AMA: Airtable Senior Director, Portfolio & Engagement Product Marketing, Christy Roach on Pricing and Packaging

The best advice I have for messaging around a price increase is to clear, concise, and customer focused. No matter why you’re changing your prices or how justifiable the price change is, a customer is not going to be excited about having to pay more. The biggest mistakes I see in pricing are when companies are too self-congratulatory in how great their product is and why it’s a no brainer to pay more and, on the flip side, companies that are too apologetic or clearly worried about customers bein ...Read More

Fully agree that pricing is tough. I’ll add my own point of view on top of that: pricing is tough and there is no “good” pricing. I have been lucky to work at 5 great B2B SaaS companies, and each of them have had frustrations with pricing, gone through pricing changes, and knew that there were aspects of their pricing model that customers didn’t like. As the folks that drive messaging around that pricing, this is super important to get internal clarity on. So often I hear folks say “can we just ...Read More

This is one of the hardest types of pricing work that I’ve done. The biggest things to me were: Understand how interconnected these products should be: Do you expect these products to be used together frequently? Are they coexisting with one another and can be used on their own or is the best customer experience to use together. Align on attach goals: Understand how important it is for your customers to use all of your products together. Are the company’s goals more focused on getting new custom ...Read More

There are so many questions you could ask but I’ll give you a few: Why do we want to go enterprise? How does landing with the enterprise land in our stack ranked priorities? Ask these to figure out how conviced your company is about going into the enterprise. You want to figure out if moving up-market is a mandatory priority versus something they’re interested in exploring since that will impact how you do this. Do we believe that our product solves a clear need for Enterprise customers? Do we h ...Read More

“Enterprise” can mean so many different things to different people. An enterprise plan and enterprise customer are not always the same thing. I’ve worked at PLG-focused companies where Enterprise has actually meant more of a commercial or mid-market customer, and at other places where you’re working with true enterprises with tens of thousands of employees. The first step is being clear about who that plan is for and what they need. From there, it’s determining if each feature fits that ideal pe ...Read More

Not to get too philosophical but I find there’s often too much focus on who is the “decider” on pricing and often not enough alignment across product, finance, data, product marketing, and sales around how we all work together on pricing. At this point, I don’t feel strongly that my team needs to own pricing, so long as my team is part of the core pricing working group and leadership team that weighs in on pricing. I’ll also say that in much of my experience, whether PM or PMM “owned” pricing, t ...Read More

Too many to count! I’ll give you a rundown of my top ones: Keep the conversation focused on value not price: The more you focus on price, the more the customer will. The more you focus on value in your messaging, the more your customer will see your product as valuable Get really clear internally about what this price change is supposed to do for you: Making sure everyone is on the same page of goals, non-goals, and expectations for this pricing/packaging change will give you the aircover you ne ...Read More

I’ll start by saying that if you’re consistently hearing that feedback, your job as a PMM is not just to come up with messaging to handle the objection but also to make sure you’re getting to the root of the issue, really understanding that feedback, and bringing that to the larger pricing leadership group to keep a pulse on how pricing is received and, over time, decide if you need to make a change or stay the course. You’re not always there just to figure out the messaging, your insights can a ...Read More

Going upmarket is hard, but important to do. I think increasing your price and tackling a new customer segment should always start by looking through the product lens. The biggest first thing is to define the overall value your product brings (or would bring) to a larger customer base. While a company will have an overall messaging framework, messaging to a larger audience usually requires a different approach and often a tweak in how you message your overall value. Once you do that, you can tak ...Read More

Usage Based Pricing is popular for many reasons. I don’t have the exact answer but my hunch is that there are more and more products built to be use by broader swaths of users than there used to be. In this world, a software bill can often get bloated with folks who signed up or got added to a software system once, but never logged in again. Having usage based pricing ensures folks are only being charged for the users that actually get value from their product. This helps customers get over the ...Read More

