DocuSign: Product Pricing and Packaging
Background
Since its inception in 2003, DocuSign has been on a mission to accelerate business and simplify life for companies and people around the world. Having pioneered the development of e-signature technology, DocuSign now helps organizations connect and automate how they prepare, sign, act on, and manage agreements from any device, from almost anywhere, at any time.
In 2023, DocuSign was developing a new no-code/low-code product offering to enable businesses to create and automate agreement management workflows. Later named Maestro, this offering was designed to automate agreement workflows, that is, the series of steps that individuals follow to create, negotiate, review, approve, and manage agreements such as contracts, partnership agreements, service-level agreements, and non-disclosure agreements.
Business Problem
DocuSign had a variety of features it was considering for Maestro, included setting up conditional routing, collaborating with other process editors and builders, providing reporting and data visualization, performing risk assessment, and integrating with and across CRMs and other systems of record. It required customer input to prioritize product features for the product and engineering teams to work on, better understand how to message and position the product in the marketplace, and price and package the features into revenue-optimizing bundles.
Solution
To address DocuSign’s needs, Callan Consulting performed a two-phase research project. The first phase consisted of a qualitative study using the QualBoards methodology and was conducted into nearly 40 DocuSign customers around the world. By starting with qualitative research, we were able to perform a high-level assessment of the overall product concept, understand the competitive landscape and how Maestro would fit in, and get customers’ open-ended input on desired features and functionality. We also probed on how customers would expect such an offering to be priced and packaged.
After the qualitative phase, the team moved quickly to a quantitative phase consisting of a discrete choice conjoint survey conducted into over 700 document process decision makers around the world. With this conjoint study we tested customer interest in approximately 12 separate feature attributes across a range of price points to build a quantitative understanding of which features were most desired and how much users were willing to pay.
Results
For the qualitative research, we asked customers about their points of pain addressed by this new product concept, methods of addressing that pain today (competitive offerings used, manual workarounds, etc.), and desirability of the DocuSign concept and its various features and benefits. We also got a high-level assessment of packaging and pricing scenarios.
For the quantitative study, we analyzed thousands of potential scenarios, analyzing the desirability of each feature individually both overall and by market segment (SMB, mid-market, enterprise as well as internal functional area: IT, HR, Sales, etc.). We then built a series of packages targeted to individual segments and ran them against a variety of price points, analyzing the potential revenue uptick under various scenarios, ultimately coming up with a recommended product line consisting of three separate offerings with different feature sets. This quantitative analysis was supplemented by the results of and insights from the qualitative QualBoards research.
The results were invaluable as DocuSign built its go-to-market plans and strongly influenced DocuSign’s pricing and packaging strategy, ultimately informing the pricing metric, packages, and price points DocuSign took to market. The results were shared with DocuSign’s broader product and marketing teams as well as senior executives, all of whom were happy with the results, and commented on how this research reflected favorably on the DocuSign pricing and research teams.