Your customers have been requesting a feature forever.
Your competitors are developing something similar, but they haven’t been able to do it as well or as quickly as your team has.
Being the first to release this feature will be a game-changer for your business. It’s almost ready to go. Except…
Adding it to your billing software’s product catalog is taking more time than you anticipated.
You called in a dev to hard code the new feature into your catalog. She wants you to be extra-sure you won’t be changing the pricing or plan configurations anytime soon. After all, it will create more work for her if you do.
One feature to improve your go-to-market
Any product or feature your business takes to market needs to be added to your billing software’s product catalog. Otherwise, you won’t be able to sell it. It’s an important part of your go-to-market strategy that can be easily overlooked because it isn’t all that glamorous.
If you’re working with a
- legacy platform
- homegrown software solution, or
- piece of software that wasn’t built specifically for SaaS billing
…updating your catalog can be a whole thing. You may have to pull your developers off their strategic projects—including putting the finishing touches on the new feature.
If that’s your situation, once your product or feature is finally set up in your catalog it’s understandable if you’re discouraged from making changes to it. But if your competitors swoop in and beat you in pricing or plan configurations, that’s dangerous for your revenue.
On the other hand, using a modern billing solution with a flexible product catalog can improve not only your time to market, but also your entire go-to-market strategy. It enables you to experiment and iterate on the fly.
Here’s how:
1. Simplify product setup and bundling
For many businesses working with legacy or in-house billing solutions, products and plans are hard-coded into the software. That means any
- iterations
- bundling
- discounting, and—yep, you guessed it—
- adding of new products
…are not exactly straightforward.
In this case, you may need to call in your developers to program the new feature into your software. You’ll also need them to run tests to ensure things run smoothly when customers purchase it.
This solution gets the job done, but it’s obviously not the most efficient.
A more efficient option is modern recurring billing software that was built for exactly this. Add new features or products in just a few minutes with a couple of clicks.
What’s more, the flexible product catalog means you can easily play with pricing.
2. Experiment with pricing upon release
Part of a successful SaaS product or feature launch is the amount of revenue it pulls in its first days, weeks, and months on the market. The right pricing strategy can make a huge difference in the product’s appeal to customers—and therefore on the amount of revenue your business sees from it.
However, you never really know what the optimal pricing method is until you try it.
“Pricing is inherently risky because your revenue depends on getting it right. Yet there isn’t one de facto strategy that works.” Mathilde Collin, co-founder and CEO of customer support solution Front, shares in a Medium blog post.
When Collin and her team initially launched Front, they hyper-focused on finding the right pricing strategy. Each time they changed it, the team second-guessed whether they’d made the right decision.
Eventually, though, Front began running pricing experiments. Collin believes these have “de-risked” pricing for the business.
“Now when we make changes, we compare the new [customer] cohort to the previous ones: if the cohorts behave similarly or the new one is even better, we stick with the new pricing plan,” Collin says. “If not, we just roll back to a pricing structure that’s worked well previously.”
Pricing experiments require the right tools, however. For example, a modern billing automation system can run A/B tests of different pricing strategies simultaneously. This allows you to analyze the customer lifecycle based on cohorts like Front does.
This is one of the benefits of choosing a recurring billing platform with strong catalog flexibility: pricing isn’t locked at the general catalog level. Theoretically, you could charge every single one of your customers differently for the same product.
Regardless of exactly how you run your pricing experiments, though, one thing is for sure. Making pricing decisions based on data is the surest way to de-risk new feature revenue.
3. Update pricing as market demands change
You’ve landed on an optimal pricing strategy for your new feature—great! Be ready to change it again in a few months.
Your pricing should always be changing, but most SaaS businesses don’t update prices nearly as often as they should. In fact, most SaaS businesses are missing out on as much as 30% growth because they don’t regularly optimize pricing.
So it might be time to call a pricing strategy meeting.
This will be true for any product that’s been on the market for some time. That includes whether it’s the new module you released last week, or your core product offering that’s been around for nearly a decade. As time goes on, your customers’ needs and expectations evolve.
With a powerful, modern recurring billing platform, you can schedule regular pricing updates to happen:
- after any set period of time
- by percentage or by dollar amount, and
- at the customer or catalog level.
What’s more, there doesn’t have to be the same amount of time between one uplift and the next. Increases can take place immediately after they’re scheduled, ensuring your SaaS pricing never stagnates. These regular uplifts make sure your product is always priced competitively.
OpenView Partners asked 2,200 SaaS businesses how regularly they update pricing. Of the results, Kyle Poyar writes:
“Later stage companies do tend to revisit pricing less frequently than earlier stage ones, but even they still revisit it once per year on average. If you haven’t changed pricing in the past year, now’s the time to assess whether it’s working or if there are opportunities to improve what you’re doing.”
Improving go-to-market strategy is all about catalog flexibility
If speed to market is important for you, you need to evaluate your billing software’s catalog flexibility. Whether your SaaS business is in the market for its first-ever billing automation solution or re-evaluating its existing platform, flexibility is key.
Certainly, any modern billing platform has more catalog flexibility than its clunky legacy counterparts. It may even beat many in-house built solutions. However, some options far outshine others.
Stax Bill’s subscription billing software offers the most flexible catalog in its class. The software sits at the intersection of ease-of-use and robust capability. This ensures your initial go-to-market and any iterations or experiments are as simple and stress-free as possible.
We’d love to show you our catalog in action. Interested? Fill out the form below to start your free trial or click here to connect with a subscription billing expert for a demo.
