Impact Pricing

Steven Forth has been a frequent guest on Impact Pricing and is a co-creator of the COMPASS framework. Michael Mansard is the Principal Director of Subscription Strategy at Zora. He's an investor in and mentor to several startups, and he started his career in consulting at companies like Deloitte and SAP, so he knows a lot.

In this episode, Steven and Michael dive deep into the COMPASS framework for evaluating pricing metrics in the age of AI and agentic systems, exploring how traditional SaaS economics are being turned upside down and why companies need to move away from user-based pricing models.

Why you have to check out today's podcast:

• Learn why AI pricing fundamentally breaks the traditional SaaS model of "expensive to build, cheap to run".
• Understand the COMPASS framework's 14-question assessment for selecting optimal pricing metrics.
• Explore the accelerating cycles of pricing complexity and simplification across technology waves.

"I think that most people are clueless and do not want to admit that they're clueless. And I think admission is key because admission leads you to a scientific approach to pricing and enables you to accept, to try smaller samples, especially in the age of AI."

– Michael Mansard

Topics Covered:

02:08 – How Michael got into pricing

03:12 – Defining business models vs. pricing models vs. pricing metrics

06:22 – Introduction to the COMPASS framework and why it exists

07:25 – How AI flips traditional SaaS economics on its head

08:03 – The gym membership paradox in AI pricing

11:05 – Steven's perspective on whether pricing fundamentals have changed

24:20 – Pricing evolution cycles and their accelerating speed

27:39 – How COMPASS captures competitive differentiation

34:28 – Michael's pricing advice on embracing iteration and admitting uncertainty

Key Takeaways:

"I've seen more change in my part of the technology world in the last six months than I've seen in my entire lifetime." – Steven Forth

"If you price it per user, the more a user uses it, the worse margin it would yield. And that's a problem, right? So I call that the gym membership paradox." – Michael Mansard

"We need to change the metric. Now the billion dollar question is what metric? And the raison d'être of that framework is exactly that. It's to help people navigate, hence the notion of COMPASS." – Michael Mansard

People / Resources Mentioned:

• COMPASS Framework: 14-question assessment for pricing metrics: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/compass-agentic-ai-pricing-metric-framework-your-2-part-mansard-f9qqe
• Roger Martin Strategic Choice Cascade: Framework for aligning pricing with business strategy: https://rogermartin.medium.com/decoding-the-strategy-choice-cascade-475d40555eb1
• John Maeda's "The Laws of Simplicity": Design principles applicable to pricing models: https://lawsofsimplicity.com/
• Karan Sood: https://www.linkedin.com/in/soodkaran/
• PriceFX: Company introducing 125 agents: https://www.pricefx.com/ and https://lp.pricefx.com/agents_trial.html

Connect with Steven Forth:

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

Connect with Michael Mansard:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelmansard/

Connect with Mark Stiving:

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

This is an Impact Pricing Blog published on May 26, 2025, turned into an audio podcast so you can listen on the go.

Read Full Article Here: https://impactpricing.com/blog/value-is-not-the-same-as-willingness-to-pay/

If you have any feedback, definitely send it. You can reach us at [email protected].

Now, go make an impact.

Connect with Mark Stiving:

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

Steven Forth is the Co-founder and Chief Value Officer at Ibbaka, a leading value and pricing consulting firm. With deep expertise in AI applications for pricing and value modeling, Steven is at the forefront of developing intelligent agents that help businesses understand and communicate value more effectively. His work focuses on the intersection of artificial intelligence, pricing strategy, and value creation, making him a pioneer in applying AI to solve complex pricing challenges.

In this episode, Steven shares his insights on how benchmarking is revolutionizing both AI development and pricing strategy. Drawing parallels between how AI models are improved through benchmarking and how pricing models should be evaluated, he introduces a framework for measuring pricing effectiveness that could transform how we approach pricing decisions. Together with Mark, they explore the challenges of establishing "truth" in pricing, the role of synthetic data, and the future of AI-powered pricing tools.

Why you have to check out today's podcast:

• Discover how AI benchmarking principles can revolutionize pricing model evaluation.
• Understand how to evaluate pricing models from both buyer and seller perspectives.
• Explore the future of AI-powered pricing tools and what it means for pricing professionals.

"We don't start with the truth. We have to work our way towards truth through multiple iterations and applications."

