Unlocking Business Growth Through Value and Pricing - Insights from the VIP Vodcast with Ozge Kurtoglu
Karen Chiang is a Chief Value Officer at Ibbaka. Connect with her on LinkedIn.
In today’s fiercely competitive B2B Technology SaaS landscape, innovation alone is not enough. To unlock innovation and capture your market value needs to be front and center, especially in today’s fiercely competitive B2B technology SaaS landscape where AI and agents are reconfiguring competitive dynamics.
Last week, I released the first episode of the VIP (Value, Innovation, & Pricing) Vodcast. I was fortunate to have Ozge Kurtoglu, a seasoned expert with over 25 years of experience in product and pricing strategy, illuminate some critical lessons on how embedding value at the heart of business strategy can drive growth, innovation, and customer success. Here, I summarize key points from our talk.
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Value-Based Wins over Cost Plus
Understanding and articulating value is essential for effective pricing. Ozge recounted the global pricing transformation for Tenneco’s $3 billion aftermarket division, which shifted from a traditional cost-plus model to a value-based pricing approach. Instead of simply marking up costs, her team began by deeply understanding what truly mattered to their customers—installers and repair shops. They identified and quantified specific value drivers such as:
Vehicle part coverage: How many vehicle models a part could serve, increasing utility for installers.
Delivery reliability: Ensuring products arrived on time, which was crucial for repair shops’ operations.
Catalog accuracy: Making it easy to find the right part, reducing errors and wasted time.
First-time correct installation: Products that enabled a successful repair on the first try, minimizing costly rework.
Value is from the perspective of those you are serving. Clear communication of the unique benefits that your company delivers—beyond features and functions—can command premium pricing and foster deeper customer loyalty. This value-centric approach is especially critical for highly crowded markets and differentiation is key.
Value is a Moving Target
“Just like beauty is in the eye of the beholder, value is in the mind of the customer. Value drivers can change over time and are situational, so it’s critical to keep reassessing what matters most to your customers.” Ozge Kurtoglu
Value is what customers believe they get—and that is a moving target. Value is no longer just about product features or efficiency gains; instead, it is about the specific outcomes delivered to the customer. Here are some example:
In healthcare, value means a “right diagnosis at the first time.”
In software, it’s the “productivity uplift.”
In industrials, it could be “emissions avoided or downtime prevented.”
Because value evolves over time, organizations must therefore continuously assess and align their value propositions with the evolving needs of their customer to remain competitive and drive growth.
Value Alignment is Critical
Stakeholder alignment is essential for unlocking value and driving successful business outcomes. Collaborative, cross-functional engagement is a requirement to execute on your orgnanization’s value and pricing strategy. Strategy execution is a team sport.
The establishment of “value councils” comprised of marketing, product, sales, and finance help ensure that everyone in the organization get to a common understanding of what value means for their customers and how it should be reflected in both the design of its offers and their associated pricing. The value council can act to:
Break down silos between departments,
Create a shared language around value,
And ensure consistency in how value is delivered and communicated to customers.
Without stakeholder alignment—internally and externally—companies will struggle to consistently deliver and capture value.
Technology Is the Engine While AI Is the Innovation
Technology is the foundational engine that powers operations, enables efficiency, and provides the infrastructure for modern businesses to function. Technology is essential for scaling, automating, and optimizing processes—it’s what keeps the business running and competitive at a baseline level.
AI represents a new next level: the innovation layer. We are now seeing that AI is not just another technological upgrade—it is fundamentally reshaping how companies create value and differentiate themselves. AI enables organizations to:
Rapidly analyze and synthesize vast amounts of data,
Uncover new patterns and insights,
Predict customer needs,
And can be used to deliver hyper-personalized experiences at scale.
While technology provides the necessary tools and platforms, AI is what transforms those tools into engines of innovation.
Key Actions to Take Now
The top recommendations for business leaders:
Align on a shared value narrative and embed value thinking across your organization, making it a lens for product development, marketing, and sales.
Build pricing as a capability, no longer thinking of pricing as a spreadsheet but as something that adjusts according to your customers mindset, trends that may be occurring and how value may be shifting over time.
Start small and begin experimenting with AI to understand the market, value messaging or to understand segments based on behavior. For example is there something that is influencing why a certain subset of customers churn.
Final Takeaway
Value and pricing are living systems. Alignment and continual insight from the market is required. The winners will be those who are able to to connect the continual insight from the market with intelligent automation and utilize that to optimally price in a way meaningful to their market.
“Value is core—innovate for value, price for value.” For anyone responsible for driving growth, embracing this mindset is a sure way to build business resilience, drive growth, and create lasting customer impact in an ever-changing market.
View the complete VIP Value Innovation Pricing Vodcast here.
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