B2B SaaS Pricing Benchmarks - with Bryan Belanger, XaaS Pricing

**Ray Rike** (0:00)
Hello, I'm Ray Reich, founder and CEO of RevOpSquared and your host of the Metrics that Measure Up podcast. We talked to a wide variety of B2B, SaaS and Cloud thought leaders, executives, investors, and people just like you to discuss the metrics and benchmarks they use to make metrics-informed decisions. Now on to today's show.
Welcome to today's episode of the Metrics That Measure Up podcast. Today, we're joined by Bryan Belanger from XaaS Pricing and Technology Business Research. Today, we'll be covering three main topics with Bryan. First, the strategic importance of pricing models in the SaaS and cloud industry. Second, pricing trends, really pricing model trends in B2B SaaS and cloud. And third, usage-based pricing. Over-hyped or strategic lever? Bryan, please take a moment to give a brief background of your journey to becoming a guest on the Metrics That Measure Up podcast.

**Bryan Belanger** (1:13)
Sure. And thanks so much, Ray, for having me. Really excited to be here. So I've been with a firm called Technology Business Research, who is a kind of hardcore technology benchmarking and research provider for the past 10 years. And most of that time, I've spent doing large, complex, competitive and market price benchmarking exercises across technology domain. So I've been rooted in data broadly, and then specifically in pricing data on behalf of large and mid-market technology companies, really since I started my career. And so we're doing some things with XaaS service pricing to take that to the next level in the SaaS, and anything as a service markets more broadly, and really invested in data at the core of what we're doing around benchmarking and pricing and trying to bring it to a much broader audience at scale. And so I live, breathe every day price benchmarking. And so that's all about metrics, of course.

**Ray Rike** (2:11)
Right. You know, I first heard about you because I saw the XaaS service pricing kind of post you made on LinkedIn. So it's really exciting to invite you to be a guest here in the Metrics to Measure podcast. So let's start at the beginning. So you've got all this experience at your company kind of doing pricing benchmarks, and then you decided to launch XaaS service pricing to capture and publish more detailed pricing benchmarks. What was the callous to launch this new, almost separate initiative within your current company?

**Bryan Belanger** (2:40)
There's a lot of them, some personal, some related to the market. But as I mentioned, we've done hundreds and hundreds of these projects. They're typically what you think of when you think of doing pricing consulting, large, intensive, three months, four months in duration, and carry a big price tag for the client. Those have been really fun, and I've done that for years and years across different markets. I actually started in professional services as my focus and have broadened. But what we found is that those are really only available as a resource to a certain set of large or high growth enterprises in the tech space. So we were looking at that business, feeling a little bit tired too about doing all of those consulting projects, and thinking about how do we bring 80% or even 60% of the repeatable efforts of this to a much broader audience, and where can we do that effectively in a high growth market? And so anything as a service is a trend for a reason. It's the direction of most markets that we've covered. There's more pricing availability of information, more transparency across the markets. So we said that's the right market space to focus, and we can bring what we've done in consulting to scale through a product-based approach, and hopefully help a much broader set of companies, and a much kind of earlier stage set of companies with pricing, which we know is a challenge for everybody. And so that's kind of where it sprung out of.

**Ray Rike** (4:02)
Well, let's double click on this kind of pricing benchmarks as a service. What type of insights, kind of what detail are participants going to be able to see is that what percentage of people use peer subscription versus usage base or is there more detail into the pricing benchmark you're going to be publishing?

**Bryan Belanger** (4:20)
Yeah, sure. So it's definitely has those areas you mentioned, but we tried to be as holistic as possible and there's always places to go deeper. So we look at just over 50 or so metrics across broad categories would be packaging strategy, pricing strategy, and then price levels and discounting themselves and even things like pricing, page design and structure trial versus freemium experience as well. So each has its own offshoot of submetrics, but trying to take a broad cut across kind of everything that can be benchmarked and indexed and compared as it relates to a packaging pricing strategy and then going deep both on quantitative and qualitative topics within that things like what is your pricing model? What are the usage metrics that define your offering? How are you metering? And then the price points and the discount levels themselves.