How to conduct a pricing survey: Questions to ask

Product, price, place, and promotion: These are four factors that determine a company’s sales success. You can have a great product, but if its price is too high or you don’t promote it, you might not get the sales you expect.

Pricing is a tricky thing to navigate in business. The price for a product or service has to appeal to customers while still generating value for the company. In order to hit this sweet spot, more companies are conducting pricing surveys to better understand their markets.

Use this guide to learn how to develop pricing survey questions so you can sell your products at a price your customers will appreciate.

The importance of pricing surveys

Using pricing surveys can help you ensure that your customers think your products are as valuable as you do. If your price doesn’t align with what your customers expect, you could see lower sales than anticipated.

“In consumers’ minds, a price represents two distinct numbers: how much money they have to give up and the level of quality of the item,” Sheryl Green at HubSpot writes. “Price too high and your customers won’t want to part with their money. Price too low and they’ll doubt the quality of your product.”

Pricing surveys can give you a range of what you can charge for a product while also helping you learn about your customers. They can be used for both B2C products and B2B services, software, and systems.

“Willingness to pay [WTP] isn’t a fixed number for all customers: You will likely see a wide variance in WTP between market verticals,” says Ryan Detwiller, director of product marketing at Gremlin and founder of Scalepath. “It may be influenced by the buyer’s role in the organization and how they perceive the problem the product or service is solving.”

For example, one level of an organization may consider a certain software essential, while another may see see it as optional. In this case, the willingness to pay and price perceptions vary within one company.

Your pricing strategy will vary depending on the customer and product. It can also vary because of outside economic factors — which means your pricing survey from three years ago could be outdated.

“Companies might conduct a pricing analysis periodically every year or two,” says Mathew Zein at Prelaunch, or “in some cases, every two months to evaluate their prices compared to competitors and discover consumer expectations.”

One great example of how customer perceptions vary is what happened with video conferencing software in the past two years. In 2020, companies considered these tools high-value because the COVID-19 pandemic made them necessary for remote work. Two years later, executives might not be willing to pay as much for a video conference service unless it proves its value.

10 pricing survey questions to ask

You don’t have to reinvent the wheel when it comes to pricing survey questions. Here are some sample questions you can include in your surveys. You can modify them based on your product, service, or industry.

1. How familiar are you with [the product]?
2. How frequently do you purchase [the product]?
3. What price would you expect to pay for [the product] if you bought it today?
4. If you knew the price of [the product] was X, would you be willing to buy it?
5. What is the most you would be willing to pay for [the product]?
6. At what point would the price for [the product] be so low that you would question its quality?
7. What features do you expect to come standard for [the product]?
8. What features would you be willing to pay extra for?
9. How would you like to pay for [the product] (single payment, monthly subscription, etc.)?
10. What do you like most (and least) about [the product]?

Use these questions as a jumping-off point for your surveys. Also consider what follow-up questions would you want to ask based on the data you receive from these queries.

Tips for conducting effective pricing surveys

Developing pricing survey questions is just the first step toward building an effective survey. There are also a few key ways to increase the chances of receiving accurate, actionable data. Here are a few things to consider:

• Determine the best format for respondents. You might want to use a mixture of multiple-choice and open-ended questions.
• Decide whether you want to refer to your product by name. Your pricing survey might focus on your general product offering instead (e.g. productivity software, shampoo, etc.).
• Make sure you have an objective audience. The survey should target future customers, not necessarily people who are already fans of your product.
• Test your survey for leading questions. Make sure your statements aren’t guiding respondents to specific answers that could skew your data.
• Evaluate the length of your survey. Survey burnout is a real issue. If your questionnaire is too long, respondents might abandon it or stop answering thoughtfully. 

If you’re still worried about conducting pricing surveys, consider working with a professional survey developer or company that creates questionnaires. They can alert you to any problems with your survey design.

Powerful pricing surveys with Jotform

Once you know how to develop pricing survey questions, you just need the right platform to build and share your survey.

Check out some of the pricing survey templates Jotform offers. You can choose from these options or from more than 10,000 other free form templates, and you can customize any of them to create a survey that perfectly fits your requirements. With Jotform, you’ll give your customers a way to easily complete the survey, and you’ll get the data you need to inform your pricing decisions.

Try out Jotform today and see how our survey tools can help you.