To embrace the constraints, one must first identify them. Last week, I was talking to the Head of Pricing at a local law firm. Yes, you read that right, a law firm employing a full time Head of Pricing (turns out this is fairly popular).  The firm’s leadership considers each billable hour equivalent to a […]

Rule #14: Everything you experience is from the past. B2B pricing needs to be responsive to the market, which means reviewing them quarterly and against the customers and markets that have come through in the intervening time. The additional coordination cost of publishing pricing when the offering is not fully self-serve only slows down this […]

Change is a two way street. Pro Tip: Most software, and in fact most businesses, is held together with duct tape and baling twine.  But because it’s so shiny on the outside, and all the duct tape is hidden inside, everyone outside believes it’s a well-oiled machine of perfection.  It’s not.  Though it is waaaay better […]

Often, simply against doing nothing. I often see first-time entrepreneurs struggle to appreciate just how wide a solution set their potential customer have to solve the target problem. The problem could be solved; strategically & system-wide (a better but slower quality improvement) or tactically & locally (a worse but faster band-aid).  Here’s a recent example. A couple weeks back, […]

At a certain price point, SaaS and professional services are indistinguishable. Based on the conversations I’ve had over the past couple months, there are two shifts happening at professional services as they re-emerge from the dearth of engagements over the past couple of years. The first shift is in simplified billing. Places that once billed by […]

Every time I’ve been to Cloudgate, it’s been absolutely packed with people trying to get exactly the right selfie of their reflection in the sculpture. Flickr has an entire gallery just of this. A couple years back, I worked with this fantastic intrapreneur that noticed customers were continually struggling with an existing software product. It wasn’t hard for […]

Measure what you do as you do it The Atomic Unit of Value is a concept I’m noodling on to answer the question: “how do we know if our products are successful?” I’m thinking of the Atomic Unit of Value as the tactical complement to the more strategic 1-sentence pitch. The Atomic Unit of Value is […]

Since announcing my pricing practice, my calendar has been filling up with conversations with B2B SaaS CEOs talking through their current pricing models and pricing struggles. Here are three takeaways from this week’s conversations: If you’re struggling with any of these pricing principles, grab a 30min time off my calendar: Schedule a Price Check with […]