AMA: Atlassian Former Head of Marketing, Cloud Enterprise and Platform, Akshay Kerkar on Pricing and Packaging

The answer really varies by company - I have seen instances of Product Marketing, Product Management, Finance, Biz Ops, and Sales Strategy teams own pricing. In an ideal world, the team that's both tasked with understand your products/market/customers and works closely w/ Sales is the best place to lead pricing initiatives. In most instances, I'd argue that this is Product Marketing. Product Management are important stakeholders in the process (along with teams like Sales and Finance) but since ...Read More

Pricing is both tough and is not one-and-done - it has to be refreshed over time. While you can use research to figure out initial pricing for launch (see one of my other answers for details on figuring out willingness-to-pay (WTP)), you will need to reevaluate pricing over time to see how it needs to be updated - e.g. are you getting negative feedback from customers? Is Sales having a hard time maintaining your price and so has to resort to deep discounting consistently? Has your product signif ...Read More

Great question! Pricing is something that's never done, since you'll have to keep updating it over time (as your products evolve, the market evolves, or due to competitive moves). A few key things I find useful when working on a pricing change: Setting up your approach to how you will develop pricing (and evangelizing that with stakeholders upfront) is really important We need to make sure we identify the "Approvers" - Marketing leadership, Sales execs, Finance partners, etc. As part of the proc ...Read More

Single product pricing is (relatively) straightforward. When you go to multiple products, or multiple SKUs of the same product (e.g. a Standard Edition vs. Premium vs. Enterprise), the complexity explodes across multiple fronts - Ops/quoting, your website/customer comms, sales enablement, and rep conversations w/ customers.  Perhaps the most important part to figure out when you go multi-product is the GTM model - for example, will you lead with one product and the others will be upsells over ti ...Read More

Hands down the value you deliver. In an ideal world, you figure out the willingness-to-pay (WTP) for your product in the market, and set your price close to the WTP line (and above your costs). WTP is usually figured out through research, both qual conversations with customers, partners, and key stakeholders like Sales and then quanty surveys out in the market (targeting your buyers) to get the actual price points. There are several research firms out there who can run this kind of work for you ...Read More

Few things to consider: 1] Your customer comms plan - when are you letting your customers know? Are you giving them a head's up? Are you letting them know why pricing is changing - e.g. new functionality that's drvcing additional value 2] Your internal enablement plan - for all teams that will be impacted - Sales, Ops, the folks who handle quoting, etc. 3] Arming your sales team - to explain pricing, handle objections, etc.  4] Do you have a grace period for existing customers? E.g. new pricing ...Read More