CROs at Slow-Growth Companies Often Aren’t Really CROs. They’re Chief Price Raising Officers.

Here’s a pattern I’ve seen play out dozens of times now, and it’s worth talking about honestly.

When a B2B company’s growth slows — say, drops from 50% to 20% or even 15% — the CRO role fundamentally changes. Not officially, of course. The title stays the same. The comp plan still has new logo targets. The board deck still shows pipeline metrics.

But in practice? When growth slows, the CRO job often becomes about one thing more than anything else: extracting more revenue from the existing customer base.

This isn’t just anecdotal. The data is brutal.

SaaS pricing is up approximately 11.4% year-over-year in 2025 — nearly 5x the 2.7% average market inflation rate in G7 countries. And that average masks some truly aggressive moves: Slack up 20%. Adobe up 17%. Salesforce combining a 9% increase in 2023 with another 6% in 2025.

Here’s the telling stat: For Salesforce specifically, price increases now account for up to 72% of forward ARR growth. Not new customers. Not expansion. Price increases.

And according to Gartner, CIOs are bracing for the impact, setting 9% of the IT budget aside for price increases on existing services.

That’s what happens when growth slows. The CRO becomes the Chief Price Raising Officer.

Making the quarter through price increases, not growth

When you’re growing 80%, 100%, 150% — your CRO is focused on net new. On building pipeline. On hiring and ramping reps. On entering new segments and markets. The energy is expansionary.

But when growth slows to 15-20%? The math changes completely.

Let’s say you’re at $50M ARR growing 20%. You need to add $10M net new ARR this year. But you’ve got maybe 10-15% gross churn eating into that. So really you need $15M+ in bookings just to hit that modest growth number.

Where’s the path of least resistance? Your existing customers. They’re already bought in. They’re already integrated. They have switching costs. And you have leverage.

So the CRO becomes laser-focused on:

• Forcing multi-year commits at renewal with 8-10% annual escalators baked in
• Eliminating monthly options entirely (or adding a 5% surcharge for monthly billing, like Microsoft just did)
• “Resegmenting” pricing tiers so customers suddenly need the more expensive plan
• Bundling AI features whether customers want them or not — 60% of vendors now deliberately mask rising prices this way
• Adding platform fees, API fees, support fees — anything that wasn’t explicitly in the original contract
• Using credit systems where they can silently double the credits required for the same service

I just lived this. Here’s what happened.

We had a renewal call the other day with a vendor where we’ve been a case study on their website for five years. Where we’ve referred them tons of other customers. Where we’re already one of their largest accounts. Where we helped them spec, architect, and ship one of their top product enhancements.

The renewal call wasn’t going to be fun in any event. It’s 2024. Every renewal call is an attempt to raise prices. But this one was worse: a new CRO joined the call.

“We’re doubling prices,” the CRO said.

What? We asked why. He said “inflation” and that “our costs are going up.” OK, but double?

We asked him if he knew we were a reference account. He said, “No, I’m still getting to know the business.”

We asked him if he thought doubling pricing with zero notice was fair. He said, “It doesn’t matter.”

Yes, this sounds awful, and it was awful. But here’s the thing: it was his job. A new CRO that owns renewals and upsells at a business whose growth has slowed is going after your top customers like a heat-seeking missile. If new deals aren’t closing and there’s pricing pressure, the obvious target is actually your largest, stickiest customers. Get them to pay more. That moves the needle the quickest in tougher times.

The immediate fallout from that call

Here’s what happened next:

First, we haven’t renewed yet.

Second, we reached out to their competitor that day — one we hadn’t talked to in years. So this CRO, if nothing else, put the deal into play with a competitor. If they hadn’t forced us onto a call and tried to double pricing? We never would have looked. We would have just paid.

And third, we’re gone as a reference forever.

Is all this worth it? It is for the CRO. He has to put points on the board this quarter, and he’s got a tough hand.

But is this good for the vendor overall? I’m really not so sure.

