If you manage a sales team, you’ve probably been here. You want to understand your people properly: what they’re good at and what they could improve. Then the quotes come in. A personality profile from one provider, a skills assessment from another and a 360 from a third. Add it up for a team of ten or twenty and the total is hard to justify, so you buy one of them and hope it tells you enough to get started.
When that happens, the price has decided what you get to learn about your own team. When we came to price MyAcumen, I wanted to change that.
I’ve been the one paying these prices
I’ve spent 35 years in sales, and much of that time leading teams. As a sales leader I bought personality assessments, skills assessments and plenty of other tools for my teams. Later, as a consultant, I worked closely with partner firms who supplied this kind of service to my clients. So I know what the market charges, because I’ve paid it and I’ve watched my clients pay it.
When I started on our pricing strategy, I looked again at what everyone charges today. This is roughly what it costs to see one person through each lens:
- A personality profile: around £75, or £300 to £400 and more for some.
- 360 feedback: around £75, rising past £300 once someone facilitates it for you.
- A motivation profile: around £50.
- A sales skills assessment: around £300, and nearer £400 a person from some of the bigger names.
That’s about £500 to £750 or more a person if you want all four, from three or four different suppliers. Nobody joins them up for you either. Each report uses its own language and its own scales, and it’s left to you to work out what they mean together.
Why the price got so high
I don’t think the tools are bad, and many of them are very good. But the price you pay covers far more than the insight. It pays for offices, sales teams, account managers and consultants in the delivery chain. Once a price has been in place for years it tends to stay there, because the business behind it has been built around it.
My honest view, after a long time as a buyer, is that a lot of this market has been overcharging for what is a fairly niche product. That hits hardest when you run a smaller business, or you’re a manager with a tight budget and a team that needs help.
Why this matters more right now
The economic climate is hard for a lot of organisations right now. Growth is a challenge, and so is finding budget for anything that doesn’t feel essential. Asking a business under that kind of pressure to find the large sum this has traditionally cost wasn’t the right answer.
So we set out to do two things at once. We wanted to give a full, thorough picture of each person and the team, and we wanted to price it so that a business under pressure could still say yes. Those two pull against each other, and the only way to do both was to build a different model. That thinking sits under everything else in this post.
Nobody understands themselves only through one lens
Part of the problem is that the market sells each lens on its own, but nobody understands themselves through a single lens. Your personality and natural tendencies tell you one thing. Your core skills, and how well you apply the skills your role needs, tell you something quite different. What drives you, and the kind of setting where you do your best work, is something else again.
Then there’s the 360, which gives you the view from outside, from the people you work with. An established psychological model called the Johari window explains why this matters. Some things about you are plain to everyone else but hidden from you, and you won’t find those on your own, however honest you try to be.
You need all of those together to see a person clearly. That’s why MyAcumen is one solution to this. We bring the personality, core skills, role skills, motivation and 360 results together, and then our AI analyst and coach, Mya, reads across all of them to show what they mean as a whole. Mya draws on decades of our experience in high-value sales when it coaches. Selling them separately would undo the reason we built it and lose the true value of how the elements connect.
Why we didn’t charge the sum of the parts
The easy move would have been to add up those four prices and knock a bit off. Bundle it at £400 and it would still look like a deal next to £500.
We didn’t do that, because our costs aren’t built like theirs. We set MyAcumen up as an AI-first business from day one. Work that used to need hours of a consultant’s time, like reading across someone’s results and pulling out what matters, is done by Mya. We don’t have office overheads, a large sales team or an old price to protect.
That makes us very efficient, and I’d rather pass that on than keep it. We make a margin we’re happy with, and the rest goes back to the buyer as a lower investment. We didn’t set out to maximise margins. We aimed to provide amazing value to our customers.
How we decided
We considered a lot of price points before we settled on our pricing. It’s £199 for each person, which includes all of the assessments and the AI analysis to bring things together. For a team, it’s £999 for the Team Diagnostic, plus a price per person that falls as the team gets bigger.
We chose those numbers because they offer very good value next to anything else you could buy or do yourself. You can hold them up against the alternatives and see the difference straight away. They also let us run a proper service and earn a fair return.
We’re not naïve enough to think this is affordable for absolutely everyone, because that isn’t realistic. Even so, there are businesses that couldn’t find the investment for this. But for most teams it’s well within the reach of their budgets. If growth is the challenge, and it is for many people, MyAcumen will show you why your team is finding it hard and help you focus on fixing the right issues.
What the Team Diagnostic offers
This is work done for the whole team rather than for one person. It pays for setting up the project and launching it with your people, including a short briefing video. It pays for the team analysis and report, where Mya does the first pass and a real person reviews it. You get an interactive dashboard of the whole team’s data and a special version of Mya for the project that answers your specific questions about your team as a whole. It also includes a 90-minute Executive Debrief, live with MyAcumen, where we take you through the key findings and help you to plan your next steps towards improvement.
On top of that, each person costs £199, or less as the team grows, so every person gets the full individual assessment plus Mya experience.
This means, for example, that a team of 20 costs £4,579 in total. Buying the same assessment bundle separately for 20 people would cost somewhere between £10,000 and £15,000, and you’d still have to join them up yourself, with nobody to take you through the findings.
That price only works because Mya does the heavy lifting on the analysis and coaching tips. As the leader, the only real time you need to give is the debrief, which is where it counts. After that, your time goes into using what you’ve learned to coach your people more effectively.
What the investment pays back
We’re asking you to invest, and you invest because you expect a return. That return can come in several ways.
It can save you money on training courses that don’t solve the right problem. It can stop you buying technology, apps and other tools that won’t move your business forward. Most of all, it lets you focus hard on fixing the real problems that are holding your business back from growth.
That’s what you’re investing in: a thorough diagnostic of your business, so the money you spend after it goes on the problems that are really in the way.
If you’re the one who has to set prices, here’s what we learned
If you run a business, or set the prices for one, these are the three big lessons here.
Price from your own costs, not your competitor’s. Their price pays for their offices, their sales teams and their history. If you copy it, you’re charging your customers for overheads you don’t have.
A low price is possible only if you deliver in a different way. Cutting the price on the same business model eventually eats into your margin, until the day when you just can’t afford to keep it down. Building the business model and operations differently is what allows us to stay low and stay healthy.
If your buyer needs several things to get the desired outcome, bundle them together. Offering only part of the answer, to keep the price affordable, gives the buyer only part of what they need. Doing that to win their budget, without delivering the full outcome, is a poor way to deliver value. Then price the bundle rather than try to add up the full total of the parts. The bundle is worth more to the buyer, and it costs you less to deliver as one.
See what you’d get
If you’d like to see what a Team Diagnostic report looks like before you decide, you can explore a sample report for a team of 55 at myacumen.app/sample.
