Pricing is at the center of any business. It influences product features, marketing, sales, finance, most KPIs…

But, often there is no clear strategy!

Shortly after I first started working as CFO for a tech startup, I was asked to help determine the pricing plan for our SaaS products. It became very complex very fast and no one had a clear vision. I was overwhelmed. The easy solution seemed to be a classic 3-tier pricing plan with a 29€ /39€ / 59€ subscription price structure that actually ended up making no sense at all. I realized that no one had actually every thought about customers willingness to pay, feature bundling or segmentation before spending quite a large amount of money on product development. It was also unclear what kind of value was generated for our customers.

Working as independent consultant with other companies, I learned that we were not alone. Most companies start thinking about pricing only once they have developed their products and need to put a price tag on to start selling. While I believe that pricing should be part of the overall product strategy of a firm, often no one seems to fully own pricing. This is natural, as it relates to marketing, sales, finance, product or maybe even legal, and it is not clear who should own the overall strategy.

I have developed my strategic pricing framework to guide management teams in creating and testing their pricing plans and I am now working on putting everything together into a book. In particular, I want to focus on the unique problems that arise from innovative business models and when pricing digital B2B products. My approach is compatible with the lean concept and relies on iterative development and testing of ideas. In practice, businesses are run based on KPIs like Customer Acquisition Cost, Lifetime Value or Churn and try to maximize LTV/CAC ratios. Pricing strategy heavily influences these indicators and my goal is to help managers understand it in this context.

In order to bring all of these ideas together, I will be presenting abstracts of the different elements on this site in my blog as I develop them further and I would love to hear your feedback. If you would like to keep up to date and read my posts, you can sign up to my newsletter on the bottom of my landing page.

Now, to kick off my writing process I need your help. I would like to ask you to take a short survey to tell me where you have struggled with pricing issues and what you would most love to see covered in the book.