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Pricing and Packaging
Pricing and Packaging
8 answers
Director of Enterprise Product Marketing at Amplitude
I think that list is correct and you should prioritize this list depending on your business. In addition to the above, I would advise getting a tool like Chorus.ai or Gong.io. Chorus or Gong will help you scale as your team scales in getting customer feedback both on the new business side as well as current business. In reality, you can't be on all the great calls as that is physically impossible.
Head of Product Marketing, Cisco Meraki at Cisco | Formerly Tellme Networks, Microsoft, Box, Vera, Scout RFP, and Sisu Data, to name a few.
Aim high, and ask for more than you think you'll need - but not by more than
15-20%. People will always be your biggest budget line item in PMM - we're the
most valuable asset because structured thinking and positioning can't really be
outsourced or delegated to software.
However, key items that I would examine for fit in your budget:
* Content creation for top-of-funnel assets, separate from Content Marketing
* Video production (think $5-10K for an animated explainer video) to fill in
gaps in your content
* Competitive and market survey data. Plan ahead to learn more about your
...more
VP of Marketing at Blueocean.ai
I would recommend doing a listening tour with your key stakeholder teams in the
organization (product, sales, growth, enablement, partner) to help inform your
priorities, as budget items could be almost limitless. It's also important to
understand the state of your product and where it might need the most help, to
help prioritize your asks. E.g you might need to invest more in awareness /
thought leadership content or third party validation research, or maybe you have
needs lower in the funnel such as demo and video creation.
Some good buckets could be: content creation (white papers, webi...more
VP Product Marketing at Medallia
This is a good list to start with. I will add a couple:
* Analyst/3rd party thought leadership pieces: Having independent, 3rd party
content is very helpful. If you are focused on the Enterprise, having content
from top tier analysts is helpful. I have worked with Gartner, Forrester, The
451 Group, Ovum Research and IDC in the past
* Graphics/multimedia: you will need to generate lots of great content that you
deploy across channels. You may have good writing skills in your team but you
will likely need support for research/graphics/multimedia. I have typically
relied o...more
VP of Product Marketing at Salesforce
You have all the right line items! In addition, I'd recommend:
* Focus groups for messaging/positioning/pricing & packaging: I'm a huge fan of
getting feedback from prospects and customers on any new changes. This helps
to have impactful content.
* Video editor/agency: Having a 3rd party video editor helps speed up content
creation considerably. Plus, they can usually handle multiple projects at the
same time and you can create new sales or external-facing collateral pretty
fast.
* Tool to track sales content adoption: Highly recommend a tool to track
content adoption...more
Head of Marketing, Cloud Enterprise & Platform at Atlassian
A few other things to consider:
- Your team's research needs (qual and/or quant)
- Any analyst-related spent (either for research reports or to engage w/ analysts)
- Content-related needs -- always a good idea to work with a good content agency to flex your capacity when needed
- And perhaps most important - a team-building/fun budget for your team :)
Head of Product Marketing at Narvar | Formerly Iterable, HubSpot, IBM
Great question. Looks like you've captured a lot of the big rocks that normally
go into the budget, but a few additional things to consider:
* People Budget: Depending on the planned growth of your team for this year,
and near-term priorities, knowing your people budget can ensure you can bring
in consultants (as necessary) to bridge any gaps and help support short-term
strategic initiatives.
* Tools: Beyond Sales Enablement/Content Management, you may want to consider
Competitive Intelligence as another tool category if you don't have one
already.
* Win/Loss: If you're ...more
Director of Product Marketing at Snorkel AI | Formerly Twilio, SendGrid
Love what you have already! Do you have budget for qual research incentives? This is a huge gift if you can offer $100 to target personas to provide feedback on messaging, or to prospects for win/loss interviews, etc. Also consider a recruiting tool like Respondent.io if you are running out of low-hanging fruit from networking / site pop-ups / LinkedIn recruiting.
4 answers
VP, Marketing at Inscribe
Oh I love this question! For me, my background is in both PMM and PM... and I believe that my future will be too. As you continue in your product career, you'll find that every organization has their own "classification" of these two roles and that a lot of the responsibilities really blend across the two teams. Sometimes PMM is responsible for pricing, sometimes PM is. Sometimes PMM is responsible for competitive intel, sometimes PM is. So, it's really about what you like about your PMM role and finding an organization that aligns to that.
