This blog post discusses the importance of value in customer engagement and introduces the Value Cycle. It explains how value creation, communication, delivery, documentation, and capture are essential for building strong customer relationships. The post also presents a simple scorecard for evaluating a company's performance in each area of the Value Cycle.

Pricing pages are the public face of SaaS pricing. Make a habit of systematically reviewing pricing pages to see what you can learn about your competitors pricing and positioning. Here is a nine step approach to reviewing a pricing page. Zoho Desk is used as an example.

One of the most crucial roles in a subscription business is customer success. Communication of the value offer to the customer and ensuring that the value promised to the client is fulfilled are the responsibilities of customer success. Healthy renewal rates, increased Customer Lifetime Value (LTV), and more success with up-sell and cross-sell opportunities are all ensured by consistent value communication and measurement of value supplied to the customer.

Value-based pricing and customer success are coming together into a new discipline customer value management. Prepare yourself for this transition with Ibbaka’s new course on pricing and customer value management. Sign up for updates on this course and to help us shape the approach.

Value-based pricing emerged from the need to price differentiated products and services in the B2B context. Price optimization models based on simplistic economic theories proved inadequate for complex solutions with multiple stakeholders in the decision making unit. But over the past two decades, applications have expanded, first to sales and marketing, then to product management and marketing and most recently to customer success.

Too many companies negotiate a price during the sales process and then forget about it. This is a recipe for failure. Pricing and value are closely connected. The pricing-value conversation continues across the customer journey. Keeping this conversation current is how to drive renewal, cross sales and upselling.

Usage-based pricing is a best practice and a key step towards outcomes-based pricing. This sounds good, but what usage? Should any click be used for the usage metric that becomes part of the pricing model? Value paths are are a sequence of actions that lead to value. They are different from but related to value streams. Identifying value paths and then making them part of your pricing model is the key to usage-based pricing.

Just because you have professional services and software subscriptions and data does NOT mean you are driving a service led growth model. You have service led growth when services predict subscriptions and subscriptions predict revenue. Prediction is key. To really get the crank turning, data is also monetized and the platform is constantly reducing the cost of service delivery while increasing its value.

More and more services companies are weaving software into their solutions. There is a tendency at some companies to discount the software to maintain margins on professional services. This sends the wrong message to customers and internally. Discounts services before you discount software.

Over the past few years, Rob Litterst has emerged as one of the most compelling new voices in pricing. His Good Better Best blog has consistently insightful content. He is able to look at a company’s pricing page and see its pricing strategy and positioning.

Value documentation is emerging as a best practice. It is especially important in subscription models or models where there is a lot of repurchase. Many companies lack a formal process for documenting value. Who is responsible for documenting value at your company?

Ibbaka is sharing a comprehensive set of value-based pricing decision guides and tools that you can use in your product and services management, marketing and sales and customer success work. Build your business on the value you deliver to your customers (V2C or Value to Customer). Let us know what pricing decisions you need to make and what tools will be of most value to you.

Customer success has emerged as the foundational discipline in the subscription economy. Delivering on its promise requires significant investments, and management teams sometimes struggle to understand and justify these investments. On the other hand, customers can balk at being asked to pay to achieve what has been promised to them. Here is a guide to how you should think through pricing customer success.