How to present pricing in slides

To present pricing in slides, show two to four options that differ in what the buyer gets, not just in price, name the option you recommend, and put a line by line breakdown on the slide after the headline figures. Compare the recommendation with a reference the buyer trusts, such as their current spend. Then show what would change the price, so a request for a discount becomes a conversation about scope.

Three tiers that differ in substance

Tiered pricing works when each step up adds something the buyer can see. Rafi Mohammed’s Harvard Business Review article on good, better, best pricing starts from a common failure: companies use discounts to attract price sensitive customers and fail to give high end customers reasons to spend more. A tiered offer addresses both, with a stripped down option at one end and a premium option at the other.

The pricing proposal deck example on this site is an eleven slide proposal from an invented managed IT provider to an invented housing association with 1,400 users across 22 sites. Its option slide shows three ways to buy the same service desk: Essential at £992,000 a year, Managed at £1,362,000 and Plus at £1,672,000, on a three year term. The table below this article reproduces its nine rows.

Read those rows and every step up changes something concrete. Service desk hours go from ten a day to fifteen to all day. Out of hours repairs move from billed hourly to included. The device refresh moves from the buyer’s own capital to a four year cycle and then three. Priority 1 response goes from four hours to one to thirty minutes. Nothing differs only in a label.

What each tier lists

Keep the rows identical across tiers and change the values, not the list. A buyer comparing options reads across a row; if one tier lists features the others do not mention, the buyer has to guess whether they are missing or included.

Order the rows by what the buyer asked about, not by what is cheapest to deliver. The example leads with service desk hours and the out of hours line, because those are the complaints the proposal exists to fix, and ends with exit assistance, which matters to a procurement team but not on first reading.

Price tables for products follow the same logic. The SaaS pitch deck example shows three plans on its pricing slide, Team, Practice and Enterprise, and says in the copy that 70 per cent of customers land on Practice, which tells an investor where the revenue actually comes from. The investor pitch deck example starts its pricing with a free 60 day pilot, because the first thing a trucking carrier needs to know is that trying it costs nothing.

The recommendation and the anchor

A choice of three without a recommendation can become a negotiation about the cheapest option. The pricing proposal names its recommendation on slide two, in one paragraph: Managed, at £1,362,000 a year, £58,000 less than the association spends today. It badges the same option as recommended on the matrix and costs it on the next slide.

The strongest move in the deck is the comparison it chooses. Instead of comparing itself with a competitor’s quote, slide eight compares the recommendation with the buyer’s own IT ledger: £1,420,000 a year today against £1,362,000 under Managed, a saving of £174,000 over three years, with the one line that goes up, the certification, explained. A buyer trusts their own numbers. The caption under the line by line table adds the cost the cheapest option leaves out, device capital and hourly out of hours work, which brings its real cost close to the recommendation.

business.gov.au’s pricing guidance makes the related point for any business: compare on the factors customers value, not only on price, and base price on the value delivered where you can.

Tables, not prose

After the options, show where the number comes from. The example’s slide five is a line by line table with eight line items across the three options: service desk, endpoint and network management, out of hours cover, funded device refresh, on site days, certification, project days and licence pass through. Each column adds exactly to its annual total.

Two details make that slide hold up in a procurement meeting. The subtitle states the terms of the numbers: annual, excluding VAT, fixed for three years with one index linked uplift at month 24 capped at four per cent. And a separate slide lists what is not in the price, from application development to a data migration quoted separately, because exclusions are where a fixed price is actually defended.

The sales proposal deck example does a smaller version on one slide: three tiers as columns, eleven rows, a monthly fee per site, and a single line under the table stating the recommended option and its monthly total for the buyer’s twelve sites.

Discounts, variables and the next step

Show a discount as a rule, not a favour. A rule applies to every option and can be checked. The example has no discount at all; instead, slide six shows what moves the number, five variables with their current values, users, sites, hours, devices and assurance, and a promise to requote in two working days if any of them change.

Then ask for a decision with a date. The example’s last two slides are five dated steps and a single line: tell us by 14 January. Pricing that ends without a next step is a quote, and quotes get filed.

If you sell to Australian consumers, one rule applies to every price on a slide: business.gov.au notes that a displayed price must be the total including GST, and if you show only part of a price, the total must be at least as noticeable.

Common mistakes

• Tiers that differ only in quantity. Buyers pick the cheapest unless a higher tier changes something they care about.
• No recommendation. The buyer is left to negotiate down.
• A headline price with no table. The unexplained number is the one that gets renegotiated.
• Hidden exclusions. They surface after signing and cost more trust than the money involved.
• Prices without tax status. State including or excluding, every time.
• Pricing before value. The example explains what is being bought on slide three before any number appears.

The post on sales deck structure covers where pricing belongs in a first meeting compared with a proposal meeting, and the question page on rate cards explains the document behind day and hourly pricing.

Build it

There are 9 pricing templates, and the page on pricing slides shows them. Two facts shape how you use them. There is no most popular flag to switch on, and the three tier card layout deliberately does not highlight a middle tier, so write the recommendation as words, as the example does. Field budgets are tight: 20 characters for a tier name, 12 for a price, 16 for the period, 80 for a tagline, 60 for each feature line and 20 for the button.

For a line by line table, a table holds up to 20 rows and 8 columns with an optional row header, and every cell is left aligned. The guide to adding charts, maps and diagrams to slides covers adding data slides and charts, including a waterfall chart if you want to show how today’s spend bridges to the recommended price.