultancy. Our Monetisation Mastery research is available at pearsonhamgroup.com. To explore where your commercial model sits, contact us at contact@pearsonhamgroup.com.