– Steven Forth

Topics Covered:

02:15 – How Intercom's FinAI agent uses daily benchmarking to improve ticket resolution performance

05:30 – Why AI's success is built on benchmarking and how it emerged from the ImageNet competition

08:45 – The critical problem: pricing lacks standardized benchmarking like AI models have

11:20 – Michael Mansard's 12-factor pricing model assessment and its potential as an industry standard

14:10 – Why pricing models must be evaluated from both buyer and seller perspectives

17:25 – How market segmentation and use cases complicate pricing model benchmarking

20:40 – The role of synthetic data in pricing research and model validation

24:15 – Why "vibe coding" could disrupt traditional pricing consulting within 3 years

27:30 – The search for truth in pricing: hedonic pricing models and market assumptions

31:45 – Introduction to ValueIQ: Ibbaka's new AI agent for value-based selling

Key Takeaways:

"Anyone who says that they're data centric or data driven is actually before that they have to be model driven because they're using some form of model to organize the data." – Steven Forth

"We should have done this 20 years ago. What were we thinking? Well, we weren't thinking. And we didn't have ways to do this for us anyway." – Steven Forth (on developing pricing benchmarks)

"Benchmarking every day, I think, is going to be critical to the success of agents that do important business things." – Steven Forth

"You can always improve your measurement, but at some point the return of improving the measurement is lower than the cost of increasing the validity of the measurement." – Steven Forth

Resources and People Mentioned:

• Douglas Hubbard's How to Measure Anything (book): https://www.amazon.com/How-Measure-Anything-Intangibles-Business/dp/1118539273
• ImageNet: https://image-net.org/
• Michael Mansard's 12-Factor Pricing Model: https://www.insead.edu/bio/michael-mansard-0
• Intercom's FinAI: https://www.intercom.com/help/en/articles/8205718-fin-ai-agent-resolutions
• Lovable, Replit, Bolt: https://linkblink.medium.com/bolt-vs-cursor-vs-replit-vs-lovable-ai-coders-comparison-guide-3b9d41e75810
• ValueIQ: https://www.ibbaka.com/ibbaka-market-blog/get-ready-for-valueiq-sign-up-now-for-beta-access

Connect with Steven Forth:

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

Connect with Mark Stiving:

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

This is an Impact Pricing Blog published on May 19, 2025, turned into an audio podcast so you can listen on the go.

Read Full Article Here: https://impactpricing.com/blog/the-two-questions-every-buyer-asks-and-how-to-design-your-product-and-pricing-around-them/

If you have any feedback, definitely send it. You can reach us at [email protected].

Now, go make an impact.

Connect with Mark Stiving:

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

Alan Hollander, VP of Offer Packaging and Pricing Strategy at Blackbaud, has led pricing initiatives for six years. With nearly three decades in pricing, his impressive career began in 1994 when Tom Nagle hired him after Alan excelled in Nagle's "Strategy and Tactics of Pricing" course. He also held key roles at Ellucian and Simon-Kucher & Partners, bringing deep expertise in large-scale pricing transformations.

In this episode, Alan addresses a major challenge for SaaS companies: how AI disrupts traditional per-user pricing. Drawing on his experience at Blackbaud (serving nonprofits with CRM and financial tools), he explains why AI's efficiency conflicts with seat-based pricing. He and Mark discuss the difficulties of shifting customers to new pricing models, managing multiple approaches, and implementing pricing innovations gradually.

Why you have to check out today's podcast:

• Understand why AI is fundamentally incompatible with per-user pricing and what alternatives actually work in practice.
• Learn how to implement pricing model changes without overwhelming your organization's operational capabilities.
• Discover the "crawl, walk, run" approach to pricing transformation that builds momentum through proven results.

"Don't go right to the end goal, in the future state, because people are just going to look at you cross-eyed. Start with quick wins, start with test pilots, test the concepts, show the results, quantify the results so you can build momentum in launching new pricing models."

— Alan Hollander

Topics Covered:

01:30 — Alan's pricing journey: From Tom Nagle's student to Strategic Pricing Group veteran

02:45 — The AI pricing dilemma: Pricing products with AI vs. using AI for pricing

04:15 — Why AI pricing isn't different: It's still all about jobs-to-be-done and value creation

11:15 — The nonprofit sector challenge: Selling efficiency when budgets are already tight

14:30 — Human augmentation vs. job replacement: Reframing the AI conversation

16:45 — The Salesforce problem: When AI doubles productivity but revenue stays flat

19:20 — Blackbaud's approach: Combining user-based and consumption-based models

21:45 — Market segmentation reality: Financial vs. fundraising as separate buying centers

