SoftwarePricingPartners - Consulting Practice

All of our consulting activities have a single overarching objective: Improve the financial performance of our clients, all of whom are in the business of providing software and related services to other businesses. Our services must have a significant impact on our client's business, otherwise the engagement is not worth doing.

The focus of all of our engagements is Pricing not pricing - as in price levels. Pricing covers a full range of activities including product and service packaging, selection of software licensing approach, identification of value metrics, defining pricing structures and price levels, and designing and implementing processes required to bring about change. Our engagements typically fall into one of the following three practice areas...

Value-Driven Pricing - Helping our clients capture greater value from products and services and to shorten sales cycles by developing and implementing pricing policies including any or all of the following...

• Licensing approach - determining which licensing approach can best attract and retain customers, while capturing software value
• Packaging structure - identifying ways that packaging can help extract greater value and accelerate deal flow
• Value metrics - ensuring that mechanisms for determining software value are closely linked to how customers use the software and how they extract value
• Price structure - identifying ways to encourage more transactions that acknowledge the value that certain deals or customers represent to the company
• Price levels - determining price levels that will maximize financial performance in the near term and beyond
• Implementation process - identifying ways to effectively implement price changes, for both sales teams, prospects, and existing customers

Strategic Discounting - Helping our clients get a maximum return on the discount dollars being "invested" by developing policies and practices that will give clients a clear view of where their discount dollars are going. These engagements include...

• Scheduled discounts - developing discount schedules that fairly acknowledge the value that large deals and selected deal types represent to the software vendor
• Analysis of negotiated discounts - determining where discount dollars are being invested and uncovering non-strategic revenue leaks
• Developing discount policies - establishing guidelines for discounts by industry, customer type, and deal size to better align discounts with the value that deals, customers, and customer segments represent to the software vendor
• Implementing change - developing processes for change implementation and tracking

Value-Based Selling - Developing and implementing analytical tools and value-focusing techniques for use by sales professionals, and sometimes providing deal-specific negotiation support. These engagements can include...

• Value identification and quantification - developing value arguments and presentation tools for use by sales professionals
• Sales training - providing focused training on the effective use of value arguments and tools
• Negotiation support - providing both visible and behind-the-scenes support to enable timely and effective large-deal closes

In addition to the "standard" engagements described above, we are often sometimes asked to pursue limited-scope engagements to address a client's specialized need or limited budget. Examples of these engagements include...

• Identifying pricing opportunities - providing an assessment of where repricing efforts should be focused, along with counsel on how they should proceed (if budgets are limited)
• Pricing to address new market opportunities - helping clients effectively address specific market segments through focused licensing, packaging and pricing
• Analyzing the economics of alternative licensing forms - enabling the evaluation of different licensing forms, such as SaaS or Subscription, prior to committing Development, Marketing, and Sales to a change
• Providing guidance on pricing issues and trends - through presentations to senior and middle management teams offering an industry-based perspective relevant to the pricing issues they face

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