The morning I lost the wrong customer

PUBlish · The Notebook 5 May · 2026 A note from the desk · 4 min read The morning I lost the wrong customer. A pricing conversation that went badly last Thursday, what I should have said instead, and what it cost us to find out. Jemma Heather · founder, InterioApp Vilnius · Thursday A retailer in Manchester emailed us last Wednesday. Twelve people, three showrooms, all the right symptoms - quoting in spreadsheets, losing orders to slow turnaround, the boss spending Friday nights on inventory. Exactly the kind of business InterioApp was built for. I jumped on a call with the founder Thursday morning. By Thursday afternoon, he had said no. By Friday, I understood why, and the reason had nothing to do with InterioApp. The reason was that I had walked into the call holding our pricing sheet. Our pricing is per-user, per-month, with tiered discounts for company size. Sensible. Easy to explain. Fits how SaaS works. The retailer asked the question every retailer asks in the first ninety seconds: "how much for our setup?" I gave him the honest answer. Twelve users at our standard rate, minus the small-business discount, billed annually, came to a number I will not write here but he reacted to it with a small pause and a polite "I see." That pause was the moment I lost him. I did not know it then. I went on for another twenty minutes about features. · · · Here is what I should have done, which I figured out at 6am on Friday in the kitchen. The number he reacted to was not the wrong number. It was the wrong frame . He was not buying twelve software licences. He was buying a way out of his current Friday night . The thing I was selling - per-user-per-month - is how I want to think about my business. It is not how he thinks about his. If I had asked one question first - "what does your current quoting process cost you in time and lost orders each month?" - he would have told me. He would have given me a number. The number would have been larger than our annual licence, almost certainly. I could have led with that number and our pricing would have looked like the discount it actually is. Instead I led with our number, and he ran the math from his side, and the math looked expensive because there was no anchor for what expensive should mean. The mistake is not in the price. The mistake is in pricing first and framing second. I called him back this morning. Eight days later, which is too late but not impossible. I opened with the question I should have opened with on Thursday. He did the math out loud. The number was twice what I was asking. He said "oh, that's not bad actually," and we have a follow-up call on Tuesday. This may still go nowhere. Founder confessions on the internet always end with a clean win, but actual sales conversations sometimes just end. What is true regardless of whether he signs is that I would have made the same mistake again next week with the next retailer if I had not lost the first one badly enough to think about why. · · · The deeper issue, which I have been chewing on for a few days, is that SaaS pricing is a tool, not a worldview . Per-user-per-month makes sense for the engineering and the gross margin and the financial model. It does not make sense as the opening sentence of a sales call to someone who runs a window-coverings retailer. For the next ninety days, I am running an experiment. We will not lead with the licence number. We will lead with two questions and a calculation done together with the customer. The licence number will appear in minute fifteen, not minute three. The number on our pricing page will not change. Only the order of the conversation will. I will write this up again at the end of July with whatever the close-rate moved by. If it moved by zero, that will also be a piece worth writing - because it is more useful to know which interventions did not work than to read another article about the one that did. Three things I&rsquo;m taking from this What I would tell past-Thursday-Jemma . Frame before price. Two questions about their current cost of doing it the old way, before anyone hears what you charge. The price is fine. The order matters. Watch for the small pause. A polite &ldquo;I see&rdquo; after a number is the customer doing math you did not give them the inputs for. That is your cue to slow down, not to add features. Call back. Eight days late is better than never. The replay-the-call instinct is real. The cost of the call is twenty minutes. The cost of not calling is the customer telling four other retailers that InterioApp is expensive. — more on the experiments at InterioApp, Jemma @InterioApp The Notebook · Issue No. 04 PUBlish