Imagine you're Salesforce making this switch at $35B in revenue:

FROM: $100k+ ACV deals priced per seat with multi-year commits; every seat is the same price regardless of role or usage

TO: Consumption-based pricing where customers only pay when AI delivers an outcome, starting at $2 per conversation 🤯 Ignore the strategy side of this.

(Yes, Salesforce faces huge disruption to its per-seat pricing if AI can take on the work of a sales or support rep.)Consider the practical realities of making this switch:

1️⃣ The hard work now starts at contract close, it doesn't end there.

This is like shifting from being Planet Fitness to being Barry's Bootcamp. Every day is now a potential revenue event, or a churn event. There's zero room for shelfware or 60% of licenses never logging in.

Your Salesforce rep is about to look a heck of a lot more like a CSM. And your Salesforce PM is about to brush up on product-led growth tactics.

2️⃣ Sales comp is about to get, well, messy.

Comp was pretty straightforward in the old model (and quite lucrative for top sellers). Now, what do you do?

You could still pay reps for signing up a big volume commit -- but that's pretty backward. It sets up longer deal cycles, over commitments, and future churn. Or you could look to folks like AWS & Snowflake and pay reps based on actual consumption. Or do something more creative (which is likely where they'll end up.)

3️⃣ Good luck predicting "ARR" for Wall Street.

In the old model, forecasting the business was a straightforward spreadsheet exercise with known inputs: pipeline, sales cycles, win rates, etc.

But now you've got to understand (a) actual product adoption, (b) how usage ramps over time in an account, (c) usage seasonality on the customer side, (d) improvements to the product to successfully manage more conversations.---

Shifting to these new value-based pricing models isn't a pricing change you can announce in a press release. I

t's a business model revolution that looks a lot like the shift from on-prem to SaaS in the first place. Things are about to get interesting 🍿