This is a GREAT question and one that I don’t think a lot of PMMs are asking. My take: Your overall product positioning is about so much more than your specific features or your price. It’s about what your product does. What problems it solves. What value it provides to the business and the buyer. It’s a higher level narrative. That said, your positioning needs to understand and reflect the “why” behind your pricing. You need to be clear how your overall positioning works for each plan and what ...Read More

I’ve seen pricing owned by PM, PMM, or finance at different companies. The world that has worked best for me is Product Management as overall directly responsible team or “owner” with PMM as a key stakeholder and part of the decision making group. This is likely because I’ve spent much of my career at product led growth companies where product’s decisions will always highly impact pricing and growth is a part of how the product is built. I essentially see it like this: PLG or product-led company ...Read More

You’ll likely have a shortlist of the competitors you go head to head against. They should always be on your checklist and the folks you look at most closely. We always use them to checkpoint the packaging of new features, study why and how they make the pricing decisions they do, and go as far as to do frequent teardowns of their pricing page and pricing model There are likely companies who you don’t compete with yet but want to. These are more established companies who you’re hoping to be comp ...Read More

Quick note that in most of my experience, new features are rarely “priced” as a standalone charge unless you’re launching an entirely new solution to the market, so when you’re making the decision you’re often deciding which pricing plan the feature goes in. In that world here’s how I go about it: Start with personas and clear frameworks for which customers should be on which plan and what the plans are for, what value each customer should get on each plan, and what should and should not be poss ...Read More

I assume this new pricing model often comes with packaging changes. My hot take (maybe not so hot) is that packaging is much more important and impactful than your dollar price. If you’ve implemented a change in pricing and packaging, use the changes in packaging to drive adoption and upsell. Maybe there’s a new feature on the new plan types that you know customers want, you can use that to encourage them to adopt the new pricing plan. Maybe there’s more power available to them in the next plan ...Read More

For single versus bundled solutions I usually make a process for the PM & PMM to determine: The goals for the feature in usage and revenue What the best customer experience looks like and our recommended usage path, as well as what the customer experience looks like for users if they only use one product Data and modeling about what each pricing decision will do for our overall revenue and how that fits with our goals (this isn’t always required but is for big decisions) Early adoption/disco ...Read More

I’d actually prioritize messaging your overall product and what your vision is for the full functionality of your product. I say this mostly to point out that having messaging that’s wildly different between plans usually means you need an overall messaging framework first. That said, I always think you should be messaging the full value of your product when it’s at it’s most powerful, and encourage prospective and current customers to use the best version of your product. When you show the powe ...Read More

Without a ton of context on how your company works and what the decision making process looks like, I’d say my biggest advice on what to do here is to lay out the full business case and options. When I hear a big flag from a VP of Sales that there’s an issue, it’s important to pause. It doesn’t mean you’ll always do exactly what sales needs, but sales morale is a hard thing to keep and if you need these folks to succeed. I’d map out the reasons for the price increase, the data and reasons it mak ...Read More

A lot of great content in the market, specifically on Sharebird and PMM groups. I’ve also learned a lot by meeting up and talking pricing with folks across product, PMM, and finance who work on pricing to swap stories and get their insight. Do a lot of digging online about how your competitors and products in your industry price their offerings so you can understand how your product fits in. If you’re looking for a book, I don’t have a ton but the book Predictably Irrational by Dr. Dan Ariely is ...Read More

There are a ton of “intangibles” that we often refer to when talking about what makes a product valuable. A huge factor in this is user experience and the design of a software. In B2B PMM, one of the biggest shifts I’ve seen over the past decade plus is that customers expect the ease and beautiful design of a consumer product at work. I’ve sat on win-loss calls where VPs and c-suite executives say they chose a solution for their team over another because of the design and usability. I’ll also sa ...Read More

Where to start! Here are some heavy hitters: Enabling your team is as important as every other step of planning: Pricing and packaging is vital for your customer-facing teams to know and be resourced around. Usually, one training meeting isn’t going to cut it so make sure you adequately prep for that Just because the change impacts a small % of customers doesn’t mean it won’t still be painful: I’ve been in situations where we’ve felt fine since we’re deprecating a feature that only his 1% of our ...Read More