An interview with Joe Schneider from Becton Dickinson on bringing the science discipline to pricing, implementing customer driven strategies and changes to markets that impact pricing

We see a lot of b2b market segmentation in our work. Often these are the weakest part of the marketing plan. Many segmentation is typically limited to firmographic data and in some cases are simply a list of industry verticals. They are meant to find a market that fits the offer. Instead, we should segment based on emotional and economic value creation to build an offer that fits a market.

There are many ways to innovate on your pricing metric to get a closer correlation with your value metrics and business model. Heathrow Airport provides an interesting case study. Note how they use different pricing metrics for inbound and outbound flights!

Customer centricity as defined by Peter Fader is emerging as a strong alternative to product led strategies. To win with this strategy you need to pay close attention to customer segmentation and then price with an eye on the value you create for your best customers.

Big data, predictive analytics, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning are all the rage these days. They are sure to be a popular topic of hallway conversations at this October's Professional Pricing Society Fall Conference in San Diego (Oct. 24 to 27, 2017). The theme for the conference is 'Data, Change Management and the Profit Landscape' and there are a number of interesting sessions on these themes on the agenda.

Much of the work we do at Ibbaka is centered around value-based pricing. In one of my previous posts, I reviewed one of the key inputs of pricing strategy—market segmentation. Now, I would like to explore another critical business process—value-based selling. How can we enable our sales people to practice value-based selling? 

The freemium revenue model is the go-to-market strategy for many web-based software solutions. Unfortunately, it can turn into a costly trap for the service provider. We saw this happen in June of this year with the Photobucket freemium to fee-based service migration debacle. Let's delve into what went wrong with Photobucket's fee introduction and contrast this with the lessons to be learned from Meetup's successful migration to a paid subscription model.

A solid pricing strategy necessarily needs to be based on an understanding of your customer and their alternatives. There are a lot of tools that can be used to gather this information.