24:10 — The PayPal model: Why percentage-of-success pricing works for fundraising

26:30 — Optional pricing models: Letting customers choose fixed vs. variable approaches

28:45 — The operational reality check: Systems and processes needed for pricing flexibility

31:00 — The "crawl, walk, run" philosophy: Building momentum through incremental wins

Key Takeaways:

"Per user is not going to be the answer. You're going to stagnate because unless you're just going to increase your per user price, it doesn't align with how they consume, how they use, what value they get." — Alan Hollander

"Sometimes you have to do the right things before you do things right... you can have a beautiful strategy in terms of how you monetize and price, and it's very elegant and you've done all the analytics and it looks super cool. But sometimes you actually need to basically what I would say, do a crawl, walk, run." — Alan Hollander

"If you don't lead with the value, I don't care if it's AI, SaaS, it doesn't matter what it is. If you don't lead with the value in a business case... you're not going to get anywhere." — Alan Hollander

Resources and People Mentioned:

• Blackbaud: https://www.blackbaud.com/
• Tom Nagle: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thomas-tom-nagle
• Reed Holden: https://www.linkedin.com/in/reed-holden-913ab69/

Connect with Alan Hollander:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alan-hollander-753167/
• Email: [email protected]

Connect with Mark Stiving:

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

This is an Impact Pricing Blog published on May 12, 2025, turned into an audio podcast so you can listen on the go.

Read Full Article Here: https://impactpricing.com/blog/markets-dont-segment-by-industry-buyers-segment-by-problem/

If you have any feedback, definitely send it. You can reach us at [email protected].

Now, go make an impact.

Connect with Mark Stiving:

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

Gary Bailey is the founder at The Talent Capitalist, where he teaches monetization as a discipline, and serves as a finance and monetization consultant at FinTech Strategic Advisors.

With a background that spans from banking and derivatives pricing in the 1990s to coaching the rise of AI monetization product managers today, Gary brings a unique perspective to value capture and pricing strategy.

In this episode, Gary shares his insights on the distinction between pricing and monetization, drawing from his experience pricing hundreds of thousands of different financial instruments to help modern AI companies think about value capture. He explores the controversial topic of contextual pricing - why companies like Google and Facebook price millions of micro-transactions differently based on context, time, and user behavior.

Together with Mark, they dive deep into the Jobs-to-be-Done framework, debate whether it's different from problem-solution thinking, and tackle the thorny issue of when dynamic pricing crosses the line from smart segmentation to sleazy manipulation.

Why you have to check out today's podcast:

• Learn the difference between pricing and monetization, and why value capture is the real game-changer for sustainable business growth.
• Discover how AI companies can price thousands of different use cases without overwhelming customers or appearing manipulative.
• Understand when contextual pricing is smart segmentation versus when it becomes unethically sleazy.

"Hire a pricing person, and that's it really, because they're going to throw some things that you hate, throw some things that you like in the same way that you wouldn't ordinarily try and clear your drain all the time on your own. Why would you not [have] someone clear your pricing issues?"

– Gary Bailey

Topics Covered:

01:32 – From banking derivatives to AI: Gary's pricing journey through 100,000+ financial instruments

03:28 – Monetization vs. Pricing: Why value capture matters more than price points

06:26 – The Jobs-to-be-Done debate: Are foundational problems the same as jobs?

12:14 – The umbrella test: Distinguishing core jobs from feature-level problems

15:32 – Why SaaS companies struggle: The 10,000 use cases pricing challenge

16:48 – Google and Facebook's secret: Pricing millions of micro-transactions contextually

18:00 – The factorial complexity problem: When features create exponential pricing opportunities

21:30 – When pricing becomes sleazy: The ethics of contextual price discrimination

23:27 – Airlines and Amazon: When dynamic pricing crosses the line

25:52 – AI for strategic moats: How Gary helps founders identify key monetization metrics

29:09 – Using AI as a pricing sounding board: Context + diagrams = better insights

30:19 – Final advice: Why every company needs a pricing person

Key Takeaways:

"Monetization is really how much of the value that you create are you capturing, and what is the system behind you consistently capturing that value." – Gary Bailey

"Most of the companies that we know, startups that talk about generating revenue, but very few talk about value capture." – Gary Bailey

"In reality, the most optimal pricing would be to price every single one of those problems individually." – Gary Bailey

"When it gets scammy... I think in some of the healthcare stuff, the PBM stuff and some of the other things do I think, well, that's a little bit risky with healthcare and stuff, but I think people are used to it because they experience it in everyday life." – Gary Bailey

