What's New / Presentations of Interest

Softletter's Selling and Marketing SaaS 2008

Softletter is the premiere newletter for executives in the software industry and sponsored "Marketing and Selling SaaS Seminar, 2008." This expands the original day-and-a-half event that was held in Santa Clara in October to a full two days. This event was held in Atlanta and featured some of the software industry's leading companies and experts on SaaS. The focus of the entire seminar was how to profit and grow as SaaS sweeps quietly but with increasing strength through the industry.

We made a presentation on SaaS pricing entitled: "Choosing a Pricing Model That’s Right for Your Company". If you'd like more information about our presentation, please contact us.

SoftSummit 2007 Presentation

SoftSummit is an annual conference that has become a must-attend event for those who price, license, or manage software. Our presentation at SoftSummit 2007, "How to Respond to SaaS Competition - Fast". The presentation focused on how established software vendors should respond to SaaS-based competitors.

The right response depends on your product position and strength as viewed by customers or prospects and your marketing objectives (further penetration/expansion in existing markets or growth by new market entry. The presentation concludes by suggesting that the appropriate response is based on what customers are responding to and the risks to the vendor. It is not necessary to wait for the next development cycle. A vendor can start to mitigate the risks almost immediately. Appropriate action means a vendor should do as much as is needed (but no more) in three areas: 1). Pricing and packaging, 2). Licensing and billing or 3). Product development.

A copy of the presentation is now available. If you would like one, click here to send us mail. Please include your name, company, title and company e-mail address.

Software 2007 Conference Presentation

Software 2007 promised to be another premiere gathering of software industry executives -- and it delivered. Attendance was more than 2,000 CEOs, VPs, VCs and others who gathered under this year's theme "Powered By Innovation". This year's keynoters included Hasso Plattner (SAP), Steve Ballmer (Microsoft), Marc Benioff (Salesforce.com) and Ed Zander (Motorola) among others. Other leaders and visionaries of the software industry will be presented their views of the industry.

MarketShare's presentation, entitled "Entering the SaaS Zone " was aimed at software companies with traditional licensing models who are considering the addition of a SaaS offering or a transition to SaaS. The presentation addressed the key drivers of SaaS success with an underlying message that ensuring success within the SaaS business model requires many of the same disciplines that drive success in traditional models, but these disciplines will have to be pursued differently - sometimes very differently. Specific areas that were addressed included…Pricing; Revenue Modeling; Evaluating long-term customer value; Managing Cannibalization; Sales Motivation and Compensation and; Product Development.

A copy of the presentation is now available. If you would like one, click here to send us mail. Please include your name, company, title and company e-mail address.

SoftwareCEO Podcast

This 15 minute podcast / interview is entitled SaaS Pricing: Why Salesforce.com's model may not be right for you and discusses potential pitfalls from adopting Salesforce.com's pricing model and metrics. Some companies eager to jump on the SaaS bandwagon believe that success lies in blindly imitating this CRM giant's pricing structure and metrics. But with imitation comes risk, confusion, and potentially unfair comparisons that can put a software firm at a disadvantage.

The interview covers topics that will help a company develop a pricing strategy that includes viral growth with an upsell "tail". Since SaaS offerings are typically priced much lower than traditional software solutions so there's less margin for error. To win, a company needs to know how to create a pricing strategy that's right for their business — and their customers.

Presentation at SoftSummit 2006

SoftSummit is an annual conference that has become a must-attend event for those who price, license, or manage software. Our presentation at SoftSummit 2006, "The Perfect Storm Hits Software Pricing: Keys to Survival". The presentation focused on how the SaaS "wave" may engulf software vendors that misunderstand how truly different SaaS is -- as a collection of software offerings and as an industry movement.

While there are several market forces converging on vendors including: Heavily discounted perpetual licenses; Open Source software; and Advertising-supported software offerings. The force of SaaS products priced below $100/user-month poses the greatest risk. Software vendors who respond to these pressures in measured ways will preserve their ability to grow, if not survive.

The presentation describes how business strategies and sales tactics need to change in the future in light of the SaaS movement. In particular, the presentation describes how and why pricing plays a crucial role in the SaaS business model. The presentation concludes by suggesting what vendors need to do to take advantage of the SaaS opportunity.

To obtain a copy of the presentation, click here to send us mail. Please include your name, company, title and company e-mail address.

Presentations Focusing on Pricing and Product Management

The product management function in most organizations covers a broad range of activities -- so broad in fact some of the activities get shortchanged. Pricing is one of them.

