The fourth choice in the strategic choice cascades is capabilities is capabilities. In order to manage value and capture value back into pricing you need to understand the skills needed to create, communicate, deliver, document and capture (price) value and make sure these are available at each touchpoint along the customer journey. It is not enough to do this internally. Customers may need new skills to understand and participate in the value your offer.

Pricing transparency is a trending topic. Many companies are struggling with how much pricing transparency to provide and whether the transparency is around how they set prices or the actual price levels. Ibbaka reached out to three people with deep practical experience in how to answer this question. See our interview with Xiaohe Li, Stella Penso and Kyle Westra.

The third choice in the strategic choice cascade is how to win. In pricing, how to win choices are where you align your pricing and portfolio with your target market. This is product market fit, with fit including your pricing model and market including your competitive positioning. Connecting the value metric and pricing metric is an important part of this work.

Have you ever wanted to pause and take an outside-in view into your organization’s approach to pricing, positioning and value creation? At Ibbaka, we understand that assessing one’s market approach is not an easy undertaking. We want to enable both new and mature organizations to take a disciplined approach to assessing their pricing and go-to-market strategy. Which is why we have designed a The Ibbaka Self-Assessment Tool to get you started.

Product management, customer experience (CX) and value-based pricing are strong complementary skill sets. They are seldom found in one person, but when they are that person is uniquely positioned to give us insights into how these fit together. Ed Arnold is one such person. It this interview we explore the interplay of these three skillsets and how they inform critical choices in B2B growth.

The second choice in the strategic choice cascade is where to play. In pricing, where to play choices are based on a value-based market segmentation. A good segment is one where potential customers get value in the same way and buy in the same way. The segmentation helps one to target the most attractive customers.

Service led growth businesses combine data insights with a software product or platform and professional services. In some cases, hardware components are part of the total solution. But customers do not experience these as different things. The customer experience is holistic. To win with the services led growth, you have to think like your customers. Every dimension of the solution is a force multiplier for the others.

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.