Price Discovery: Finding Competitor Prices When Nobody Publishes Them
Your buyer already has a number in their head before you walk in. Your job is to find out what it is.
Summary
- In Indian B2B almost nothing is published, so most founders set prices without knowing what the market pays and find out one deal at a time.
- A buyer's reference point comes from four places, and only one of them is a competitor. The alternative solution, doing nothing and building it in-house all carry a price too.
- Ten legitimate sources, triangulated, give you a price corridor. Talking to a competitor about price is the one thing you must never do.
Every buyer arrives at a negotiation with a reference point. Something they're comparing you against, whether or not they say so.
In consumer markets that reference is easy to find: the prices are on the shelf. In Indian B2B, almost nothing is published. Price lists are internal, contracts are confidential, and the number your competitor actually accepted last month is known to about four people.
So most founders set prices with no idea what the market pays, and then find out one deal at a time, expensively.
There is a better way, and it doesn't require anything improper. Here's what it looks like.
Start with the reference, not the competitor
Before you research anyone, be clear about what you're looking for. Your buyer's reference point comes from one of four places, and only one of them is a competitor.
A direct competitor. Same problem, same approach. The obvious one, and usually overweighted.
A different kind of solution. Same problem solved differently. If you sell software that reviews contracts, the reference might be a law firm's hourly rate, which is often five to twenty times the direct competitor's price. This is where premium pricing lives, and most founders never research it.
Doing nothing. The spreadsheet, the manual process, the junior analyst. It has a real cost, loaded salary times time spent, and it's the thing you most often lose to. If you can't state that number in rupees, you don't yet have a price corridor.
Building it themselves. Especially relevant in Indian enterprise, where in-house tech teams are large. The reference here is headcount times months, plus the risk it doesn't work.
Research all four. The competitor price is one input, not the answer.
Ten ways to find what the market pays
Roughly in order of how much you can trust what you get.
1. Published price pages and rate cards. Start here, but remember that published price is list, not what anyone actually paid. In enterprise the gap between the two routinely runs 20 to 50%, and most of that gap sits below the invoice line.
2. Public tender records. GeM, the central procurement portal, state tender sites and PSU award notices publish winning bids with line-item prices. If you sell anywhere near government, banking or public sector buyers, this is the richest public price data available in India, and almost nobody uses it.
3. Win/loss interviews. Structured conversations with deals you lost, run by someone who isn't the person who lost them. Ask what the alternative quoted, how the deal was structured, and what would have changed the outcome. Done within 30 days of the loss, this has the highest information yield of anything on this list.
4. What prospects tell you. Buyers reveal competitor pricing as leverage. Capture it in your CRM as a proper field rather than a note. Across fifty deals it becomes a dataset.
5. Review platforms. G2, Capterra and similar often carry price bands in reviews. Skewed toward self-serve and Western buyers, so useful for calibration rather than for Indian enterprise.
6. Channel partners and system integrators. They carry competitor rate cards and know the margin structures. They'll tell you far more than the competitor's own team would, and the reseller margin itself tells you how much discount room your competitor has.
7. Public financials and funding announcements. Revenue divided by disclosed customer count gives average contract value. Annual reports, investor decks and press releases leak more than companies realise. Crude, but directionally useful.
8. Job postings and sales compensation. A posting stating quota and on-target earnings lets you infer average deal size and sales efficiency, and therefore roughly what deals are worth.
9. Industry bodies and published benchmarks. Sector associations sometimes publish aggregate pricing data. Useful for ranges.
10. Your own customers. The ones who evaluated alternatives before choosing you remember what they were quoted. Most will tell you if you ask in the right context: a quarterly review rather than a negotiation.
Record it properly
Don't put this in a slide. Build a simple table and keep it alive. The minimum columns:
- Competitor and segment
- List price, and observed actual price
- What they charge per
- Contract length
- What's included free
- Implementation charge
- Payment terms
- Observed discount depth
- Source, date, and how confident you are
Two columns most people leave out and later regret.
What's included free. The real weapon in Indian B2B is waived implementation and bundled support, not headline discount. If you're comparing list prices and ignoring this, you're comparing the wrong thing.
Payment terms. A competitor's 15% higher price on 30-day terms may be worth less to them than your lower price at 120 days. Compare on what actually reaches the bank.
The line you must not cross
A necessary word, because an article telling you to research competitor prices has an obligation to mark the boundary.
Under India's Competition Act, agreements between competitors to fix prices, share markets or rig bids are treated very seriously. The Competition Commission has acted against cartel conduct across many sectors.
What's fine: published information, tender records, what a customer volunteers, what a channel partner tells you, win/loss debriefs, public financials. Gathering market intelligence is normal commercial practice.
What isn't: talking to a competitor about price. No "let's both hold at this level." No agreeing discount ceilings at an industry association meeting. No signalling your intended price moves to rivals.
The offence is the agreement or coordination, not the outcome.
Be especially careful in industry bodies, founder WhatsApp groups, and shared investor networks. These are exactly where informal coordination happens and exactly where it's hardest to defend afterwards.
Two practices to avoid as well. Inducing someone to bring confidential documents from a previous employer creates real legal exposure. And misrepresenting who you are to obtain a quote is common practice, but carries reputational risk and sometimes contractual risk. The ten methods above make it unnecessary.
Treat this as orientation and take proper advice on anything that affects channel pricing policy.
Then find out what it's worth
Competitor research tells you the reference. It doesn't tell you what you're worth relative to it.
For that you need willingness-to-pay conversations: fifteen to twenty-five structured interviews per segment. Not "would you pay X?", which people answer badly, but a proper walk through how they solve the problem today, what it costs them, which capabilities actually drive their decision, and where in a price ladder their answer changes character.
One thing to ask that almost nobody does: what's your approval threshold? In Indian enterprise, a great many deals are shaped more by approval process than by value. Knowing that a VP can sign ₹24.9 lakh without a tender, but ₹25 lakh triggers a three-vendor bid, is a pricing insight no survey will ever produce.
Where you end up
Not a price. A corridor.
A floor, from your own cost structure. A ceiling, from what you're worth to the customer relative to their alternatives. And a target somewhere between, with the evidence for each boundary written down.
The number you pick inside that corridor will change many times. The corridor is what makes the choice a decision rather than a guess.
Where to start
Run win/loss interviews on your last ten lost deals. Ask what the alternative quoted and how it was structured.
Ten conversations, a fortnight, and you'll know more about your market's pricing than most of your competitors know about theirs.
Our Pricing Maturity Assessment covers alongside the other layers of pricing, so you can see where your biggest gap actually sits.
Frequently asked questions
What is price discovery?
The process of working out what the market actually pays, and what your offering is worth relative to the alternatives a buyer is considering. In public procurement it refers specifically to a bidding process; in commercial pricing it means building a defensible price corridor from evidence.
How do I find out what competitors charge in B2B?
Triangulate. Published price pages give you list. Public tender records give you winning bids. Win/loss interviews, prospect disclosures, channel partners and public financials fill in what actually gets paid. No single source is reliable; the pattern across several is.
Is researching competitor pricing legal?
Gathering information from public sources, customers, partners and your own lost deals is normal commercial practice. What is not permitted is coordinating on price with a competitor: any agreement or understanding about price levels, discounts or bids. The offence is the coordination, not the research.
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