Ibbaka and OpenView on Pricing Transitions in 2022

Steven Forth is a Managing Partner at Ibbaka. See his Skill Profile on Ibbaka Talent.

OpenView Venture Partners lives up to the promise of being a value-added investor. It is a thought leader in areas like product-led growth and usage-based pricing, and supports not only its portfolio companies but the larger communities concerned with moving the innovation economy forward.

Each year Ibbaka and OpenView publish our thoughts on pricing transformations for the coming year. I (Steven Forth) write these together with Kyle Poyar at OpenView. We have now done this for three years and you can find our most recent take, for 2022, here.

Pricing transformations in 2022

Here are our key predictions:

• Companies push usage-based pricing even further

• Customer value management will supercede customer success

• Inflation will dominate conversations on pricing strategy and tactics

• We’ll take the “SaaS” out of “SaaS pricing”

• Pricing strategy will be about increasing company value and not just revenue or profits

I recently updated another post for OpenView, one that has been very popular and helped shape a lot of growth stage companies thinking on pricing.

Your 3 pricing strategy choices

This is just the beginning though. Ibbaka shares some important ideas with the OpenView community.

One that came up recently was is on pricing when a category is being commoditized. (Remember that commoditization is a good thing in general, it means the value of a solution is widely understood and accepted, it is the natural outcome of tornado like growth.)

We recently wrote about this in the context of the DAM (Digital Asset Management) category, which is going through a phase transition.

Pricing as a sector transitions: the case of digital asset management (DAM)

This leaned heavily on earlier and more general analysis that had been shared with OpenView.

Is your SaaS business being commoditized? Here are your options.

We look forward to continuing to collaborate with OpenView to build successful growth companies in the innovation economy.