The hidden mechanisms are getting worse

Beyond the headline price increases, vendors are getting increasingly creative with how they extract more revenue:

• AI Bundling (The “Innovation Tax”): Add AI capabilities (often half-baked), bundle them into existing plans whether customers want them or not, raise prices 10-20%, and justify it as “innovation investment.” Google did this with Gemini. Adobe did this with Creative Cloud Pro. You’re paying for AI you may never use, and you can’t opt out.
• Credit Multipliers (The Silent Doubling): Many vendors now use credit systems where “credits” buy services. The catch? Vendors reserve the unilateral right to change credit multipliers. A service that costs 10 credits can rise to 20 credits overnight. Same subscription price, but you burn through credits twice as fast and hit overage charges much sooner.
• The Migration Tax: As vendors upgrade platforms, they charge “migration-related” price increases. HubSpot did this — technically pricing “remains the same at time of migration,” but customers see approximately 5% increases at renewal. Death by a thousand cuts.

The customers notice. They just can’t leave — yet.

Here’s what these slow-growth CROs forget: customers remember.

They remember when you jacked up their price 40% at renewal because you “restructured packaging.” They remember when you eliminated the plan they were on and forced them to a more expensive tier. They remember the “gotcha” true-up where you clawed back months of overage fees they didn’t know were accruing.

They pay. Because migrating is painful. Because they have workflows built on your platform. Because ripping you out is a 6-month project no one wants to own.

But they’re not happy. They’re not expanding. They’re not referring. And the moment a credible alternative emerges — especially one that’s 30-40% cheaper with AI-native efficiency — they’re gone.

The federal government proved this with Slack. When they pushed back hard, they got 90% discounts. That tells you exactly how much margin vendors have been sitting on — and how vulnerable they are when customers actually have leverage.

This is how slow growth becomes no growth

The irony is brutal. The aggressive price extraction that helps you make this quarter is exactly what kills you two years from now.

• NPS craters, so inbound referrals dry up
• Customer case studies become impossible to get
• Expansion revenue goes negative as customers actively try to reduce seats
• The market narrative shifts from “leader” to “legacy vendor”
• Your best enterprise AEs leave because they’re tired of selling to angry customers

I’ve seen companies that were doing $80M at 25% growth end up at $85M at 5% growth three years later. They made every quarter in between through price increases. And they destroyed the business.

The math doesn’t work for customers either.  Not in the end

Here’s the structural problem: corporate IT budgets are growing at just 2.8% annually. SaaS pricing is growing at 9-12%. Businesses now spend an average of $8,700 per employee annually on SaaS tools — up 27% in just two years.

Something has to give. Either customers consolidate vendors aggressively, or they find alternatives, or they push back hard at renewal. The current trajectory is unsustainable.

What good CROs at slower-growth companies actually do

The best CROs I know at 20-30% growth companies do something different. They accept that the growth rate is what it is for now, and they focus on:

1. Genuine product-led expansion. If customers naturally upgrade because they’re getting value, that’s durable. If they upgrade because you’re forcing them, it’s not.
2. Net revenue retention through love, not leverage. Getting to 110% NRR because customers genuinely want more of your product is completely different from getting there through mandatory price escalators.
3. Protecting the customer base for the reacceleration. When the product team ships that new AI module, or when the market expands, or when the economy turns — you want customers who will expand with you, not flee from you.
4. Being honest with the board. The hardest part. Saying “we can make this quarter’s number through price increases, but it will cost us $5M in ARR two years from now” requires real courage.

Go long. And get involved.

Here’s my advice if you’re a founder or CEO: sometimes, these days, you can’t fully trust a CRO or sales team or renewals team to do the right things. The short-term pressures and incentives are just too intense.

You’ve got to get more involved. Sit in on renewal calls with your top accounts. Ask your CS team which customers are getting squeezed. Look at the pricing proposals going out.

Because that new CRO? His job is to make his number this quarter. Your job is to build a company that’s still growing five years from now.

The wild card: AI is coming for seat-based pricing

There’s one more thing to consider. The same AI that vendors are using to justify price increases could eventually disrupt the entire pricing model.

At SaaStr, we’re already downgrading our seat counts at vendors because we have 12+ AI agents in production. We just have fewer humans and more AI agents. If AI agents can truly automate tasks currently requiring SaaS tools, seat-based pricing could collapse entirely.

The Chief Price Raising Officers might be extracting maximum value right before the model implodes.

The test is simple

Ask yourself: if every customer could leave tomorrow with zero switching costs, would they?

If the honest answer is “a lot of them would,” you don’t have a growth problem. You have a value problem. And no amount of price increases will fix it.

The Chief Price Raising Officer might make the quarter. But they won’t build the company.