Inflation and a possible recession. Many companies are circling the wagons and shifting to survival mode. This means different things for different companies, but in all cases, pricing should be at the center of the board conversation. Here are 5 Questions that boards should be asking CEOs about pricing.

Introducing Ibbaka Valio - a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution for Customer Value Management and Price Optimization. With Ibbaka Valio, companies drive revenue growth by increasing average deal size between 50% and 100%.

Over the past 6 months, we have seen many companies shift their focus from ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue) to growing NDR (Net Dollar Retention - also known as Net Revenue Retention). How do you use the value and pricing levers to grow NDR?

Usage-Based Pricing is a hot topic. It fits well with Product-Led Growth (PLG) and is a critical step on the way to Outcome-Based Pricing. Ibbaka and OpenView Venture Partners have been documenting what you need to do before, during, and after you introduce Usage-Based Pricing.

Usage-Based Pricing uses a measure of usage as a pricing metric. It is often combined with other pricing metrics to create a hybrid pricing model. Research has found that companies who include a usage-based metric grow faster. A well designed usage-based pricing metric connects price to value.

Gerry Smith is one of the people who has shaped how we think about pricing. This post covers the 4Cs of pricing: Customer Value, Customer Willingness to Pay, Competition and Costs. The 4Cs interact with each other and we tease out some of the ways this happens.

B2B SaaS companies are waking up to the importance of pricing. There is a lot of work going into building pricing excellence. But what does pricing excellence mean? And how do you build it? The foundation of pricing excellence is being able to design and execute on a superior pricing model. In this post, we look at the 5 most important characteristics.

Pricing after Merger and Acquisition Part 3: The M&A Pricing Checklist. In the 3rd and Final Post of our Pricing after Merger and Acquisition series, we provide a simple checklist to help you make sure you are covering off the key pieces. A checklist helps with alignment, allocation of tasks and makes sure that nothing falls through the cracks.

Pricing after Merger and Acquisition Part 2: Finding Alignment. In the 2nd post of our 3-part series of Pricing after M&A, we look at how to find alignment between the 2 organizations when it comes to pricing and market segment.

Pricing after Merger and Acquisition Part 1: Why Pricing is Critical to M&A Success. The 1st in a 3-part series on how to make sure that pricing contributes to the success of a merger. There are common challenges in post merger pricing. Roger Martin’s strategic choice cascade can be adapted to guide us through the critical choices are to be made.

One of the hot topics in Product-Led Growth (PLG) is the idea of Product Qualified Leads (PQLs). We have long had Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) and Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs). We now have Product Qualifies Leads (PQLs). How do you design your free offer to generate PQLs?

Pricing dashboards are a critical tool for managing pricing and connecting pricing to value. How does your company track this today? What will a state of the art value and pricing dashboard look like? Please contribute to our short survey.

Ed Arnold will be giving a talk at the Professional Pricing Society’s Spring Conference in Chicago on “The Art of Value Storytelling”. Ed has deep experience developing value models for B2B companies and using these models to inform pricing design. The model is what lies below the water, what most customers want to hear is the value story.

Value ROIs and value models are best communicated as a story. This is the ‘Art of Value Storytelling’. One approach to value storytelling uses ‘the hero’s journey.’ The hero of the customer value journey is not you or your software. It is the customer. Value storytelling makes the customer the hero of their own story.

As economic conditions change, Net Dollar Retention (NDR) has become a critical issue for many B2B SaaS companies. What role does pricing play in ensuring NDR? In this post, we look at why NDR has become an important concern and how to improve Net Dollar Retention.

As companies innovate and adopt new growth models, they need to redesign their pricing models. Designing a pricing model is a difficult challenge. Many different perspectives and objectives need to be integrated. But once the design is done, the hard work starts. Ibbaka asked the Professional Pricing Society community about the biggest challenges.

B2B companies use 5 distinct growth models: Sales-Led Growth, Product-Led Growth, Service-Led Growth, Relationship-Led Growth and Community-Led Growth. These models are often combined. How are they being combined? Sales-Led Growth is the most mature approach and uses the most different combinations.

Understanding value drivers is critical to work in Product Management, Marketing, Sales and Customer Success. Value drivers come in 3 flavours: Economic, Emotional and Value. Understanding value drivers is central to effective pricing demand and value management.

Value is central to the design, sale and support of B2B software. Sophisticated ways of understanding and measuring that value have been developed, from basic ROI calculators to sophisticated Economic Value Estimation models. But at the end of the day, we are human, and humans respond to stories. Converting value models into value stories is key to communicating value.

There is more than one way to grow your company. The 5 most common growth models today are Product-Led Growth, Sales-Led Growth, Service-Led Growth, Community-Led Growth and Relationship-Led Growth. Most companies will have a lead strategy and a supporting strategy. Each model has implications for pricing strategy.