Services unfold over time, and when you design a service and its pricing you need to make sure to consider how emotional and economic value unfold over time. Find some way to make sure buyers get at least some economic and emotional value early on.

Executives are looking for data-driven insights to make key decisions that will allow them to execute and drive their businesses forward. Business needs to strike the balance between what its market needs and what it can achieve with its talent. Leaders are tasked with driving business performance and outcomes—outcomes that are usually measured in terms of financial performance. The winning path to do this is to create value for our stakeholders while differentiating to stay ahead of the competition and to drive ongoing engagement with our stakeholders.

Category creation is one of the most powerful ways to build a business. For large companies creating new categories is a key to growth. For start-ups it is how to go about creative disruption. How does one approach value creation in a new category? What role does pricing play? Pricing is one of the pillars of a category creation strategy.

Pricing is one of the most powerful ways to change up your business. There are many different pricing actions you could take, so how do you decide which to invest in? Treat your pricing actions as a portfolio. Make sure you are design pricing to accelerate learning.

Your pricing operates as a system. Change one part, a price level for example, and other parts of the system change as well. Designing pricing and them changing or evolving pricing requires a systems thinking approach.

Dynamic pricing is a hot topic in pricing circles. Some experts are predicting that it will dominate pricing in the future. As sellers move to dynamic pricing buyers may move to dynamic buying. This sounds a lot like automated trading and machine auctions. Is this the best direction for pricing? Will it lead to transparent, consistent and fair pricing? At Ibbaka we believe performance-based pricing is often a better option.

Pricing consultants can change your business, letting you set prices more effectively and drive higher profits. Or they can bog you down in process and analysis paralysis. When should you hire a pricing consultant? How should you make your choice? This post gives the essential guidance.

Pricing expertise has a direct impact on enterprise value. Private equity firms are looking at pricing as one of the first areas to improve when the take over a company. Analysts are paying more and more attention to pricing as they evaluate public companies and make buy/sell recommendations. What are the five questions boards need to be asking leadership teams about pricing?

Traditional jewelry is priced on the value of its materials with a premium for brand. Over the past few decades, an alternative has emerged known as art jewelry. As the name suggests, the price of art jewelry is similar to the price of art. It is driven by reputation, collectability and requires engagement from museums to create a market.

Lifetime customer value (LTV) is one of the most important SaaS metrics, one that many teams manage to. Pricing is one of the most powerful levers for framing lifetime customer value and any subscription pricing strategy needs to be designed and evaluated for its impact on LTV and other unit economics.

One high impact pricing tool is Segmented Price Variance Analysis. This tool was developed by Dick Braun, VP Pricing at Parker Hannifin, one of the most respected practitioners in the pricing industry. Dick gave a compelling overview of this and other tools at his keynote address to the Professional Pricing Society.

The growing demand for pricing experts, changes to revenue models (especially the rise of the subscription economy) and the introduction of new technologies (AI and specifically machine learning) was changing the skills needed for pricing expertise and opening new job opportunities and career paths. Our research resulted in a competency model to help train and develop pricing experts.

Majid Iqbal introduced a new model for integrating value, price and customer experience in his book Thinking in Services. We compare this model to other models from the pricing space to see what we can learn from it.

In the book trade, old books are often bought by weight. This seems odd, but it makes sense if you use a mining metaphor. There are lessons here for data pricing or in any case where one knows there is value somewhere but one has to do a lot of processing to find it.

Are you pricing inputs or outputs? Cost based pricing prices inputs. Market based pricing uses outputs. Value based pricing thinks of outputs as an input into other processes. It is the value of an input to the next output along the line that determines value.

Majid Iqbal, author of Thinking In Services, will speak at the Value Innovation and Pricing Meetup on Thursday August 2. Majid’s book goes deep into the underlying patterns behind services and how to combine them. He also brings some interesting perspectives on the impact of customer experience on pricing power. This will be a unique opportunity for people in Vancouver to learn from one of the true deep thinkers on service design.

Pricing design work often needs to include an unbundling phase. The current offer gets broken down into its key parts so that the contribution of each aspect to value can be understood. These function to value mappings are then connected to a value-based market segmentation in order to repackage offers so that they can be priced.

Exciting developments at Ibbaka & TeamFit as they merge expertise to innovate in market insights & people analytics. Meet the new additions, Alexis Katigbak, Brent Ross, & Jessie Tai, each bringing unique skills & passions to the team. With a focus on driving value for customers & fostering collaboration, they aim to shape the future of work & make a positive impact on the world.

How can a maturity model help you with your pricing strategy? It all comes back to what drives value. Different stages of a maturity model drive value in different ways and therefore, influence how they should be priced

This series is focused on the challenges of pricing a portfolio of offers. In the first two posts, we looked at how pricing changes over time and how to set goals for a portfolio of offers. Now, we move on to the most difficult part of pricing a solution portfolio. Working out how to make the interactions between different offers work in your favour. We also look at some of the pitfalls.