The Mark Stiving and Steven Forth webinar attracted about 500 people and there were a lot of questions asked in the chat. This is the second of a series of posts where we answer these questions.

The Mark Stiving and Steven Forth webinar attracted about 500 people and there were a lot of questions asked in the chat. This is the first of a series of posts where we answer these questions.

There has long been speculation that AI will enable a shift to outcome based pricing, overcoming objections based on attribution, predictability and accountability. Intercom’s pricing of its Fin AI Agent is evidence that this is beginning to happen. Will AI lead to outcome based pricing?

MEDDIC is a popular approach to lead qualification for B2B SaaS. The M stands for Metrics and itis often where sales struggles. Some even skip over this. The value based approach provides the tools needed to manage the M in MEDDIC.

Value models integrate different types of information: about the customer, about the improvement claims, about the industry and economy along with assumptions that are part of the model. Bringing these different types of information together drives insights that are not available when the data is managed in silos.

Last fall Ibbaka research found that the most common pricing metric for AI applications was per user. This was confirmed in a recent survey by Kyle Poyar and Palle Broe for Growth Unhinged. What are the reasons for this?

Many companies focus on cost reduction as the easiest value driver to define. But there often cases where revenue is a more powerful value driver. Why do so many pricing and marketing teams default to cost value drivers? Revenue value drivers are playing a key role in green or sustainable solutions.

Major generative AI vendors are looking for ways to make solutions more compelling, that is to say higher value. What are the emergent strategies? How are they creating value? How will this value get priced?

AI is changing what we price. That is the theme of our April 26 talk at the Professional Pricing Society conference in Chicago. But it is also changing how we price. Let’s open up our thinking and explore different ways we could apply AI to pricing.

Total Cost of Ownership (TCO), Return on Investment (ROI) and Value are ll used in price setting an justification. How are these related? Which approach works best? A value model is at the heart of a successful value program and critical to managing churn.

Churn is the first of the six Net Revenue Retention Levers to look at. Begin by understanding the natural rate of churn for your solution. If you are above the natural rate of return, then churn is where you need to focus. Ibbaka can help you use value and pricing to reduce churn.

SaaStr recently had a series of interesting posts on pricing. One of them tells the story of a new CRO justifying price increases because of higher costs. Is this ever a good move for a SaaS company?

Many companies start worrying about pricing when they encounter a symptom that they associate with a pricing problem. A classic example is churn. But pricing is only one of the possible causes of churn. Trying to fix churn by changing pricing will only work in certain circumstances.

NRR is the critical metric for SaaS companies and measures the organic growth from within the customer base. There are different ways to drive NRR: reduce churn, grow revenue with current customers and discourage revenue shrinkage. As we near the end of Q1 2024, what are SaaS companies prioritizing?

Should B2B SaaS contracts include automatic price increase? Ibbaka shares poll results and gives some guidance on if and when to include such a clause.

Churn sucks the life out of SaaS business models. In this PeakSpan Masterclass Karen Chiang and Steven Forth will diagnose the root causes of churn and how to use packaging and pricing to reduce churn and improve Gross Revenue Retention (GRR).

Where are people applying generative AI solutions? Ibbaka conducted a quick linked in poll to explore this. Here are the results. Not surprisingly, improving internal business processes is the most common use of generative AI today.

Discounting is a fact of life in B2B SaaS. If you are going to discount, how should you do so? A fine grained approach can pay big dividends. First unpack discount to reflect the structure of your offer. Then repackage discounts to align with your business strategy and how you negotiate.

Our thoughts on what to price, products, use cases or value paths seem to have struck a nerve. We did a LinkedIn poll on this theme and got more than 300 responses in 24 hours. Pricing of value paths is much more common than we expected.

Pricing is often divided into product pricing or services pricing. This is too simple an approach for companies that provide solutions to complex problems. Use cases and value paths can be a more compelling approach to pricing for companies that do more than sell a simple well defined product.