The first choice in the strategic choice cascade is your winning aspirations. Pricing is a powerful lever and it can do many things, but it cannot do everything at the same time. Building alignment on what your pricing strategy is meant to achieve is the first step to a winning pricing strategy.

Roger Martin’s Strategic Choice Cascade is a powerful way to frame strategy. Ibbaka has developed a version of this specific to pricing choices. Karen Chiang and Steven Forth will be giving a workshop on how to apply this framework at the Spring 2021 Professional Pricing Society Virtual Conferece.

Usage-based pricing is one of the themes in 2021. Both product led growth and service led growth strategies work best when there is an element of usage based pricing. But where to start? We walk you through the best way to layer in usage-based pricing.

Service Led Growth or Product Led Growth? Both are compelling strategies that can generate extraordinary growth and shareholder value. Ed Arnold provides a guide on who to make this important strategic growth.

Geoff Hansen sees more market segmentations in a year than most of us will see in a lifetime. He has a sharp eye for what works and has heard pretty much every excuse out there on why not to segment or target. We tapped into Geoff for some of his wisdom.

Organizations follow three different paths to adopting a service led growth strategy. They can start with a software platform, a professional services business or with disruptive new technology. Service led growth leads to higher value to customer (V2C) no matter what path you take.

Service led growth is an emerging discipline that brings together professional services, software and data to create a growth flywheel. To execute on service led growth pricing must be considered as a system and systems engineering principles applied. This post introduces service led growth and its special pricing considerations.

Digital products are part of the strategy of almost all companies, be they born on the web, traditional manufacturers moving into the Internet of Things or professional services companies executing a service led growth strategy. Ed Arnold walks us through a some of the key obstacles to growth and makes available his Digital Product Growth Playbook.

More and more services companies are weaving software into their solutions. There is a tendency at some companies to discount the software to maintain margins on professional services. This sends the wrong message to customers and internally. Discounts services before you discount software.

Over the past few years, Rob Litterst has emerged as one of the most compelling new voices in pricing. His Good Better Best blog has consistently insightful content. He is able to look at a company’s pricing page and see its pricing strategy and positioning.

Value documentation is emerging as a best practice. It is especially important in subscription models or models where there is a lot of repurchase. Many companies lack a formal process for documenting value. Who is responsible for documenting value at your company?

It is a new year and people are coming out with their forecasts. Here we share some of the forecasts that people are making together with our own thoughts on what we will see.

Pricing is sometimes seen as a dry technical discipline, focussed on data and the optimization of price levels, discipline around discounting and tweaking of package design. This is too limited a view. We can learn about pricing processes and how to develop them by thinking about pricing as a design problem and leveraging the past three decades of work on design.

Pricing negotiations are among the most difficult in business. If not framed in terms of value and differentiation they quickly become zero-sum games, in which what one side wins the other side loses. Poorly handled, they can even become negative-sum games, where both sides lose. How can you make sure your pricing negotiations are win-win negotiations?

Much of the published content on pricing is meant to be either expository or persuasive. That is to say, it is meant to either explain things to you or to persuade you of a certain approach. That is true for Ibbaka as well. In 2021 we will be layering in something new - exploratory work. These are explorations of pricing and ways to frame pricing where we risk being wrong. It is through exploration that we will be able to move the pricing discipline forward.

There is an old saying “what gets measured is what gets managed.” Most companies do not do a good job of managing pricing. Is that because they do not measure it? What aspects of your pricing performance should you be measuring? How will those measurements help you to manage pricing? We conclude with three critical measures you need to get started.

Pricing strategy is critical to commercial excellence. Without a pricing strategy pricing drifts into throw it at the wall pricing and becomes a frozen accident. What are the key aspects of pricing strategy? This post gives you a concrete introduction. It is a great place to get started.

Discover the transformative potential of strategic pricing with Ibbaka. Our insights on dissecting Roger Martin’s Strategic Choice Cascade, crafting winning aspirations, targeting high-value market segments, and executing tactical decisions to connect value metrics with pricing strategies.

It is often said that cost-based pricing is the most common pricing methodology. I fact the two most common approaches to pricing are ‘throw it at the wall and see what sticks’ and the ‘frozen accident.’ Here is how to recognize these two pricing anti patterns and what to do when you find them.

2021 is just around the corner. Here are the three critical things to do to plan you pricing strategy for next year., and a tool to help you with your planning.