The Benefits of Pricing Your Product for Value

By David Ronald

Are concerns about pricing keeping you awake at night?

If so, it’s understandable—price your product too low and you leave money on the table; price it too high and you can say goodbye to sales that could have made your year.

SaaS companies have relied on subscription-based pricing for more than a decade. Subscriptions are a popular way to sell SaaS solutions because transactions are relatively uncomplicated. Customers can budget for the purchase, and SaaS providers can forecast revenue with a high degree of precision.

However, today’s customers are tired of “shelfware”—they don’t want to waste money on seats that go unused or pay upfront for solutions that may suffer from poor adoption. Usage is variable by nature, challenging to predict, and represents an unknown value-to-cost ratio.

Customers prefer to pay for exactly what they use.

A great product married with an easy-to-understand consumption-based pricing model can pack a powerful one-two punch for your business.

Benefits of Usage-Based Pricing

Companies that use consumption-based pricing are experiencing 38% faster revenue growth over their subscription-based peers based on research from OpenView.

Usage-based pricing not only provides business benefits, but it also helps improve your customers’ experiences: 

• It better correlates product usage with pricing and eliminates the risk of “black box” pricing associated with other approaches.It shifts cost control to your customers, providing them with maximum flexibility.
• It provides a low entry price point and allows customers to experience the full product regardless of company size.
• It improves customer retention since it does not require customer to cancel their plans during periods of lower usage.

Consumption-based pricing compels SaaS providers to better understand customers’ behavior and usage patterns. Through metering, you benefit from a continuous flow of data that illuminates each customer’s behavior in real time.

Transitioning to Usage-Based Pricing

Although there is a huge potential upside when you move to consumption-based pricing it doesn’t mean the shift will be straightforward.

Pricing equates to two things for customers: 

• Buyers must be confident that your pricing aligns with the perceived value they expect you to deliver.
• Buyers should believe that the value you will deliver is better than the status quo and what your competitors are delivering.

As you prepare to implement a consumption-based pricing model, focus on these five areas to minimize stress and help ensure success: 

• Pick a value metric that communicates your solutions’ benefits for customers (more on this below).
• Transform your sales process and compensation structure by aligning your sales team’s comp plan to the way customers derive value from your solution.
• Rethink your revenue playbooks to account for the variable nature of consumption and the challenges associated with forecasting revenue.
• Assist your customers in predicting and optimizing spend through consumption transparency, picking the right payment structure, and manage overage scenarios.
• Leverage data by unifying it in a central repository so you can deliver in a holistic view that provides insights into consumption and your financials on a daily basis.

Let's look now at the first item on the list above.

Picking a Value Metric

One of the biggest challenges is determining how to price your product. A well-priced solution benefits both SaaS providers and customers. It transforms providers into advocates for value, and value is about more than price—it’s about the success of customers. 

The purpose of a value metric is to communicate your product’s value to customers. It demonstrates an understanding as to why customers pay you for your service. Here are three factors to keep in mind when choosing your value metric: 

• It should be easy for buyers to understand immediately—your value metrics should not be complicated or incomprehensible.
• It should align with your solution’s perceived value.
• It should scale and grow in correlation with your buyer’s use.

What value metric is best for your business?

You can begin by recognizing the challenges and use cases that your buyers are trying to solve. Think about how your solution functions in order to solve a problem, and then consider the outcomes your customers track. Here are some examples:
 

Type of Organization	Value Metric
Internet marketing platform	Number of marketing contacts
Monitoring and analytics tools	Amount of data ingested
Authentication services	Number of external active users
Communication platform	Number of SMS messages
Cloud computing service provider	Amount of data stored
Security network	Pricing per feature
Task automation service	Number of tasks

It is important to ensure that it aligns with your delivery costs and will scale and grow with your customers whatever value metric you select—and the only way to uncover this ideal provider-and-customer alignment is through testing. 

This means that you should put your value metric out in the wild and see how it performs with real customers.   

Keep in mind that you’ll need to be patient—a data-driven approach requires implementing, testing, and iterating different ideas. 

It takes time and honing to ensure your value metric aligns with your underlying technology and resonates with your customers.

 

The Possibilities are Priceless

No one will tell you that adopting or shifting to a consumption-based pricing model is easy. However, it’s the right move if it aligns with your company’s overall product strategy and delivers stronger value to customers.

Startups may find it less complicated to adopt a consumption model because everything is greenfield. A try-before-you-buy approach may make it easier to attract customers, but don’t forget that you will chase revenue for a period of time until usage starts to grow consistently. 

Expectations must be set for a longer ramp-up time, and you must have enough funding and investor buy-in to support this strategy.

For mature companies, the process requires plans for handling current accounts and bookings and understanding what a hybrid model looks like. The benefits are that you have time to hone your consumption model to suit your business and can transition sales and finance teams to this new way of operating over time.

Remember that everything starts and ends with data. All data must be accessible from a centralized location and shared securely without friction or integration headaches. Today, that means you must build solutions on a cloud data platform if you want to support growth and enable pricing models that protect margins and drive new revenue.

The end result is delivering more value to your current customers, attracting new customers, and opening up new revenue opportunities—all of which are truly worth the effort.

Thanks for reading.

Let us know what you think of this blog post? Did we omit anything?

And keep an eye open for future blog posts on pricing for your business.

Although I'd like to take full credit for all the ideas presented in this blog post, it's the culmination of ideas from a variety of people and sources—the most significant of these is a paper by the smart people at Snowflake called “Consumption-Based Pricing Playbook", 2022 – it’s a terrific white paper and well worth a read!