Resources and People Mentioned:

• The Talent Capitalist: https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-talent-capitalist/
• FinTech Strategic Advisors: https://www.ftadvisory.co.uk/
• Salesforce: https://www.salesforce.com/
• HubSpot: https://www.hubspot.com/
• Google/Facebook/Meta: Examples of companies with sophisticated contextual pricing
• Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/
• OpenAI/ChatGPT: https://openai.com/

Connect with Gary Bailey:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gary-bailey-monetization-cfo/

Connect with Mark Stiving:

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

This is an Impact Pricing Blog published on May 5, 2025, turned into an audio podcast so you can listen on the go.

Read Full Article Here: https://impactpricing.com/blog/urgent-pricing-decisions/

If you have any feedback, definitely send it. You can reach us at [email protected].

Now, go make an impact.

Connect with Mark Stiving:

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

Garrick van Buren is the owner and principal consultant at Pricing from the Start, where he helps early-stage entrepreneurs and B2B SaaS companies create effective pricing strategies before they invest heavily in product development.

Since 2003, he has been launching and managing businesses that support entrepreneurial organizations. His diverse experience includes working with creative professionals and agencies, as well as time at a large corporation with established pricing practices. Garrick is also a certified Cicerone (beer sommelier), which gives him a unique insight into customer value and market positioning.

In this episode, Garrick shares his "Pricing from the Start" framework, designed to help entrepreneurs avoid the costly error of building products without fully understanding their value or pricing potential. He emphasizes the importance of qualitative customer research, explains the difference between foundational and detailed problems, and highlights why many entrepreneurs overlook pricing to their own disadvantage.

Alongside Mark, he explores how the Jobs-to-be-Done methodology intersects with traditional pricing strategies, debates various value frameworks, and delves into how to measure value in B2B settings.

Why you have to check out today's podcast:

• Learn how to determine pricing before you build your product, avoiding costly over-investment in questionable features
• Discover the "Pricing from the Start" framework for early-stage entrepreneurs and established companies at inflection points
• Understand how to identify foundational vs. detailed customer problems and price accordingly

"They need to have a price, they need to be comfortable charging it, and they need to approach it in a way that they want it to be repeatable, that it gets at the customer value, and that they can make the decision in an ongoing way of, is there a sustainable business here that we're developing?"

– Garrick van Buren

Topics Covered:

01:53 – How Garrick transitioned from struggling creative professional to pricing consultant

03:36 – Why entrepreneurs need to know their price before building their product

05:38 – Why successful companies often don't understand the value they deliver to customers

06:37 – Using MVP and Agile principles to test value through service delivery before building products

08:58 – The "Pricing from the Start" framework: qualitative research and timeless persistent problems

11:57 – Jobs-to-be-Done vs. problem-solution-result-value frameworks: what's the difference?

15:42 – Foundational problems vs. detailed problems in market segmentation

20:48 – Why the McDonald's milkshake example may be hurting Jobs-to-be-Done adoption

23:21 – The single sentence framework: "I help [role] at [adjective company] struggling with [timeless persistent problem]"

25:38 – Working with B2B SaaS companies at inflection points and quantifying customer value

28:44 – The 10% rule: capturing value as a percentage of customer incremental profit

Key Takeaways:

"Because the alternative is that they burn hundreds of thousands of dollars on something that they were guessing at and then pushed, shoved, fought, and argued with the developers... because they didn't do the first few steps." – Garrick van Buren

"Your competitive set is wider than you think. And that I think really drives how I think about both products, solutions, jobs-to-be-done, pricing, all of those things." – Garrick van Buren

"If we're going to capture 10% of value and we're going to charge $10,000 a year, that means that somebody is expecting $100,000 worth of value in that year against this kind of problem." – Garrick van Buren

Resources and People Mentioned:

• Pricing from the Start: https://pricingfromthestart.com/
• Jobs-to-be-Done Canvas (referenced in discussion)
• LinkedIn for recruiting (used as foundational problem example)

Connect with Garrick van Buren:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/garrickvanburen/
• Website: https://pricingfromthestart.com/

Connect with Mark Stiving:

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

This is an Impact Pricing Blog published on April 28, 2025, turned into an audio podcast so you can listen on the go.

Read Full Article Here: https://impactpricing.com/blog/why-i-dont-use-value-maps/

If you have any feedback, definitely send it. You can reach us at [email protected].

Now, go make an impact.

Connect with Mark Stiving:

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