GTM Leader | Marketing Author | Career Coach
I suppose that answer varies for everyone. For me, it was simply about being more comfortable with marketing than with product management. I didn’t really know what product marketing was until a few years into my marketing career but once I got into it, I loved it. In hindsight, I don't regret it for a second. Having said that, there is obviously an overlap and each position must intimately understand the other.
Head Of Marketing at Tailscale | Formerly Atlassian (Trello), HubSpot, Lyft
Great question and I've thought about this a lot, I LOVE watching Product
Managers work and think that the problems they tackle are super fascinating,
that being said, I'm a marketer at heart. I think PMMs are lucky to be in a
position where we get to work super closely with PMs but our jobs are very
different. I like Product Marketing because it's so versatile, what I do from
day-to-day can really vary but I also get to really own things and take them
from start to finish, collaborating with tons of people along the way. Product
Marketing to me is the "connector" role, your job requires in...more
Product Marketing Lead at Plaid | Formerly Google
I started my career in Marketing (Brand Marketing, CPG) and always loved the
intersection of consumer/customers, brand building, and business ownership. I
went to business school to transition industries - from CPG into Tech - and
locations - from Latin America to the US. MBA folks would know that most schools
advise to only switch one out of three variables (industry, location, function).
I chose two.
During this search, I explored and interviewed for both options: Product
Marketing and Product Management. What drove me towards Product Marketing is
that I still got to experience the asp...more
1 answer
Sr. Director, Product Marketing at Hims and Hers | Formerly Lyft, American Express
While there’s no perfect answer here, there can be too much of a good thing.
Behavioral economics research has shown that we tend to have a hard time
deciding from a large array of options. This phenomenon is known as choice
overload. It’s also often referred to as the paradox of choice, being
paradoxical, of course, because you’d think that more options would be better.
In fact, not only is it harder to make a decision when there’s too much choice
available, if we do end up making a decision, it can lead us to feel less
satisfied with it than we otherwise would. Some experiments have...more
3 answers
Head of Monetization & Pricing Strategy at Intercom
At Intercom we believe in value-based pricing, which means we price primarily,
but not exclusively, according to the perceived value of our proudct to our
target buyers. Competition is an important input, but unless you are selling a
fully commoditized product for which many identical alternatives exist (ie.
toothpaste), it shouldn't be the primary driver of your pricing. I could hold up
two identical black rectangles labeled "smartphone" and put $999 on one and $599
on the other, then ask you "which one is an iPhone?" and I guarantee you'd know.
They have the same features. They're probabl...more
Head of Marketing, Cloud Enterprise & Platform at Atlassian
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 (or
larger companies have teams that do this in-house).
You should ofcourse be aware of the...more
Sr. Director, Product Marketing at Hims and Hers | Formerly Lyft, American Express
It’s always really tempting to look for “answers” among what competitors are
doing. I think you should absolutely keep competitive moves in mind, but I would
urge you to start from a place from the value you deliver and only rely on
competition if you don’t think you can articulate the value well enough.
To understand why, here are some of the pitfalls of relying too heavily on
competitive moves:
* Information asymmetry: You might think they’re basing a choice on sound
information, but there’s a decent chance they’re not.
* Strategy: Relying too heavily on competitors ends up de fa...more
4 answers
Head of Monetization & Pricing Strategy at Intercom
Assuming you have a clear strategy, it always comes down to understanding your
ideal, target customers. When going from a single product to multiple, you need
to figure out who it's for, what drives value, and how you plan to charge. We
have a set of richly detailed buyer personas at Intercom that connects
segmentation, value drivers, product needs, and willingness-to-pay. To develop
packages, you start with a hypothesis: create hypothetical packages, price
points, and buying motions (self-serve vs sales) and then pull in
cross-functional team (designers, researchers, analysts, and sales pe...more
Head of Marketing, Cloud Enterprise & Platform at Atlassian
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 time? Which product will you pitch to which type of customer?
