Chris Mele
Chris is Managing Partner for Software Pricing Partners, where he and his team have launched some of the software industry’s most transformative monetization strategies. As a former software company founder and leader, Chris focuses on the impact effective licensing, packaging and pricing strategies can make on the most essential software company metrics: revenue, profit and valuation. Under his leadership, Software Pricing Partners has become an influential voice for growth-oriented software companies both large and small.
Latest Resources
Why Investors are Starting to Pay More Attention to Pricing Data
The software trade has always been central to the institutional investment world. Silicon Valley and its subsequent lookalikes were literally...
To Improve Pricing, Software Companies Must Get Serious About Competitive Intelligence
Soon it will be football season and millions of Americans will dedicate considerable energy to their favorite obsession. Meanwhile, the...
Should you display pricing on your website and how much detail should you provide?
One of the livelier debates among software companies is how much pricing detail should be displayed on their website or...
How to Utilize Programmatic Pricing when Selling Software to Procurement
If you sell your product to other businesses or government, you’ve undoubtedly encountered the challenge of the Procurement Department. When Procurement gets involved, whether to negotiate a purchase...
It’s Wise to Question the Big Assumption about Consumption Pricing
Consumption pricing–a licensing model where software is sold based on use (actual traffic, transactions, etc.) rather than a fixed fee–is...
An Introduction to Successful Software Pricing
Of the many questions software executives must answer, those concerning software pricing may have the most significant impact on their company’s overall success. Pricing has a...
The Fundamentals of Effective Software Discounting
The importance of discounting to a software company can hardly be overstated, as the difference between the right and wrong...
Bye Bye Beta: A Better Way to Think About Early-Phase Software
Recently, I wrote an article about avoiding “pricing traps” during the beta phase, a common challenge for software companies. My...
Thanks to 2020, Software Pricing is an Essential Consideration for 2021 Planning
For software companies, 2020 has been boom or bust. While some of us have benefitted from the massive disruption and...
Your SaaS Investors May Soon Demand a Chief Monetization Officer
The Importance Of A Chief Monetization Officer In part 1 of this series, we recently proposed that executive teams at software companies...
SaaS Pricing Strategies-the Fallacy and Fix for Land and Expand
The sales strategy of “Land and Expand” is common among software companies. So common, in fact, that it might be...
The Secret Dangers of Competitive Intelligence Gathering
Early in my career, I fell for a competitor’s spying ruse. I was working a tradeshow booth during the busiest...
Pandemic Pricing Blunders: Avoid the Cliff
It’s been said that you learn the true character of a person by how they respond to adversity. That applies...
Meet Your New Best Friend In a Post-Pandemic World: The CMzO
We recently introduced our thoughts on the need to create a Chief Monetization Officer (CMzO) executive role, particularly for software...
The Time has Come for a Chief Monetization Officer
In the 1980s, when Information Systems was gaining a foothold as a vital corporate discipline, most companies managed their “computer...