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Guides · Pricing intelligence · Reading the report

Reading the report

Every analysis can produce two reports. The Standard report gives you the competitor's pricing as it stands and what it signals. The Advanced report adds the frameworks that explain whether that pricing is well designed and how much value it leaves on the table. This page walks through each section and ends with how to use them in a live pricing conversation.

Both reports open in the report viewer with section navigation, and each ends with a disclaimer. Where the pricing page is ambiguous or incomplete, the report says so rather than filling the gap.

The Standard report

Three sections, available for 30 credits as soon as the analysis completes.

  • Pricing Snapshot. The structured pricing data: tiers, the features in each, billing models, add-ons and discount structures. This is the factual record of what the competitor charges for what.
  • Strategic Imperative. What the pricing strategy signals about the competitor's market position and who they are targeting.
  • Pricing SWOT. The strengths and weaknesses of the pricing approach from a buyer's perspective.

The same three sections are produced for every competitor you analyse, so a battle card built from Standard reports compares like with like.

The Advanced report

Everything in Standard plus five further layers, for 120 credits. Section numbering follows the report.

  • Part 3: Value Architecture (COMPASS). The COMPASS framework, co-developed by Michael Mansard and Steven Forth, applied to the competitor's pricing metric design. It evaluates six dimensions: Comprehensiveness, Objectivity, Measurability, Predictability, Alignment with value, and Scalability. The result tells you how well the metric the competitor charges on tracks the value their customers get, and whether it scales with growth.
  • Part 4: Competitive Position. How the competitor positions relative to alternatives, including their tier strategy and a competitive positioning map on pricing strategy dimensions.
  • Appendix 1: 14-Factor Assessment. Michael Mansard's buyer perspective analysis, scoring the pricing across 14 buyer-concern dimensions on a 1 to 10 scale.
  • Appendix 2: Value model. valueIQ's value methodology applied to the competitor's pricing: an estimate of the value the pricing structure creates for its customers against the value it captures.
  • Appendix 3: Value by Segment. How value delivery, and the share of it captured in price, differs by customer segment and use case.
  • Appendix 4: Price Curves. Price sensitivity and elasticity: how the competitor's price scales across usage levels, segments and tier boundaries.

COMPASS and the 14-factor assessment are established frameworks applied by valueIQ. They are not valueIQ's own frameworks, and the report attributes them accordingly.

When a buyer says a competitor is cheaper

"Cheaper" is a claim about a list price on one tier. The report lets you turn it into a claim about value, which is a conversation you can win.

  1. Check the Pricing Snapshot. Find the tier the buyer is quoting and what it includes. Add-ons, usage metrics and discount conditions often change the comparison before you say anything about value.
  2. Read the Price Curves. See what the competitor's price does at the buyer's actual usage level and where the tier boundaries fall. A lower entry price and a steeper curve is a different conversation from a lower price throughout.
  3. Use Value Architecture and the value model section. If the competitor's pricing metric aligns poorly with value, or captures a large share of the value it creates, say so in the buyer's terms: what they pay for versus what they get.
  4. Bring it back to your own deal. Your business case carries an Expected Value for this prospect and a Value Capture figure, price divided by expected value, which the app shows in places as "VCR" or "vIQ Score". Put your Value Capture next to what the competitor's structure implies. The buyer is choosing between two ratios, not two prices.

Ask the Deal Copilot for the objection response and it draws on the same report for the prospect's likely alternatives.

Tip. Refresh the analysis when the competitor's page changes. Reports reflect the page at the time of the crawl, and a Standard report that is 90 days old may not match what the buyer is looking at today.