Ibbaka spoke with pricing expert Mark Stiving about how he developed his expertise in pricing, what could be done to improve pricing education at business schools and the value capture gap. In Mark’s experience, the value capture gap is one of the most effective frames for engaging company leaders in a conversation on pricing.

In the enterprise cloud world, integrations are central to value creation and differentiation. How does one go about pricing these integrations? How should vendors see the emergence of platforms that can integrate many different applications. Value-based pricing shows us how to proceed.

Many companies are adding predictive analytics capabilities to their offers. We all want to know more about the future, there is more and more data available and deep learning style AIs have been described as prediction machines. How should this new functionality be priced? There is no one answer, but by following the basic value based pricing process one can get to an answer.

In a time of uncertainty one of the most powerful tools we have is scenario planning. This approach has been underutilized in pricing, but its power is now becoming apparent. There are three key ways to use pricing scenarios. Each of these is explored here.

Why Use Value-based pricing? Pricing can be extremely complex to many as it is a nuanced art but also a strange science. There are many different pricing models and strategies to choose from. It's hard to know where to even start. If your product has differentiated offers and you want the most flexible model that can support different pricing strategies, value-based pricing is for you. Pricing models might seem complicated but here we break down the structure to show the basics of value-based pricing.

Understanding your customers is critical for value-based pricing. Adam Lorant and Doug Lyons have a long and hugely successful track record in starting and coaching high growth companies. They are now taking those insights and putting them into the customer canvas. In this interview we learn about the customer canvas and explore its connections to pricing.

Willingness to Pay (WTP) is one of the most popular ideas in pricing. Many software packages or consultants will tell you that they can calculate your customer’s willingness to pay and use that to set prices. What happens when willingness to pay collides with ability to pay? Or when there is compelling community need that transcends either.

Ibbaka made the Ready to Rocket List for 2020. This list is in its its 18th year and celebrates the British Columbia’s high growth technology companies, those that are most likely to succeed. In this post we share Rocket Builders insights from the launch event.

Ibbaka has an ongoing research program in market segmentation, customer targeting and pricing. This connects to our other research in talent, competency and skill management. Market research is outside in. Skill research is inside out. This report is on pricing actions and pricing action portfolios.

Value drivers are generally stable over time. Once you understand them and have used them to segment your market you have a solid foundation for your pricing strategy. But when there is a severe supply or demand shock, and we currently have both, that can change. There are some standard patterns for how value drivers change. Understanding these is critical to planning your response to the COVID 19 crisis.

“Everyone has a plan until they are punched in the face.” Mike Tyson famously said. Many of us feel like we have been punched in the face and are scrambling to respond and not react, adjusting our pricing, applying discounts and changing terms of trade on the fly. Willingness to pay has been replaced by ability to pay or even interest in paying. Let’s share how each of us are responding.

Different scenarios offer insight into optimizing pricing for various conditions, including commodity markets, loyalty-driven demand shifts, & extreme demand scenarios. Segment customers based on market dynamics to adapt pricing strategies effectively.

Scenario planning is a powerful tool for managing uncertainty. It is a powerful way to frame pricing strategy and to prepare a portfolio of pricing actions. Planning is important to pricing agility.

In a time of great uncertainty transfer risk from your customer to yourself. One way to do this is with usage based pricing. Layering in usage based pricing is a good pricing strategy to increase willingness to pay (WTP).

Value based pricing relies on a deep understanding of value drivers. In B2B pricing, the focus is often on economic value drivers. Most economic value drivers concern the profit and loss statement. But in some cases there are value drivers that impact the balance sheet. Understanding balance sheet value drivers is an important part of value based pricing.

One cannot plan pricing actions in isolation. Pricing excellence requires a portfolio of possible actions, with different levels of investment and different levels of risk and return. Learn how to build and manage your pricing action portfolio.

Is pricing a lever that can impact Net Promoter Score and Share of Wallet? How do these interact with

Good pricing decisions require data. By the time you need to take action, it is often too late to collect the needed data or data collection adds to costs and delays. You can avoid this by setting up your CRM, financial data, user surveys and most importantly your SaaS offer to collect the data you will need.

Companies taking a customer centric strategy need to think about how they price. The customer experience of a price change is one of the key things that should be design in any pricing action. How you go about designing and communicating price changes has a big impact on market acceptance and willingness to pay (WTP).

Many organizations will discount software subscriptions before they discount professional services. The logic is you have more room to discount where you have high margins. This is a strategic mistake and reduces long term profit and weakens competitive positioning. Discount professional services before software or data subscriptions.