Once you have your pricing committee in place, they should be making minor changes to your pricing strategy every quarter and major changes to your pricing strategy every six months, regardless of the size of your organization. In reality, given organizational size, larger organizations may move a bit slower and smaller organizations a bit quicker, but this cadence is exceptionally important, because this is how quickly almost every vertical in SaaS is moving.
Every 3 months make small tweaks that don’t require major customer communication
At the end of every quarter you should be evaluating your pricing strategy’s performance based on goals you’ve set as an organization (improving LTV/CAC, increasing QoQ growth, etc.). You should also be analysing your main pricing metrics (value metric, price level, feature packaging, etc) by pulling or collecting necessary data.
The three month cadence allows you to constantly be re-evaluating where you stand in the market and how your customers are changing. Yet, even with wide data swings, you’ll likely not make major changes every three months, because customers would be placed into too volatile of a pricing environment. This is why we recommend making minor changes that mainly impact your upgrade and downgrade rates to keep your pricing momentum, but to not have to communicate to the whole of your customer base.
What are “minor” pricing changes? Here’s a good list:
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Reduction in amount of value metric given: Reducing the number of visits or quantity of the value metric you provide each tier allows you to spur upgrades, and more often than not, you’re giving away too much already
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Reducing your discounting thresholds: Getting rid of all discounts is a noble goal, but in enterprise software they have their merits. You should still be working to reduce these constantly though, especially if your organization is discount happy.
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Moving features from plan to plan or adding in new features: Never underestimate the power of features on upgrades. Moving API access or non-essential features one way or another can be gold for upgrades.
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Design and funnel changes: Don’t underestimate the impact of proper funnel management, pricing page design, and even shifting your marketing channels on your pricing’s bottom line.
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Value proposition alignment: One of the easiest things to change are pixels on a page or email when it comes to your messaging.