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

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 what new great benefits they are getting on this new model. You need to show them "what's in it for them." And then determine how the communication will come - via the AM, CSM, email from someone at your company etc. Some cohorts might require 1-1 touches, whereas others an email sequence followed by CSM outreach might be sufficient. Lastly, make sure you give customers time to make the switch. There's nothing worse than having to change to something brand new within 2-3 months when you have other things going on. 6-12 months is a good rule of thumb -- or you can use renewal dates to keep things simple too. In terms of adoption, that's where I lean on your customer success team to be great partners to their customers. And share best practices and customer examples of how other customers are benefiting and adopting it. 

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 material and ask questions -- they will be able to field 90% of the questions that come in from the field. And that's how it should be. Strong first-line managers is the key to any sales team and adoption of any messaging or pricing & packaging roll-outs, training, etc. -Make sure you are including sales and cs representitives in your pricing & packaging process. They need to be brought along - and feel that they do have a seat at the table to voice their thoughts and what they are seeing on the front lines. We do this with a Core Pricing Committee that has 1 (2 max) representatives from each of the major departments (Sales, CS, Product, Marketing, Ops, Finance etc). And, we have an executive pricing & pacakging commitee that is informed along our quarterly process with 2 check-ins (midpoint and final feedback). That group is our c-suite: CRO, CPO, CMO, CCO, CFO, CHRO and co-founders. What works well -Establish your core p&p committee and your executive committee. Determine who the final decision maker is (typically a C-suite. ours is our co-founder). This person should be in every meeting throughout the quarter so they have full visibility and context -Over communicate to executives. Keep them informed of what you discussed, what's next, and what's off the plate (and why for all of it). -Establish a quarterly cadence - with set meetings throughout. Our core P&P committee meets 3 times a quarter to discuss P&P proposals sent to us from people throughout the business (or top down), we have 2 check-ins with our c-suite and then a final approval meeting before we begin the systems work and training/roll-out content. The nice thing about having a quarterly process is that it's there if you need it, but ideally, you don't have big pricing and packaging changes every quarter. It should mostly be around product launhces or new features. Big changes should happen once a year - maybe even longer. -Establish tempate that your internal teammates must complete if they have a pricing & packaging recommendation. Why? It forces them to fully flush out their idea and proposal instead of making your committee do it. If they feel strongly about a proposal, they should be able to take the time to do this. I learned the hard way of creating more work for the committee when we didn't have this template and process. -Create a pricing policy. A document that serves as the source of truth for your business. Anyone internally can go there and ready about all thing P&P to find the answers they need. And, you can easily keep this updated by refreshing it quarterly based on the outcomes of your process. 

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 use this market data (buyers, customers, competitors etc) and your short term business goals to determine your monetization strategy. This strategy will be your north star - letting you say no to any recommendations that don't align to your strategy vs evaluating those that do. Packaging is a strategic job. Pricing is more about the math, margins, etc. But they way you bundle aka package your products, has tremendous implications to how your customers perceive your product and evaluate you as a partner. Most buyers want transparency and simplicity. My biggest learning is that you should make your packaging -- from how you present it on your website to your order form, as simple and clear as possible. That will help you build trust with your buyers/customers and differentiate from the competition (especially those that have tons of add-on/sneaky pricing). 

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 & follow-up, and partner with sales enablement to train the sales and cs teams on any pricing and packaging process. Product management is responsible for communicating with their counterpart in product marketing about any upcoming product and/or feature releases that requires pricing or packaging work. We then bring this into our pricing & packaging process -- where our core committee discusses, evaluates and ultimately makes a final recommendation to our executive DRI.

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. Tier 3s likely don't. But something that warrants a Tier 2 or 1 launches typically will. The pricing & packaging recommendation for these should come from the product manager and the product marketing manager leading the launch. It should be based on what problems the product is solving, who it's for/audience/persona, value it delivers, and how it compares to the competition. Is it a catch-up or parity feature? Is it highly differentiated? Is it a nice to have / required capability vs value add? These are important factors to determining the plan the feature will go into or if it should be sold as an add-on/standalone and at what pricing point. One thing to keep in mind is that during the alpha and beta process, you are still likely working through the pricing and packaging. I would caution to not set any expectations with customers that they will get it for free forever. You might do that, but leave the door open to have the flexbility to choose. You can hande this communication in a high touch 1-1 manner since most alpha and betas are relatively small and/or the CSM should be involved to help drive adoption, answer questions etc.