Saudi Vision 2030 business opportunities, read from the data
Where Vision 2030 spending has actually landed, according to GASTAT figures, and what a foreign B2B seller has to localise before any of it is reachable.
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Most price increases fail on delivery rather than on the number. The rate was defensible, the notice was short, the reasoning was about your costs, and the client heard it as a renegotiation they did not ask for.
Raising a rate on a new prospect is a pricing exercise. Raising it on a client who has been paying the old number for two years is something else, and treating the two as the same problem is why so many increases end in an awkward call and a quiet non renewal three months later.
The difference is that an existing client is not comparing you to the market. They are comparing you to yourself, last quarter. The number is not the hard part. The notice, the framing and the segmentation are the hard parts, and each one has a specific way of going wrong.
Before the mechanics, the context that makes this conversation survivable. In Egypt, annual urban consumer inflation ran at 14.9 per cent in July 2026, up from 14.3 per cent in June, according to figures released by CAPMAS and reported by Daily News Egypt. A client operating in that economy has repriced their own product at least once in the last eighteen months. They know why costs move.
In Saudi Arabia the pressure is growth rather than prices. GASTAT reported real GDP growth of 3.0 per cent in the first quarter of 2026, with non oil activities the main contributor and financial, insurance and business services the fastest growing at 5.4 per cent. A services buyer in that market is competing for the same scarce delivery capacity you are.
Neither figure belongs in the letter you send. Both belong in your head, because they tell you the increase is not the outrage you are privately afraid it is.
A single percentage applied to every account is the fastest version of this and the worst. Accounts differ in what they cost you to serve, how long they have been on the old rate, and how much of your capacity they occupy. Sort them into three groups before you write anything.
The first group is underpriced and low maintenance. These are the increases you should make and expect to keep. The second is underpriced and high maintenance, where the real problem is scope rather than rate, and where an increase without a scope conversation just buys you a more expensive version of the same frustration. The third group is priced correctly and should be left alone, because raising a fair price to hit a round number across the book is how you lose the accounts you least wanted to lose.
Doing this honestly requires knowing what each account actually consumes, which is a data problem before it is a pricing one. If your record of that lives in three people's memories, fix that first. We have written about the CRM hygiene rules that make this kind of question answerable, and the same discipline is what makes a price review defensible rather than intuitive.
Thirty days reads as a demand. Ninety days reads as a plan. The number itself changes very little between those two, and the reaction changes enormously, because a client with a quarter of warning can absorb the increase into their own budget cycle instead of finding it in a month where the money is already committed.
Give notice before the renewal conversation, not during it. An increase disclosed inside a renewal negotiation turns the renewal into a negotiation about the increase. Disclosed a quarter earlier, it becomes a known fact that the renewal then proceeds around.
The instinct is to explain. Salaries rose, the tooling costs more, the exchange rate moved. All true, and all of it invites the client to audit your business rather than evaluate their own decision. Your costs are not their problem and saying so out loud reminds them of that.
The stronger frame is what they are getting. Name what the engagement now includes that it did not include when the rate was set, and be specific enough that it is checkable. If nothing has changed, that is worth knowing before you send the letter, because an increase on an unchanged service is a pure ask and should be smaller and better warned than one attached to a genuine expansion of scope.
This is the part most service firms handle by instinct and then discover at audit. A price change agreed part way through a contract is a contract modification, and under IFRS 15 that is not simply a new number applied from the next invoice. The standard's core principle is that an entity recognises revenue to depict the transfer of promised goods or services to the customer in an amount that reflects the consideration to which the entity expects to be entitled, and it reaches that number through a five step model: identify the contract, identify the performance obligations, determine the transaction price, allocate it across those obligations, and recognise revenue as each is satisfied.
The practical consequence is that whether your increase is treated as a separate new contract or as a modification of the existing one depends on whether the additional services are distinct and priced at their standalone selling price. Get that wrong and the revenue lands in the wrong period. This is worth twenty minutes with whoever signs off your accounts before you send anything, particularly if the increase is bundled with added scope.
An increase that loses nobody was too small. That is not a slogan, it is arithmetic: if every account accepts without hesitation, the old price was well below what the market would bear and you have left more on the table than the increase recovers.
Decide the acceptable loss before you send, name the specific accounts you are willing to lose, and hold to it. The failure mode is discovering your tolerance one call at a time, granting an exception to the loudest client, and ending the quarter with a price list that has an undocumented discount attached to whoever complained hardest.
The cost side is the other half of this calculation, and it drifts in ways that are easy to miss. Our colleagues at Rivl made this point about software specifically in the year one bill that arrives after launch, and the shape of the argument holds for any service where the delivery cost quietly rises while the invoice stays flat.
Send the notice in writing first, keep it to a page, and state the new rate, the date it applies, and the notice period. Follow with a call for the accounts in your top group only, and let the rest respond in their own time. Do not open with the call. A verbal increase with no document behind it invites the client to remember a different number than the one you said.
When somebody pushes back, the useful answer is almost never a discount. It is a smaller scope at the new rate. That keeps your price list intact, gives the client a real choice, and turns a confrontation about your value into a conversation about what they need. If you find that most pushback resolves this way, the underlying issue was scope, and the fix is upstream in how the work was priced originally. We set out that method in how to price a B2B service without guessing at the number.
Deals that stall at this point usually stall for reasons that have nothing to do with the number, and the pattern is the same one we described in the five places B2B deals actually die. A price increase is a small sale, and it dies in the same places.
We have not given you a benchmark percentage, because there is not an honest one to give. The right increase depends on how long the account has been on the old rate, what your delivery cost has actually done, and what the alternatives cost your client, and no published figure knows any of those. A number borrowed from an article is a number you cannot defend in the call that follows.
The second limit is contractual. Many retainers specify a notice period or an annual review mechanism, and where they do, the contract decides your timeline rather than your preference. Read the agreement before you plan the campaign, and where an increase is not permitted mid term, the honest move is to wait for renewal rather than to send a letter you cannot enforce.