What have been your key learnings from any "Pricing/Re-pricing launch" that you have led/seen within your company?

Question

Akshay Kerkar · Accepted Answer

Great question! Pricing is something that's never done, since you'll have to keep updating it over time (as your products evolve, the market evolves, or due to competitive moves). A few key things I find useful when working on a pricing change:

* Setting up your approach to how you will develop pricing (and evangelizing that with stakeholders upfront) is really important
 * We need to make sure we identify the "Approvers" - Marketing leadership, Sales execs, Finance partners, etc.
 * As part of the process, it does not hurt to run your thinking by partners and/or a few customers 
 * Enablement is key once you are ready to launch -- pricing can get confusing and is really important for individual AEs, so you'll likely need a robust enablement plan with solid documentation, an FAQ, and refesher sessions in the future

Jonathan Brandon · Answer

The big one....where to start?! Creating your company's first well-researched pricing model is quite different than making a big change later on, but I'd say some of the same advice holds:

* Alignment is CRITICAL! Any change in your pricing, especially in SaaS, absolutely must involve every team within your organization. And as much as it may sting, customer-facing teams (sales, support, success, etc) need to have a very prominent role. Alignment comes from creating a team of cross-functional stakeholders all accountable for elements of the project. Make sure you have a project plan and a DACI! At Intercom, we are lucky enough to have a dedicated program management team, who are critical in ensuring alignment and continued progress. 
 * Make sure your company's strategy is well-defined and committed to for at least the medium term. This includes overall company strategy, product strategy, and GTM strategy. Pricing and packaging strategy should ladder up (and inform) every level. Since P&P changes take a long time to implement (and an even longer time to measure) shifts in strategy can be very difficult to incorporate.
 * Do your research, and be wary of analysis paralysis. Depending on your business model, there will be blind spots that you'll never be able to fully understand, but you should try. In high-volume, self-serve businesses, you will need to supplement your commerical and product data with primary customer research. And in sales-led, enterprise businesses, you'll need to analyze discounting practices and talk to prospects on your own, as sales feedback has strong recency bias and often reflects problems in your sales enablement or team skills, rather than price-to-value. There will be a point where you just can't learn any more, and you have to go with your gut. Which is why it's important to...
 * ...Create clear metrics and a rigorous test plan to attribute results to specific changes that were made. Changing a lot of things at once can make it very difficult to pull apart results that didn't go as expected (and trust me, they won't go as expected!) 
 * Don't skimp on sales enablement, and involve sales teams FAR before launch. Make sure you understand what's working and what's not with the current pricing model. Change is hard, and pricing changes are among the most disruptive things a sales team can experience. Be optimistic, but make sure to frame the change in a way that makes them feel heard and understood.

Aurelia Solomon · Answer

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.

Chris Mills · Answer

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 meets regularly to review and evaluate changes. We've also established Pricing/Packaging Guidelines (simplicity, customer lens, bundle vs. a la carte, etc.) that help us evaluate and make decisions related to pricing & packaging.

Jesse Lopez · Answer

A pricing launch is never easy; you must educate internal and external audiences on your pricing model's "what" and "why." Some key learnings based on my past experiences include:

1. Over-communicate pricing plans to GTM partners (e.g., sales, customer success, customer support, etc.) to ensure there is a clear understanding of your pricing strategy (e.g., positioning & messaging, competitive differentiation, objection handling, etc.) and pricing timeline (announcement, go-live, post-launch reviews, etc.). Many companies execute flawless pricing executions on their website and external channels. Still, they fail to enable their internal stakeholders to roll out pricing plans and empower them to answer questions from prospects and customers.
 2. Be transparent to your existing customers and communicate your pricing plans before enacting changes, if possible. If you plan to gate features on a future date, begin to message them as a "premium" or "added-value" capability to prepare your customers for a forthcoming announcement. If you have a large user base, you should consider offering them more time to transition to a new pricing model and use those extra weeks/months to reinforce the value of your paid offering.
 3. Keep it simple for new customers by creating a pricing model and messaging that is approachable and easy to understand. Many companies typically complicate pricing news by building complex pricing models and explanations. If your pricing model requires multiple reads or clarifying questions, you probably need to revisit your plans.
 4. Don't rush plans; you only get one chance to get them right. I have seen many companies underestimate the scope of their pricing plans. As a result, they encounter issues operationalizing or migrating customers to a new pricing plan, further delaying their pricing timeline.
 5. Build feedback cycles with GTM teams and external channels (e.g., app store feedback, reviews sites, etc.) to monitor customer sentiment and optimize content as you roll out pricing.

Yannick Kpodar · Answer

A few key learnings:

1. Involve your cross-functional partners as early as possible. The worst thing you can do is come up with a new strategy, but Sales or Account Managers don't believe it. They will usually end up not selling it or using it as a discounting lever.
    
 2. Make sure you can make the changes in the product. If you are thinking of adding or changing new features into different plans but your product team can't technically move things from one plan to another or create add-ons. You're in trouble.
    
 3. Make sure billing can support your new pricing and packing strategy. If billing can't do upfront payments or bill with add-ons because they don't have the right tool, your plan won't work.
    
 4. Aim for both growth and profitability. You can change your pricing and packing plan to get volume, but you're in trouble if you're costs outway the customer lifetime value. Similarily, you can create a strategy that enables you to be profitable but not get a ton of volume. You want both growth (volume in new sales) and profitability (each sale increases profitability) to make it work.
    
 5. Get-buyin from cross-functional leadership by showing what's in it for them. (Product to increase adoption and customer satisfaction. Sales to increase sales conversions, etc.)
    
 6. Take your time. Rome wasn't built in a day. You won't change your pricing in a day, either. Depending on your industry, product, and legal due dilligence, it could take 3 weeks, 3 months, or a year.

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