Pricing and customer value management is an emerging business practice that manages value to customer (V2C) over the lifecycle of the customer engagement. Managing value entails creating, communicating, delivering, documenting and then capturing a fair share of the value created through pricing. Help define this category by participating in this survey.

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.

Some are predicting a recession in 2023. With recessions, one often sees market consolidation. The number of potential customers, or the number of pricing units, or both, can decline. This has implications for both pricing and growth models. Leaders need to be prepared to respond.

For pricing to be effective, it should track the value metric. The value metric is the unit by which the product or service offering is consumed that best reflects how the customer gets value.

A pricing metric is the unit of consumption for which the buyer pays. An example of a pricing metric is dollars per litre for purchasing fuel. Choosing a pricing metric is one of the most important steps in designing value-based pricing.

Fashioning a business with value at the center requires a commitment to ongoing value creation for customer stakeholders. In depth understanding of how value is created for the customer is foundational to designing fair and effective value-based pricing. It also creates positive customer experiences across the customer lifecycle. Customer value management is an emerging business practice that manages value to customer (V2C) across the full customer journey.

At Ibbaka, we often come across organizations who struggle to support their sales team in their value-based selling endeavours. Sales teams often find it difficult to defend pricing and communicate the differentiated value of the offer.
With that in mind, we developed The Ibbaka Value Pricing Dashboard which is a software as a service (SaaS) application that connects value to price, and helps organizations quantify and demonstrate the value that they deliver to their customers.

Have you ever wanted to pause and take an outside-in view into your organization’s approach to pricing, positioning and value creation? At Ibbaka, we understand that assessing one’s market approach is not an easy undertaking. We want to enable both new and mature organizations to take a disciplined approach to assessing their pricing and go-to-market strategy. Which is why we have designed a The Ibbaka Self-Assessment Tool to get you started.

Discover the transformative potential of strategic pricing with Ibbaka. Our insights on dissecting Roger Martin’s Strategic Choice Cascade, crafting winning aspirations, targeting high-value market segments, and executing tactical decisions to connect value metrics with pricing strategies.

Coming back from maternity leave during a pandemic has reframed my understanding of the importance of emotional and community value drivers. At Ibbaka we have always included emotional value drivers in our analysis. Recently we have added community value drivers. We have recently been focussing on trust. As a mother with a child in daycare I have a real appreciation of the value of trust and its implications for pricing.

Our recent research on how people price innovations found different pricing methods for sustaining versus disruptive innovators. Sustaining innovators tend to use value-based pricing. Disruptive innovators are more likely to price relative to the market alternative. We explore why this might be using the Clayton Christensen model of disruptive innovation.

At Ibbaka, we begin our pricing work by understanding the value of your product or service from the perspective of your customer. Our approach is to research, validate and quantify the economic (monetary) and emotional value your offer creates for the market with customers and non-customers. By understanding your differentiation relative to the customer’s next best competitive alternative, we can design a pricing model built that communicates and even amplifies your differentiation.

Primary research for B2B pricing requires a focus on how the offer creates value for different types of prospective customer and how the customers buy. It is important to combine surveys with interviews and to avoid confirmation bias. Direct questions about willingness to pay (WTP) give misleading results.

We see a lot of b2b market segmentation in our work. Often these are the weakest part of the marketing plan. Many segmentation is typically limited to firmographic data and in some cases are simply a list of industry verticals. They are meant to find a market that fits the offer. Instead, we should segment based on emotional and economic value creation to build an offer that fits a market.

There are many ways to innovate on your pricing metric to get a closer correlation with your value metrics and business model. Heathrow Airport provides an interesting case study. Note how they use different pricing metrics for inbound and outbound flights!

While appealing to emotions may seem intuitive within the B2C environment, there are often questions around whether emotional value creation really matters within the B2B environment. That is, is there room for emotions if it is “just business”?

Even if you have a highly differentiated, value-added offer and are able to charge a premium without much customer pushback, your pricing should not aim to recoup the full value you create for your customers. Your price should leave a consumer surplus - that is, the customer should feel they are getting more value than the amount spent, as value perception is key to the sustainability of any good pricing.

In the Sixth Edition of The Strategy and Tactics of Pricing, Tom Nagle and Georg Muller introduce the Value Cascade. This is a powerful framework for identifying value and pricing leaks. Use it to ask yourself hard questions about how you create, communicate and capture value.

Pricing excellence requires organizational alignment on pricing. Corporate culture plays an important role in this. It is critical that finance, operations, product development, product marketing and especially sales are aligned on pricing success. Without alignment, it is difficult to execute on adaptive pricing.

Good market segmentation brings together customers that buy the same way and get value from a product or service offering the same way. It ensures optimized use of an organization’s resources through targeting customer segments who derive value from the offering in a way that is in alignment with the organization’s objectives of maximizing revenue, profit or margin at a reasonable cost to serve. Market segmentation is the foundation of value-based pricing. In value-based pricing the goal is to capture a fair share of the differentiated value of an offering relative to the customer’s next best competitive alternative.