AMA: SalesLoft Former VP Product Marketing, Chris Mills on Pricing and Packaging

I'll answer this from the aspect of a GTM plan for pricing and packaging changes. The top 3 areas to identify and mitigate risk around include: 1) RISK: Did you get the Price/Packaging right?   Does the price and what's included in the packaging resonate with the buyer?  Is the price point in the ball park of what the customer is looking for and relative to alternative solutions? MITIGATION PLAN: Get input from customers, prospects, analysts and advisors in advance of the change and GTM roll-out ...Read More

I've answered some of this in previous questions, but here are some thoughts... 1) Understand your buyers needs, budgeting/buying process, problem you are solving for them (and/or their users) and the relative value of solving that problem 2) Look at competitive solutions or alternatives to solving the problem and look at how they are pricing/packaging their solution 3) What's the cost of not solving the problem 4) Form a hypothesis on the price for the new product 5) Talk to existing or potenti ...Read More

It depends on the competitive dynamics in your market. Are you the market leader or a new emerging alternative? What are the important buying factors in your market and with your buyers? Is price a primary buying consideration (hint: it often is not unless you make it that way)? It's always important to understand how direct competitors and/or alternatives are tackling pricing. You need to determine what your differentiated value is and how you want your brand represented in your market.  Are yo ...Read More

1). Pricing & packaging is a complex topic that typically involves coordination between many internal constiutents and teams including Sales, Customer Success, Product, Finance, Deal Desk, Marketing, etc. It's important to make sure that you have alignment between these teams as you embark on any pricing and packaging changes. A key is you need to align on what problem(s) you are solving for. Are you looking to increase demand or remove friction from the selling or buying process (perhaps lo ...Read More

Pricing & packaging changes have big impacts across the organization - sales, marketing, product, customer success, renewal, sales/revenue ops, systems, etc. You need to make sure you have strong executive alignment from the C-suite on problems that you are solving for and process to research and implement changes. For big changes, don't underestimate the importance of enablement and change management. One thing that has helped us is we have an internal pricing & packaging committee that ...Read More

In different organziations, Pricing is owned by different orgs. Sometimes Product owns it, sometimes Strategy or Finance, sometimes Marketing and specifically Product Marketing. No matter which team 'owns' Pricing it's almost always a collaborative process to determine Pricing and Pricing Strategy (including whether or not to have it on a Pricing page on the website). At SalesLoft we have a Pricing & Packaging committee that PMM chairs and includes ELT members and other execs from Sales, Mar ...Read More

Generally, product marketing creates messaging guides for new products, features, pricing, campaigns, company positioning, etc. While develop the messaging guide, we typically solicity input from other teams and individuals including product management and other marketers like communications/brand, demand gen and marketing leadership. As the messaging gets near final we do a final review with sales enablement, our sales advisory council (a handful of individual reps and saleas managers) and fina ...Read More

I've done pricing & packaging projects both in-house with the support of external consulting help. If you or others in your org have never done a big pricing & packaging project before it might be worthwhile to bring in external help. I've worked with Simon Kucher in the past and they have a ton of pricing strategy expertise across a variety of industries. In our latest P&P project, we ran it internally but involved advisors from our investors, industry analysts we work with and our ...Read More

The Professional Pricing Society (PPS) offers courses and a formal certifcation program - Certified Pricing Professional (CPP).   https://pricingsociety.com/pages/cpp Their course offerings include topics like:   Core Pricing Skills  Best Practices in Pricing Analytics  Value Based Pricing and Value Modeling \ Best Practices for Pricing Execution Pricing and Corporate Strategy ... (and a bunch of others) Pramatic Institute (formerly Pragmatic Marketing) also offers Pricing courses (https://www.p ...Read More

This is one of the more complex areas of rolling out a new pricing model. It's important to make sure that you understand the impact of any of the pricing changes to existing customers. Are you changing any capabilities that are available to them? Are you giving them more? Generally, you shouldn't and in many cases contractually can't take any thing away. If you are giving them more is the incremental stuff that you are giving them valuable to them? Is it worth the potential price change (to the ...Read More