Is it Time to Change Your Pricing?
Ed Arnold is a Senior Advisor at Ibbaka. See his Skill Profile on Ibbaka Talent.
Ed Arnold has led product development at LeveragePoint, a SaaS solution for value-based pricing and sales and at Forrester Research where he was VP Products for CX (Customer Experience) Analytics. He is a leading expert in value-based pricing and go-to-market strategies and how these energize the customer journey.
Last weekend folks in the US and Canada reset all our clocks in accordance to our biannual daylight savings time tradition. No choice here, whether you hate it or not everyone has to adapt if they wish to align with fellow clock users.
Of course, there is no mandated calendar date for when you ought to adjust the pricing of your product/solution. So this begs the question of when you should seriously consider revising your pricing and perhaps more importantly, how to decide what types of changes should you make?
This is especially true for solutions that publish their pricing and packaging information online.
See what kind of pricing challenge you have with the Ibbaka Pricing Diagnostic
Or to ask this question a different way, how do you know when it’s time to change prices? For a company that is missing its revenue targets, adjusting pricing may seem like a quick & easy fix. Perhaps, but I bet many of us would have a natural hesitation to make such a change without doing a little due diligence first.
This is because we know that sometimes pricing is a problem that can be fixed, but we also know that customer pushback on pricing can be a symptom or signal of other issues. Such as:
Focusing on the wrong customer segments
Focusing on the wrong buyer personas
Failure to communicate your clear differentiation
Confusing customers with your pricing & packaging
Not addressing new competitors
Eroding value proposition
Etc, etc.
Indeed it is wise to have a little diagnosis before revamping the price list. Besides, adjusting pricing isn’t all that quick & easy anyway in many organizations depending on the state of their CRM and related systems. Speaking from my own product management experience, this process could take over 6 months with a lot of internal arm twisting.
Wouldn’t it be great if there was an online diagnostic tool to help sort out these various issues and identify where your “pricing hot spots” are? Actually, there is one! Ibbaka has recently developed,
Take the survey and receive a brief report of where you should focus your attention as well as some ideas for next steps.
It takes less time than resetting your clock!
Implement Customer Value Management with the Ibbaka Value Pricing Dashboard
Is it time to change your pricing (this post)
