AMA: Gong Director of Pricing & Packaging Strategy, Daniel Kish on Pricing and Packaging

Let's assume that you've got the pricing set, the feature packaging defined, and the product technically built. What happens next? Enablement! My laundry list of things to do includes: Work with the CPQ/Systems team to build out the commercial workflow of what a SKU looks like, how discount approvals and escalations flow, product special terms, and configuration policies Build a training deck for different audiences (Sales, CSMs, Implementation, Support, Deal Desk) that describes what the produc ...Read More

Really depends where you stack up in the competitive ranking.  Let's say there are three products: Mercedes, Toyota, Pontiac. The price reflects the package. That's why Mercedes are $50k and Toyotas are $25k.  Mercedes has premium leather and a host of other items "included in the price" to justify that price discrepancy.  When you're Mercedes, you double down on 1) the experience at every touch-point of being a customer (vs. at Toyota they're not giving you white-glove necessarily when you brin ...Read More

For starters, going multi-product is hard! Like, really hard! And it's typically for reasons outside of pricing and packaging: sellers need to communicate a bigger narrative (think the Customer 360 platform vs Sales Cloud at Salesforce) the product needs to have natural cross-sell points that seed reasons for a customer to expand support, success, and implementation will all need to level-up their knowledge to provide killer experiences But let's say you get past that. On the P&P side, here' ...Read More

There's no hard and fast rule here (ugh the "it depends" answer). In truth it's a function of your product maturity, your buyer's sophistication, and use case differentiation.  When in doubt, keep. it. simple.  The research is pretty clear that good-better-best works, well, best.  It focuses a buyer's mind.  The most common mistake I see are packages that are invented to solve a use case for a handful of customers.  That's how you get SKU-creep.  The order I like to start with is: When in doubt ...Read More

Short answer is as early as humanly possible.  Also probably don't launch in your Q4 (Q1 at your Sales Kick-Off is great if you can swing it!). The key is maximum mind share from the field and minimal distraction as deals are in flight.  PMM tends to lead (assuming that pricing and packaging is in the PMM org) the recommendation and execution.  My feeling has always been that the pricing and packaging is actually messaging, so it's hard to decouple. And importantly, the messaging content needs t ...Read More

The short answer is: think really hard about your buyer.  Usage-based pricing makes a huge amount of sense for small teams who want to experiment.  Hence why you see startups moving fast with dev on AWS or engineers coding on Twilio.  What do most UBP products have in common? The thing you're counting is easy to understand and scales with value. That's why you see so many CIOs loving UBP (remember that advice about the buyer?!).  Counting data, integration points, servers, storage, compute, etc. ...Read More

Basically, you do both.  Working for premium product companies, you tend to optimize for customer value learnings.  And then obviously recognize the reality of a competitive environment.  Something that surprises a lot of people is that you can shift your price up dramatically by presenting it in new ways.  Let's say your competitor sells lemonade for $5. You sell for $6 (it's "hand-squeezed" so you get the premium).  If you ask customers what they think lemonade should cost, most will say $5-$6 ...Read More

The price is traditionally based on two things: How much value the thing is or has created How much the provider splits that value capture with the customer Some strategies say minimize #2. That would be Google Ads (take a small slice of a huge pie). Other strategies say maximize #2. That would be Warner Bros. Studios (take a bigger slice for the risk of fronting cash on a blockbuster movie). I weirdly view those two levers as independent (you can measure #1 somewhat objectively within a range, ...Read More