There is a lot of noise in the pricing world about how pricing will evolve over the coming years. Some say dynamic pricing will dominate. Others remain focussed on value-based pricing. There is more and more discussion of outcomes or results based pricing. Other people have already begun to speculate about machine-to-machine pricing. People in the Professional Pricing Society’s LinkedIn Group and in the Coalition for the Advancement of Pricing have shared their thoughts. We summarize these here and provide some additional structure.

One of the key barriers to adopting value-based approaches, including value-based pricing is a lack of customer understanding. The best way to organize your research into customer value is a customer journey map. This tool is underutilized in pricing discovery. Here we show how to build a customer journey map that will inform your pricing.

Ibbaka recently shared a template to help you define your strategic choice cascade for pricing. Here is a case study on how we apply this strategic choice cascade to Ibbaka Talent. We hope this will help you in defining your own strategic choice cascade for pricing.

Guest post by Fabian Szulanski in which the connections between value networks and systems thinking are explored. Systems models can be quantified and the feedback loops made explicit, which makes system models a better approach to investigating the impacts of interventions and different pricing tactics.

Ibbaka is committed to helping companies move from potential to growth. As part of this, we support the innovation economy and are active participants in the Vancouver community. Mile Volker is one of the key people in our community, as an investor, fund manager and community organizer. In this interview he looks back on his career and casts a glance into the future.

Most companies have moved from having a price to having a pricing model. This is a necessary step towards the next generation of pricing excellence. But a pricing model without a value model is adrift. It does not help align the value to customer (V2C) to the price. It is only half the story. Effective pricing strategy requires that we connect a value model to a pricing model.

Despite the benefits of value-based pricing, companies are still lagging on implementation and execution. Corporations are failing in value-based pricing and are therefore not maximizing their opportunities to transact. This is a topic that Laura Fay, TSIA VP & Managing Director, Offers Research and Advisory, and I will be exploring during TSIA Interact. On October 21st, we will be discussing why it is difficult for customers to identify and connect value metrics to pricing.

The key to pricing is to connect strategy to execution. One of the best ways to do this is to use Roger Martin’s strategic choice cascade. Ibbaka uses this regularly with our clients and it helps build alignment across the organization. This is a template that you can download to guide you in your strategic choices.

Mountain Equipment Co-op (MEC) was an important part of how Vancouver imagined itself. It failed in September 2020 and was sold to private equity. Could a subscription model have saved the co-op, forcing it to pay less attention to growth and more attention to its members?

The migration of licensed pricing models to subscription of SaaS pricing models continues. Many companies are asking how to migrate to the cloud and subscription models while protecting their established businesses. Begin with value-based market segmentation and then choose a pricing metric that tracks the value metric and differentiates from the licensed pricing.

Coming back from maternity leave during a pandemic has reframed my understanding of the importance of emotional and community value drivers. At Ibbaka we have always included emotional value drivers in our analysis. Recently we have added community value drivers. We have recently been focussing on trust. As a mother with a child in daycare I have a real appreciation of the value of trust and its implications for pricing.

Research has found that emotional value drivers play an important role in B2B pricing. In our recent work Ibbaka has found that it can be just as important to consider community value drivers, the positive (or negative) impacts a product or service has on the wider community. Including community value in market segmentation, customer targeting and positioning gives important pricing insights.

To thrive, to even survive, one must continually deliver new functionality to the market. For this to be sustainable, there has to be a return on the new functionality. It needs to be priced. In this post we explain how to price new functionality.

Value-based pricing is widely recognized as the most effective way to price a differentiated offer and is currently the reigning champion for B2B pricing. Why do so many companies struggle to implement value-based pricing/ There are many reasons, ranging from a lack of understanding of the basic concept to a struggle to communicate their value differentiation. But one of the underlying causes, one that we seldom talk about, is a lack of trust. Trust is the foundation of value-based pricing.

The shift to subscription pricing and SaaS business models has opened new financing models. One company leading this transformation is Timia Capital. We interview Mike Walkinshaw on the foundations of this approach and how Timia’s portfolio is performing under the Covid 19 pandemic.

Ibbaka is sharing a comprehensive set of value-based pricing decision guides and tools that you can use in your product and services management, marketing and sales and customer success work. Build your business on the value you deliver to your customers (V2C or Value to Customer). Let us know what pricing decisions you need to make and what tools will be of most value to you.

Customer success has emerged as the foundational discipline in the subscription economy. Delivering on its promise requires significant investments, and management teams sometimes struggle to understand and justify these investments. On the other hand, customers can balk at being asked to pay to achieve what has been promised to them. Here is a guide to how you should think through pricing customer success.

The economy will emerge from the pandemic at different times and speeds depending on sector and geography. This will be a tactical challenge for most pricing experts and it will be easy to make mistakes and get your timing wrong. A solution is indexed pricing. Demonstrate that you understand your customer’s business by usinng indexed pricing.

In The Strategy and Tactics of Pricing Sixth Edition, Tom Nagle and Georg Muller say “One of the major differences between tactical and strategic pricing is that tactical pricing assumes that price sensitivity is a constant.” Covid 19 has proven this assumption dramatically wrong. We all need to think strategically about pricing. Connecting pricing to scenario planning is critical to this. This is how you will find the leverage needed to shape willingness to pay.

Many companies provide learning resources to support the adoption of their technologies. Visionary companies and those engaged in category creation go beyond this to help people develop domain level expertise. Large, mature companies often support certificates and credentials. What does value-based pricing have to say about pricing strategies for learning resources?