The pricing model was the ceiling.

At a Series A cybersecurity company, complexity was treated as part of the business. The pricing model was intricate, contracts were bespoke, and every deal required days of operational work before anything could go out to a customer — considered normal because the product was sophisticated and the sales motion was complex. The channel was supposed to be a growth lever, but partners couldn't predict what a deal would cost. Large customers were sometimes getting lower prices than small ones. Small customers received quotes that made no economic sense. Partners who brought in a lead would watch the direct sales team close it without them. The company wasn't just losing channel deals — it was actively training its partners not to trust it. Scale felt like a question of hiring and hustle: push harder, bring in more reps, grind through more deals. The idea that the pricing architecture itself was the ceiling — that the company had structurally built a cap into its own growth — hadn't been named yet. A new CRO joined and asked a simple question the internal team had stopped asking: how does our pricing compare to what the market is doing? The answer wasn't 'somewhat different.' It was almost a polar opposite. The company was pricing on a proprietary unit called an 'Investigation' — a measurement that made internal sense but meant nothing to buyers, nothing to partners, and nothing to a competitive landscape that had standardized on endpoints. Every deal required a translation. Every translation required a Sales Engineer. Every Sales Engineer was spending most of their time as a deal desk operative instead of a technical seller. The pricing model wasn't just inconvenient — it was consuming the people who were supposed to be selling.

• 01Reframed the work from translation to reconstruction. Three senior directors and VPs had spent a quarter trying to map the old structure to a new one. Translating from one pricing logic to a fundamentally different one isn't translation — it's reconstruction, and the assumptions baked into the old model (deal sizing, contract structure, margin math, channel comp) did not survive contact with an endpoint-based model.
• 02Walled the build off from the whirlwind. Kita embedded full-time around Thanksgiving and was scoped before Christmas. One team maintained the existing system through the transition. One individual switch-hit between old and new. One team built toward the end state. A small group of specialty contractors handled the system implementation so the embedded Kita hire stayed focused on design and project management.
• 03Got the pricing unit right first — everything else was modular off of it. Moved from Investigations to endpoints. Larger accounts could receive lower per-unit pricing through economies of scale, but would never carry a total contract value lower than a smaller company. The model became defensible, explainable, and consistent. Partners could finally predict what a deal would cost.
• 04Took pricing off the SE's desk and into a configurable quoting system, freeing technical sellers to sell. Made terms, service descriptions, and product definitions published, versioned documents — not continuous redline negotiations. Moved renewals out of finance's ERP and Excel into the CRM. Gave the channel program a real pricing waterfall: deal registration, protected margins, predictable comp.