War-game a pricing change before customers, sales, and finance see it in production.
A price move is not only a number. It changes who buys, how sales sells, what support hears, and how competitors respond. Shipping without a seating chart review usually means you learn the hard objections in the first week of tickets and churn, not in a private pass.
Freeze the scenario
State the current price and pack, the proposed change, the effective date, grandfathering rules, and the success metric you will honor. Name the segments that feel the change first. If the memo mixes three experiments, split them. A war game needs one move under fire at a time.
Write the decision you will make if the war game finds nothing new. That sentence keeps the review from turning into endless optionality. Also write the kill criteria: the conversion drop, churn spike, or sales exception rate that would reverse the change within a stated window.
Seats that matter
- Finance. Margin, cash timing, and what the forecast hides if conversion drops.
- Buyer. Switching cost, perceived fairness, and the message that would make them leave.
- Competitor. Cheapest counter-move and the narrative the market will hear.
- Sales and CS. Objection scripts, exception pressure, and support load in the first thirty days.
- Skeptic. The claim that looks strongest and is least sourced.
Attach the same source pack to every seat: cohort math, win/loss notes, competitor price sheet, and the exception policy you actually intend to use. Secret data for one seat creates fake agreement.
Loop the review
Feed Pingpong the memo, the cohort math, and the seating briefs. First pass steelmans the change. Later passes attack from finance, buyer, and competitor seats. Final pass turns surviving objections into tests, mitigations, or a changed recommendation. Agreement across passes is not proof. Keep the objections that still have evidence gaps.
If sales exception volume is the real risk, force the review to invent the exception policy before go-live. A price change that only works with quiet one-off discounts is not a price change. It is a shadow discount program with worse reporting. Write the exception rules, the approval owner, and the monthly cap into the package, then ask the buyer and finance seats to attack those rules.
Pair with before you change pricing, war-game your strategy, pretend you are the buyer, pretend you are the competitor, and CEO decision review. See AI decision review and how it works.