“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 […]

The Basics of Quantifying All the Value Value Stacks are the bridge between the 1-sentence pitch (alternatively ‘jobs statement’)and an actual price.  Here’s a simple example I used in the presentation:  We help CFOs atresidential real estate brokeragesstruggling toaccurately calculate commissions. In this 1-sentence we have; a role, at a specific business, and a frustrating activity. That’s […]

Or how to confuse and discourage the most enthusiastic customers I came up in an age where phone service, both landline and cellular, was sold by the minute – and every minute cost something different depending on where it fell in the day and which day it was. Despite nights and weekends being cheaper they […]

Number 6 Will Shock You The past couple weeks I’ve been toggling between interviewing customers on behalf of my clients (~$50M ARR) and advising early stage founders (<$1M ARR) on getting to real revenue faster.  In the former, customers know my client’s product can help them more, but they don’t have time to just click […]

‘Percentage of Annual Revenues’ is my preferred reference for pricing. My overarching goal for every pricing project is to determine what a given product is worth to a given customer, and make recommendations to move that number closer to my clients’ business goals.  Lately my preferred answer to “What’s it Worth?” is a % of […]