A big welcome to the new members who joined since last send:

• Jordan Lieberman, Pricing Team Manager at Paddle (Boston)

• John Kotkowski, Founder at PricingSaaS (Ontario)

• Dan Balcauski, Founder at Product Tranquility (Austin)

• David Caughman, Director of Pricing & Monetization at Docker (Charleston)

• Jean Xin, COO at Melodics (New Zealand)

• James Waldrip, Business Development Manager at UKG (Austin)

If you haven’t requested access to join the GBB LinkedIn Group, please do so here so you can get in on the action!

On to this week’s community notes.

First, an exclusive offer for GBB Members 🔥

I’ve been using a tool called PricingSaaS to track emerging pricing trends across a wide range of SaaS players.

The tool tracks pricing page changes across 3k+ SaaS companies, and allows you to filter by category, company size, GTM motion, and a range of other variables.

It’s the type of thing that can take your competitive intelligence to the next level, and make sure you never miss a move from another player in your space.

If you saw the public post yesterday, you might have noticed we’re offering a bundle discount. We’re working on an offer for existing Good Better Best members, so stay tuned for that next week!

Loved this feedback on pricing research 🔬

• Kyle Hart, Toast: Since external market surveys are tough for restaurant owners, he’s using a combination of qualitative research (e.g., internal interviews with sales reps/managers), internal data analysis (usage data, and tying that back to Salesforce if possible), financial modeling and sensitivity analysis

• Joya Smithayer, Sage Intacct: For B2C products and new offerings that the market hasn’t seen before, external surveys can be useful. If it’s a B2B product and the market is saturated, using internal data to do financial modeling/ analysis, talking to sales reps, and looking at what the competition is doing is the way to go.

Check out the full thread here.

Solid takeaways on pricing a multi-product Enterprise offering 💰

• Simplicity is overrated. Especially in the enterprise, there’s nothing wrong with having a complex pricing structure, as long as your Sales team can explain it to customers.

• On that note, if your pricing is complex, it’s critical to equip your sales team with tools to make it more digestible (e.g., calculators, quoting tools, etc.).

• A la carte pricing can be an effective way to package when selling in the Enterprise — especially when building a case with CFOs.

Check out the full thread here.

Lastly, Evan just kicked off a newsletter that’s a must read — check it out here!

That’s it for this week! Have a great weekend, and if you have any colleagues or friends who might dig Good Better Best — please share!

A big welcome to the new members who joined since last send:

• Joshua Herzig-Marx, PM Coach and Mentor at Supra (Boston)

• Jevon McDonald, Co-Founder of Tier (Canada)

• Matt Shapiro, Director of Investments at York.ie (Boston)

• Lee Smith, Co-Founder/Head of Commercial Development at AcuityMD (Boston)

• Ben Morgan, SVP of Pricing Strategy at FIS (London)

• Evan Grubb, Account Executive at Paddle (Grand Rapids for now)

Every Friday(ish), I’m aiming to use these emails to recap the best conversations happening in the community so you don’t miss a beat.

If you haven’t requested access to join the private LinkedIn Group, please do so here.

Let’s get to it!

First up, Charlie brought up the idea of self-service volume discounts.

Some of my favorite ideas explored in the comments:

• One challenge with PLG is when prospects will come through ‘contact sales’ that aren’t big enough to justify sales involvement, but are too big for the existing self-serve motion. Charlie’s question gets at how to serve these folks. Simply put, it’s complicated.

• Offering public volume discounts may help, but there are downstream implications — it gives Enterprise customers reason to expect heavy discounts.

• If you keep the volume discounts low, they may not be enticing enough and those prospects will just contact sales anyway. For instance, would a 5% discount actually be compelling enough to drive a self-serve purchase?

Dig deeper on the full post here.

Next, Kyle raised a great question about how pricing strategy changes for public vs. private companies.

While I couldn’t find any resources explicitly about this, I do have some experience with it. I was in Sales when Hubspot went public, and one big focus was operationalizing discounting and ensuring we had discipline there. 

While we didn't change our actual pricing model, we did put more rigor behind discounting, including: 

☑️ Capping discount levels
☑️ Requiring different tiers of approval for discounts with our SVP of Sales needing to sign off at the highest level
☑️ Tying discounting to performance/promotions for Sales Reps, Managers, etc.

The biggest takeaway that I remember is in hindsight our days as a private company felt like the Wild West.

Beyond sales, some other things that Kyle and I mentioned that could be impacted are:

• PR/Communications around pricing changes and how it impacts analyst perception

• Making life easier for Finance/Accounting

The bigger takeaway that I’ve been thinking about is hopefully your pricing model is in a good enough place that it doesn’t need to change when you go public, but more needs to be put into how pricing impacts everything else.

If anyone has any other thoughts or feedback on this, I’d love to hear it.

That’s it for this week. Hope you all have an amazing weekend. If you have peers or colleagues that should join the Good Better Best, please spread the word!

Share

It’s been so cool watching the community take shape this week, and I can’t wait to see where it goes.

My plan is to publish the best stuff from the community in a roundup every Friday. That way, if you’re too busy to check in on the group, you won’t miss out on the gold being posted in there!

On to the good stuff from this past week…

First up, Alexa asked for help selecting a survey tool for pricing and packaging research, and got some great feedback from the crew.

I compiled that commentary into a living document that we can continue to update as members offer new perspectives.

Good Better Best

Choosing a Survey Tool for Pricing and Packaging Research

There are several ways to go about pricing and packaging research, depending on your desired output, and the methodologies you want to use to get there. With that in mind, this doc is a collection of shared experiences from the GBB Community, who have shared their experiences with some of the usual suspects…

Read more

3 years ago · Rob Litterst

Secondly, I’m planning to write about Generative AI pricing next week and sampled the group for spicy takes 🌶️

The biggest takeaway? Everyone thinks Jasper’s pricing is kinda silly. Check out their pricing page below:

I plan on digging deeper here next week, but this seems like an example of an undercooked value metric that has likely left many customers scratching their heads.

My favorite take on it comes from Charlie, who asked “is a long blog post actually more valuable than a shorter one?” He argues no, and I agree.

I want brevity — give me GPT Hemingway.

Last thing before I go…

If you have any peers or friends that might be interested in joining the community, please send them my way! You can also send them here for more info.

I want to be really thoughtful about growth in the early days and am down to offer 30-day free trials so new members can check it out before jumping in.

Alright. That’s all I got. Hope you all have a great weekend!

Until next week ✌🏼

Rob