In part this is because Product Managers are too busy working with the development organization and dealing with the complexities of a product launch. But often it is because Product Managers are not well equipped to deal with pricing challenges that are, in fact, very challenging. During the Fall of 2006 we made a series of presentations meant to help Product Managers do a better job of pricing.

Each of the presentations makes two common points. First, how to improve new product pricing by making appropriate pricing decisions at appropriate points in the product development process. Second, the presentation suggest who should own what parts of pricing. While there is some overlap in the presentations, each emphasizes a slightly different aspect of pricing in the range of product management activities.

"Effective Product Pricing: The Key to Product Line Success" Describes how pricing is a strategic activity that is applied differently when pricing new products versus doing pricing as an ongoing activity. The presentation also briefly discusses SaaS pricing.

"Pricing: The Thankless Job That Someone Has to Do" This goes into somewhat more depth into actual price setting and pricing fundamentals. It was presented to the NorthEast Chapter of the PDMA.

"5 Common Pricing Mistakes – What Product Managers Can Do To Avoid Them" Describes the mistakes and root causes of the mistakes as well as possible approaches to avoiding the mistakes in the future.

"Right Pricing Starts with the Right Product Plan" This was a webinar given as part of the Orasi Software Webinar Series. It is descibed below.

To obtain a copy of any of these presentations, click here to send us mail. Please include your name, company, title and company e-mail address.

Presentation at SaaS Summit

The first annual SaaS Summit conference attracted more than 150 software executives. The Summit was sponsored by OpSource, a leading vendor of SaaS enablement infrastructure. Clearly customers are attracted to the SaaS model with its low cost of entry, "bite-sized" scalability and remote hosting.

One of the major sticking points for many software companies is the SaaS pricing model. Whether a company is a new entrant or an established player, pricing is not easy.

Our presentation, "SaaS Acceleration Pricing: Faster sales through value-driven pricing" focused on how companies could accelerate their sales cycle and product uptake with pricing. Pricing that does this is understandable and driven by the value delivered. Attendees were given a brief introduction to value-driven pricing. The presentation also raised the question whether some of the current SaaS pricing models are priced too low relative to the perpetual model -- or perhaps the perpetual model has been priced too high.

To obtain a copy of the presentation, click here to send us mail. Please include your name, company, title and company e-mail address.

Software 2006 Conference Presentation

Software 2006 continued to be the premiere gathering of software industry executives with more than 1,500 CEOs, VPs, VCs and top executives attending the conference. The group gathered to hear the leaders and visionaries of the software industry explain the importance of “Unifying the Ecosystem.” Keynote speakers included Ray Lane and C.K. Prahalad.

MarketShare's presentation, entitled "Licensing and Pricing – The Next Segmentation Weapon" suggested innovations in licensing and pricing will become an increasingly important means by which successful companies address the needs of the various segments they serve. Software-as-a-service is already emerging as the licensing and pricing model of choice for companies with limited in-house resources. In the future, successful companies will complement their portfolio of product offerings with a portfolio of licensing and pricing schemes. The presentation addressed challenges facing management: 1). Understanding the emerging choices of licensing and pricing models; 2). Dealing with the challenges and opportunities each new model poses; and 3). Understanding the challenges and opportunities of managing a portfolio of pricing and licensing models.

To obtain a copy of the presentation, click here to send us mail. Please include your name, company, title and company e-mail address.

Presentation at SoftSummit 2005

SoftSummit is an annual conference that has quickly become a must-attend event for those who price, license, or manage software. Our presentation at SoftSummit 2005, "Multicore Processors: The Last Straw for Hardware-Based Pricing?" focused on the new pricing challenges facing the software industry and many vendors with the advent of dual core processors.

The debate and the challenge over hardware-based pricing and scaling metrics will almost certainly escalate over the next 24 months as the number of cores per CPU grows from 2 to 4 to 8 or more.

Multicore technology is just the latest way hardware vendors are delivering greater value to their performance-hungry customers - good news for the customers, but bad news for software vendors whose pricing is closely tied to the hardware on which it operates.

The presentation provides software vendors with the information and perspective they need to develop and begin to implement a strategy that distances, as much as possible, the price of their software from the price of the hardware that enables it. Session attendees were provided with a better understanding of …

• The disadvantages and long-term perils of closely linking the price of software with the hardware that enables it,
• The advantages software vendors and their customers will realize when software pricing is more closely linked to the value it delivers,
• Software licensing options that can increase the distance from hardware-based metrics and more closely align to value delivered,
• Strategies and tactics that can be deployed to effectively manage the transition from their current licensing model to the model they select for the future.
  