Defining this clearly upfront will...more
Director of Pricing and Packaging, Twilio Flex at Twilio | Formerly Narvar, Medallia, Helpshift, Feedzai, Reputation.com
This is a good question. Multiple products, sold successfully together can take
a company from good to great. You now have multiple revenue streams and a chance
to increase the total spend your customers make with you. Leading to high growth
rates and NDR (net dollar retention) rates.
From a pricing standpoint, it is important to think about these products both
individually and together.
What do I mean by that?
All products will have to be priced on their own merits, based on the buyers and
use cases they work for. At the same time:
1. The pricing metric should be consistent/similar ...more
Sr. Director, Product Marketing at Hims and Hers | Formerly Lyft, American Express
I would encourage you to make sure you’re putting the customer first whenever
you encounter this.
In my experience, it’s really tempting to bolt on the next product with slightly
different pricing that solves for that particular new product but doesn’t
account for the existing one. Then you can end up with a bit of a frankenstein
experience that makes it hard for customers to evaluate what’s right for them,
having downstream effects on conversion.
So make sure that whenever you’re going from one product to multiple, it’s hyper
clear to the customer how they are either different or wor...more
4 answers
Chief Marketing Officer, Dalenys & Xpollens Payment Solutions at Natixis
Customer willingness to pay is crucial. You can create a product, but if it's
not seen as a must-have for your customer, they won't purchase. Focus on
building a product that meets a real need, which is core to a business' toolbox.
An easy way of prioritizing new feature development is to ask your customers. We
have a customer/user community where we ask them to prioritize certain features
and ask them why before we develop them.
If you build a product and your customer doesn't purchase, you know you skipped
the Voice of Customer phase.
Everything we build is because it will either inc...more
Group Product Manager at Zendesk
The mistake some Product Marketers make is to only think about net new revenue
potential. For example, let’s say you are deciding between two features that
will take equal amounts of development time. Do you build the feature that will
help you attract new customers or one that will retain your existing ones? If
you only considered net new revenue potential, almost everyone would recommend
building the feature to attract new customers. This is because the feature that
helps with retention won’t have any immediate revenue impact. Therein lies the
mistake.
Many studies have shown that it can...more
Group Product Marketing Manager - (CIAM / API Products) at Okta
"Be pragmatic"
Yes - sometimes, deals tend to have revenue opportunities linked to them, and
the PMM-PM team needs to decide on the trade-offs about making changes to the
roadmap that have revenue linked to them. In such situations, it is important to
be pragmatic. Some of the questions to think about while considering revenue
linked feature development are:
Customer and deal pipeline impact - How many opps and current customers will be
positively impacted by building the feature now?
Timeline - How long will it take to meet the customer's demand. Can we meet to
offer the customer an acc...more
Sr. Director, Product Marketing at Hims and Hers | Formerly Lyft, American Express
Many things should play a role in shaping the product roadmap. That might
include customer insights, market opportunities, current customer satisfaction,
and beyond.
Willingness to pay (WTP) should absolutely be among those considerations.
In order to determine how much it should play a role for your particular
product, you need to first reflect on what the product strategy is. Are you more
of an engagement-based product trying to get customers to interact (e.g.,
TikTok, Nextdoor, Instagram). In those cases, I wouldn’t get hung up on WTP
because you don’t need customers to make a buyin...more
1 answer
Sr. Director, Product Marketing at Hims and Hers | Formerly Lyft, American Express
Price acts as a huge quality signal. One of my favorite studies on the subject
is one done by Professor Dan Ariely. He had a hypothetical painkiller he called
Veladone Rx. In reality, in this experiment, it was nothing more than a sugar
pill. There was no actual active medication in it. But the participants didn’t
know that. It was paired with literature that said “clinical studies show over
92% of patients report relief in 10 minutes.”
In the first variant, people were told that the drug cost $2.50 per pill. In the
second variant, people were told each pill only cost 10 cents. Both grou...more
1 answer
Sr. Director, Product Marketing at Hims and Hers | Formerly Lyft, American Express
Picture this: You’re working on the merchandising team at Williams-Sonoma, a
home goods store that sells things like upscale kitchen appliances, utensils,
and cooking supplies. Your boss has just asked you to figure out how to sell
more breadmakers, which are appliances that mix the ingredients, form the dough,
and bake it all in one. Many people enjoy fresh-baked bread, but not many people
have the time or patience to make it, so the convenience of it makes it
interesting for the brand to push in store.
