At a field inspection SaaS, the construction customers wanted the advanced analytics capabilities but, the tooling was sophisticated and brittle. What they actually wanted was the SaaS provider to set it up and maintain it for them.  The feature was desirable; operating and maintaining it was not. For a marketing SaaS platform, the enterprise entertainment […]

Early in my career and in the early days of SaaS, I built a time tracking system for the agency I worked at. Twenty people, eighteen – including me – billable at $200/hour. I was the only employee comfortable writing code and managing web servers so I was an obvious choice. But this alone, not […]

The second best time to plant a tree. Komoroske’s “How organizations are like slime molds” has quickly become one of my most referenced pieces of digital media this decade. It talks about how subtly coordination costs at a growing organization slow down decision making – even for the most strategically significant effort.  Cost of Delay is one […]

Always the clearest signal of customer value you’ll ever receive. When I first started focusing on pricing, a fantastic mentor — hi Jack! — forwarded me two articles: a 1992 Harvard Business Review piece, “Managing Price, Gaining Profit” (Marn, Rosiello), and a 2003 McKinsey Quarterly article, “The Power of Pricing” (Marn, Roegner, Zawada). A solid portion of […]

When it’s better someone else talks to your customers. You’ve seen the sticker on the backs of cars and trucks of all size a thousand times driving down the highway. To state the obvious: when you call the number on the bumper sticker, it’s not the driver of the truck that picks up, it’s some […]

TLDR; hardly ever. We’ve talked a lot about how there’s almost always a better pricing metric than per seat or per user. But, so much B2B software is still sold per seat, so it must be appropriate in some situations. Right? For starters, let’s restate the north star: Price the Noun Customers Value. The easiest way […]

“The business enterprise has two—and only two—basic functions: marketing and innovation.” – Peter Drucker These days, I send one invoice. Maybe two. Rarely three. Never four. The first decade of running my firm, I did what most (all?) creative service providers did; track hours and bill monthly, receive payment net 30. It was the only revenue model […]

Back in For Starters #60 we talked through Value Stacks, a technique for articulating and quantifying value for a specific customer. Consider this part 2, where we turn that value estimation into a price. For starters, value, even quantified value, isn’t willingness to pay. Value is the customer’s expected outcome. Willingness to pay is a range of […]

“Your margin is my opportunity” – Jeff Bezos My first biz dev call of the new year was with an exec saying their seat-based SaaS missed 2025 revenue targets.  The cause? Some combination of customers getting smaller, finance consolidating SaaS tools, and AI helping customers do more in-house. All of which meant fewer seats, renewed […]

A surprisingly long list of all the ways we sabotage our own success At a networking event recently, I heard some variation of “Oh we struggle with pricing”from every business leader I met. While this struggle is shaped differently depending on the team and stage of the company, here are nearly three dozen reasons I continually […]