With over 20 years of software experience, Ryan Glushkoff provides pricing and product marketing expertise for business-to-business (B2B) software companies. This includes offer packaging, pricing, market research, and pricing strategy and organization.

Prior to founding Fraction8, Ryan cut his teeth in both the pre-sales and post-sales world for both mass-marketing and custom-enterprise software companies, which gives him a unique perspective on how SaaS companies need to price and market themselves for success.

In this episode, Ryan shares what important data set his qualitative and quantitative interviews and surveys uncover to arrive at a pricing decision.

 

Why you have to check out today’s podcast:

• Find out the three types of competitive research you can use to understand your competitors’ offer structure so you come up with the right pricing decision
• Learn about what different companies are using in their pricing structure
• Find out what is of utmost reason for putting your price online

 

“Pricing is a team sport. All of those different groups need to be part of the decision. So, it's incumbent upon the product team to steward the rest of the organization through that decision making process.”

- Ryan Glushkoff

 

Topics Covered:

01:36 - What he does as a B2B technology pricing consultant

03:32 - Doing qualitative interviews and quantitative surveys

04:17 - Aha moments when it comes to clients saying what they claim customers value versus what customers say they value

05:16 - Important data points uncovered with qualitative and quantitative interviews

05:57 - What is competitive research and its different types

07:44 - Times when you consider pricing as part science and part art

08:46 - Going the same pricing metric as the competitor versus charging with better options

09:56 - Sharing his concern about using different pricing metrics

10:38 - Perpetual license of moving to SaaS

11:23 - Touching on usage-based pricing

12:43 - Outcome-based pricing being a version of user-based pricing

13:47 - PayPal and tollbooth pricing

14:41 - Are Lyft and Uber subscription-based companies

15:06 - Price structure of AWS and how it’s different from Uber

18:48 - Regularly buying diet Coke compared to subscription-based

19:37 - What he thinks of putting pricing online

21:42 - When it’s not proper to pricing online

23:28 - His thoughts to a recommendation of putting a price range versus none at all

24:35 - Which way to go -- put price online or not

26:14 - When do companies miss part of their pricing research

26:44 - Where should pricing lives in a company

30:24 - How pricing is screaming for a center of excellence type of approach

31:58 - His best pricing advice that can have a great impact on one’s business

32:27 - Does he actually ask, ‘What are you willing to pay’

33:33 - Mark’s answer to Ryan’s question on why he asks, ‘What are you willing to pay’

 

Key Takeaways:

“Competitive research is something that is really good to know, but since every company has their own unique value proposition that they bring to market, just copying a competitor, you're probably leaving something on the table by doing that, or you're selling yourself short.” - Ryan Glushkoff

“If you'd ask which side of the fence I would come on, or land on for, whether to put your pricing online or not, I would err on the side of putting it online. The idea of maintaining positive control of the sales conversation is paramount. Especially if you do your homework and you're confident in the research that you've done that informs the value of your solution, the price that people are willing to pay.” - Ryan Glushkoff

“I really think it [Pricing] should live in the product organization because the product owner is really the CEO of the product; the product team has the deepest understanding of the problems that the buyer and the user are facing. They have the deepest understanding of how to go about solving those problems, through the features and capabilities that the solution is offering.”  - Ryan Glushkoff

 

People/Resources Mentioned:

• PayPal: https://www.paypal.com/ph/home
• Lyft: https://www.lyft.com/
• Uber: https://www.uber.com/tw/en/
• AWS: https://aws.amazon.com/

 

Connect with Ryan Glushkoff:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/glushkoff/
• Email: [email protected]

 

Connect with Mark Stiving: 

• Email: [email protected]
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stiving/