Okay, you might first think about running a promotion. Adding a discount would
surel...more
4 answers
Chief Marketing Officer, Dalenys & Xpollens Payment Solutions at Natixis
There are multiple turning points when you should think about reviewing or
changing pricing;
* You're losing too many deals to the competition
* Constant feedback from your Sales team that pricing and packaging needs a
revamp
* You're expanding your product portfolio
* You're entering a new market
* You recently got acquired
* Too many customers are churning (although it could be for other reasons)
* Reached an MRR or Customer acquisition milestone
In sum, lots of different events could create an excellent opportunity to review
pricing.
The most important piece of advice for a...more
Director of Product + Customer Marketing at Resultados Digitais
Aside from the triggers, I would say it is imperative to constantly review your
pricing on a regular basis. Aside from one-off items mentioned above, I run an
annual process (that in the future I want to be 2 per year) where I gether the
pricing committee that I lead and we bring up suggestions of the key issues we
think we need to be addressed with monetization strategy. Our process goes as
follows:
1. I prepare an initial list of pain points and opportunities
2. I send the list to others to add theirs
3. We all detail the problem, if there is a hypothesis and the type of analysis
...more
Director of Pricing and Packaging, Twilio Flex at Twilio | Formerly Narvar, Medallia, Helpshift, Feedzai, Reputation.com
Pricing strategy will be closely tied to either a major product change, new
market entry, onboarding a brand new sales team or persistent issues identified
in deal win/loss analysis.
This is like any other major company strategy change. PMM can lead the
discussion if they are involved in bringup the insights leading to the change in
pricing -- i.e. win/loss, competitive analysis or being part of strategic
analysis on TAM for a new product or market.
Once you earn a seat at the table, you might be asked to lead the project
itself.
But its hard to do if one is stuck being reactive and i...more
Sr. Director, Product Marketing at Hims and Hers | Formerly Lyft, American Express
The best time to prepare a change in pricing strategy is when you have
actionable data.
Perhaps you would have guessed something more related to the product or
portfolio lifecycle, like when another product is getting added into the mix.
These moments can certainly make internal conversations a little smoother, but
ultimately you’re going to want your case to be built on a strong foundation
rather than anchoring yourself to internal processes.
In that case, the question then becomes “What data?” You could use data from any
of these sources to inform a business case for making a pricin...more
3 answers
Director of Pricing and Packaging, Twilio Flex at Twilio | Formerly Narvar, Medallia, Helpshift, Feedzai, Reputation.com
Your room to maneuver depends on whether you have a fully transparent pricing
model reflected on your website or if it is somewhat general on the pricing page
so that your reps can customize.
If I were to guess, this is a transparent pricing page on your website.
1. Package Definition: It could be worth considering what would increase package
differentiation more so that your prospects have a clear choice in front of
them. To do this correctly it is important to try to reduce the overlap between
the segments targeted by the packages. You can also consider adding a decoy
package to mo...more
Head (VP) of Global Enablement at Benchling
Value selling is a really tool you can have in your arsenal. I would do a few
things here if you're focused on having them shift to higher selling things.
(1) Articulate Value - what is the customer getting for paying more? What are
the benefits they would gain with this?
(2) Teach them to place competitive traps - what are questions they could be
asking their prospects to place some FUD in their minds? I have done things like
"below the iceberg" documents for AEs which teach them all the things that the
customer may not be thinking about in terms of all the below the surface stuff
th...more
Product Marketing Lead at Klaviyo
It sounds like you may be cannibalizing yourself with overlapping product
offerings. If customers are happy to use your cheaper product, it means the
value of your enterprise package isn't crystal clear. I'd go back to the value
prop on this one, what does your enterprise package offer the customer that's
worth the price? If you feel you have that figured out, then it's just a matter
of illustrating that through messaging. Show some super specific examples of
enterprise brands that have seen killer value from upgrading and you'll have a
more convincing narrative.
Another option here is t...more