To obtain a copy of the presentation, click here to send us mail. Please include your name, company, title and company e-mail address.

Software 500 Marketing Perspectives Conference Presentation

At the first Annual Software 500 Marketing Perspectives Conference & Expo we made a presentation entitled "Pricing Software-as-a-Service: Can Short-Term Licenses Lead to Long-Term Opportunities?" The presentation shows the ways Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) or software subscriptions are fundamentally changing the basis of competition in the software industry.

This new business model is raising a number of troubling questions. How should ISVs respond to this emerging business model? How can ISVs take best advantage of this strategic shift? How will this new business model affect the way software prices are set?

The presentation gives some guidance on how to address these questions. In particular the presentation showed:

• How SaaS / subscription licenses will affect new or existing ISVs
• A perspective on software-as-a-service - making it less daunting
• A methodology for setting SaaS software prices

To obtain a copy of the presentation, click here to send us mail. Please include your name, company, title and company e-mail address.

Professional Pricing Society Member Webinar

The Professional Pricing Society offers it members webinars covering topics of strategic importance. This webinar entitled "Pricing Software-as-a-Service: Short-term Subscriptions and Long-term Opportunities" described how vendors offering software-as-a-service (SaaS) or software subscriptions are fundamentally changing the basis of competition in the software industry. The webinar covered how this emerging business model affects new or existing software companies and helps them understand how to consider when, and under what circumstances, a vendor should embrace this emerging business model. Finally, the webinar described how the new business model affects the way software prices are set.

Webinar objectives included:

• Understanding the impact of SaaS / subscription licenses on new and existing software businesses
  
• Putting software-as-a-service in perspective - making it less daunting
  
• A methodology for setting subscription software prices so they align with the more traditional perpetual pricing model
  

To obtain a copy of the presentation, click here to send us mail. Please include your name, company, title and company e-mail address.

SoftwareCEO.com's Software University Webinar

Recently SoftwareCEO held a webinar at their Software University featuring Jim Geisman who presented "What's the Right Price for My Software? 5 Steps that will Help You Set Standalone and Subscription License Prices". The presentation was aimed at people responsible for product pricing in their companies. This included CxOs in smaller companies and VP Sales, Sales Management, VP Marketing and Product Managers in mid-sized companies and larger.

The first part of this seminar helped attendees understand how to set product prices and establish discount schedules applying value-based principles to perpetual software licenses. The second segment focused on how to choose the right pricing method and how to modify perpetual license prices accordingly.

This presentation is available with the purchase of the CD from the session. The CD includes an audio voice-over plus the slides and plays in a browser window. For information on this Webinar CD, follow this link >>>

Software 2005 Conference Presentation

Software 2005 was the premiere gathering of software industry executives with more than 1500 senior executives in attendance. It lived up to the billing by its organizers "A vendor-neutral forum where all software business leaders could candidly debate strategic issues, share ideas and opinions - all for the common good of the industry." The conference was jammed packed with high profile keynote speakers and many breakout sessions. Keynote speakers included software industry leaders such as Scott Cook (Intuit), Jim Goodnight (SAS), Charles Philips (Oracle).

MarketShare made a presentation at one of the breakout sessions. The presentation was entitled "New Business Models: Pricing to Increase Your Competitive Strength". The presentation addressed three challenges facing management: 1). Finding the right new licensing model; 2). Establishing the new pricing model and; 3). Rolling out the new model. If you would like a copy of the presentation, click here to send us mail. Please include your name, company, title and company e-mail address.

Orasi Expert Series: Strategies in Software Product Marketing and Management

Orasi Software offers products that improve product design and development by harnessing customer information into actionable product plans. The company sponsors a series of webinars that are aimed at people involved in product marketing. More than 150 people signed up to hear a MarketShare presentation entitled "Right Pricing Starts with the Right Product Plan".

The presentation showed how Right Pricing could meet a wide range of customer needs, and should drive some of the decisions made early in the product development cycle. Defining the right product elements and combining them together into the right modules is where Right Pricing begins. With this starting point, one can find the right pricing metrics and set the right price levels for the product.

When a product is designed with pricing flexibility in mind, one has the option of using this flexibility. If the product architecture is not modular enough, the customer will not be able to configure the product to meet their specific needs and will be less able (and likely) to pay for value delivered.

The presentation described some of the principles and processes involved in Right Pricing and applied them to traditional and emerging business models such as subscription pricing. To obtain a copy of the presentation, click here to send us mail. Please include your name, company, title and company e-mail address. To see the webinar and hear the audio, click here and select Expert Series Archives. (Registration required).