AMA: Drift Senior Director of Product Marketing, Aurelia Solomon on Pricing and Packaging

The roll-out should happen at the same time you train your internal teams about the messaging & positioning, product value, use cases etc. But, the work with pricing & packaging has to start much early. Ideally you have some idea of the products and features that are going to be released a few months before and can bring it into your pricing & packaging process.  I would think about the features based on tier - Tier 1, 2 or 3, and use that to determine if it needs P&P support. Ti ...Read More

They go hand in hand. You need to keep a pulse on your competitors pricing & packaging so that you can adjust or create promos/spiffs to support your sales team when needed. That said, you don't buld your pricing & packaging process based on the competition. You should undersand the market - conjoin anaylsis, willingness to pay, price elasticity, value metrics your buyers assign your product and capabilities that are seen as table stakes versus a broad or niche value driver. You should u ...Read More

Pricing & Packaging was owned by Product Marketing when I was at Drift. It's also been like that at my other past companies (Enernoc, athenahealth and Toast). With that said, it's a highly collaborative role - including partnership with sales, product, finance, operations and customer success. And of course, your executive leadership team. Product Marketing owns the function - we are the driver of the pricing & packaging process, hold the pricing committees accountable, hold the meetings ...Read More

I love this question. Retros/looking back at what we could have done better is so important. It's equally as important as celebrating the positives, the wins, and what we did well.  My learnings -Always, always, always train your managers and leaders before your roll our pricing & packaging to the fied (sales reps etc). They are your key to adoption and learning. If they understand the why for the change and how it impacts their teams/them - and have had sufficient time to digest the materia ...Read More

This is a great quesstion. And a tricky one. The key is to first segment your customers - and determine how you want to communicate, and what you want to communicate, to each group. For example, you might have long time customers on your legacy pricing that you want to give them extra time to make the change - or some type of discount/incentive to do so faster.  The next step is to prepare what your communication to each cohort of customer will be. And try to make it very simple, showing them wh ...Read More