B2B companies now have a consistent method for their sales teams to assist their buyers in making a case for investment. Customer Value Management (CVM) has provided our customers with a solid foundation for increasing revenue faster in the future.

At Ibbaka, we begin our pricing work by understanding the value of your product or service from the perspective of your customer. Our approach is to research, validate and quantify the economic (monetary) and emotional value your offer creates for the market with customers and non-customers. By understanding your differentiation relative to the customer’s next best competitive alternative, we can design a pricing model built that communicates and even amplifies your differentiation.

Pricing is often seen as a branch of the dismal science, a coldly analytical attempt to extract the maximum price from buyers. Good pricing practice is completely different from this stereotype. It factors in empathy and emotion and is deeply concerned about the value delivered to the customer (V2C).

What should should you be doing in 2019 to build and activate pricing as a driver of business growth? A combination of new capabilities, market research and decisive action is needed. The outcome can be greatly improved performance.

The Vancouver Value Innovation and Pricing Meetup will have its first meeting on Thursday January 17, from 6:00 PM, at VentureLabs. The theme is Value and Pricing Along the Customer Journey. Please join us for a vigorous discussion.

Meaningful innovation is a community effort. As a contribution to the Vancouver innovation community Ibbaka is sponsoring a new meetup on value innovation and pricing. We will meet about four times a year in Vancouver and may have meetups in Victoria and Kelowna as well.

Primary research for B2B pricing requires a focus on how the offer creates value for different types of prospective customer and how the customers buy. It is important to combine surveys with interviews and to avoid confirmation bias. Direct questions about willingness to pay (WTP) give misleading results.

While appealing to emotions may seem intuitive within the B2C environment, there are often questions around whether emotional value creation really matters within the B2B environment. That is, is there room for emotions if it is “just business”?

At Ibbaka we are looking forward to 2018, and to helping our clients price their offers more effectively. Pricing begins with a deep understanding of emotional and economic value and is built on a foundation of market segmentation and customer targeting. So that is where we start. We help to find your pricing strategy, set prices and then to collect and interpret data so that your pricing can evolve and shape the market.

User-based pricing has gotten a lot of bad press recently. It is generally seen as a lazy pricing metric, used by companies that have not thought deeply about their value metric and how to connect the pricing to value. But there are many cases when user-based pricing is the best metric and should be used.

One of the best questions we are asked is 'OK, you are pricing experts, so how do you price your own services?'

A fair question and we don't answer this by giving a price. We advise our clients not to get into a price discussion until they have established value. We follow that advice ourselves!

Pricing power has a huge impact on how investors see your company. One rule of thumb used in due dilligence is to ask, 'Can this company raise its prices?' If the answer is no, or if there is a lot of downward pressure on prices, then company valuation goes down. Smart companies understand their pricing power and are taking steps to increase it.