AMA: Atlassian Former Head of Marketing, Cloud Enterprise and Platform, Akshay Kerkar on Pricing and Packaging

Great question! Pricing is something that's never done, since you'll have to keep updating it over time (as your products evolve, the market evolves, or due to competitive moves). A few key things I find useful when working on a pricing change: * Setting up your approach to how you will develop pricing (and evangelizing that with stakeholders upfront) is really important * We need to make sure we identify the "Approvers" - Marketing leadership, Sales execs, Finance partners, etc. * As part of the process, it does not hurt to run your thinking by partners and/or a few customers * Enablement is key once you are ready to launch -- pricing can get confusing and is really important for individual AEs, so you'll likely need a robust enablement plan with solid documentation, an FAQ, and refesher sessions in the future

A few other things to consider: * Your team's research needs (qual and/or quant) * Any analyst-related spent (either for research reports or to engage w/ analysts) * Content-related needs -- always a good idea to work with a good content agency to flex your capacity when needed * And perhaps most important - a team-building/fun budget for your team :)

Pricing is both tough and is not one-and-done - it has to be refreshed over time. While you can use research to figure out initial pricing for launch (see one of my other answers for details on figuring out willingness-to-pay (WTP)), you will need to reevaluate pricing over time to see how it needs to be updated - e.g. are you getting negative feedback from customers? Is Sales having a hard time maintaining your price and so has to resort to deep discounting consistently? Has your product significantly evolved to justify increasing prices due to additional value being delivered? The bid advantage of B2B pricing (unlike B2C) is you don't have to get it "perfect" -- due to how the B2B sales process works and discounting, the rep usually finds the "right" price for the deal. 

Few things to consider: 1] Your customer comms plan - when are you letting your customers know? Are you giving them a head's up? Are you letting them know why pricing is changing - e.g. new functionality that's drvcing additional value 2] Your internal enablement plan - for all teams that will be impacted - Sales, Ops, the folks who handle quoting, etc. 3] Arming your sales team - to explain pricing, handle objections, etc. 4] Do you have a grace period for existing customers? E.g. new pricing won't come into effect until x months after launch Any pricing change will cause confusion with both your Sales team and customers, so you'll need to keep an ear to the ground and react accordingly. One thing you could do before a big rollout is run the new model by a few trusted partners and customers to get their feedback and figure out major concerns/obstacles that you have not accounted for. 

Your pricing inherently reflects the value of your products, and since competitive comparisons will inevitably come up in deals, you have to translate all your competitive research and market understanding into a compelling set of content and enablement for your Sales team so they can sell the "value"/better position your priducts throughout the life of your deal. If this happens primarily when pricing is being discussed, I'd argue that it's a much harder to successfully navigate.

The answer really varies by company - I have seen instances of Product Marketing, Product Management, Finance, Biz Ops, and Sales Strategy teams own pricing. In an ideal world, the team that's both tasked with understand your products/market/customers and works closely w/ Sales is the best place to lead pricing initiatives. In most instances, I'd argue that this is Product Marketing. Product Management are important stakeholders in the process (along with teams like Sales and Finance) but since they are not as GTM focused as PMM in most cases I don't think they are in the best position to lead pricing efforts.

Single product pricing is (relatively) straightforward. When you go to multiple products, or multiple SKUs of the same product (e.g. a Standard Edition vs. Premium vs. Enterprise), the complexity explodes across multiple fronts - Ops/quoting, your website/customer comms, sales enablement, and rep conversations w/ customers. Perhaps the most important part to figure out when you go multi-product is the GTM model - for example, will you lead with one product and the others will be upsells over time? Which product will you pitch to which type of customer? Defining this clearly upfront will avoid a lot of complications down the road. 

Hands down the value you deliver. In an ideal world, you figure out the willingness-to-pay (WTP) for your product in the market, and set your price close to the WTP line (and above your costs). WTP is usually figured out through research, both qual conversations with customers, partners, and key stakeholders like Sales and then quanty surveys out in the market (targeting your buyers) to get the actual price points. There are several research firms out there who can run this kind of work for you (or larger companies have teams that do this in-house). You should ofcourse be aware of the competition and arm your reps to sell the value of your products (and address any competitive questions) but basing your pricing on the competition assumes that they have figured out the right price and you can accurately assess the difference in value between your products.

Figuring out the willingness-to-pay (WTP) by conducting research for your product with your target market/buyers is an effective approach. I've mentioned more details in a previous response. There are lots of good articles on WTP research (including HBR). Also checkout the Profitwell/PriceIntelligently blog for some good articles on pricing.