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 […]

Is your pricing metric a tugboat or a headwind? Half my projects this year have been clients asking for a better, different pricing metric. Something other than seats, users, or devices.  While the specifics are different for each client – the overall goal is to create annual contract value (ACV) growth. Whether growth is waning […]

The biggest limiter to better pricing: fully appreciating customer value During the inaugural 1-Day Value-to-Price workshop, we helped an early-stage talent development platform quantify customer value supporting a massive 4.4x price increase over their initial, dart-against-the-wall, pricing. The goal of the workshop was improved pricing confidence – provide a backstop for their current customer negotiations and future strategy. […]

“The enthusiasm of customers to talk with us is an indicator of how successful they want us to be.” I just got off a call with a client’s past customer. Three years ago the customer had a very challenging experience with my client and yet, they booked the second available slot on my first day […]