Capturing Value with SaaS Pricing - with James D. Wilton, Author Capturing Value

**Ray Wright** (0:00)
Hello, I'm Ray Wright, Founder and CEO of BenchMarket, and your host of the Metrics It Measure Up podcast. We talked to a wide variety of the top B2B SaaS and Cloud thought leaders, CEOs, executives, investors, and people just like you to discuss the metrics and benchmarks they use to make metrics informed and benchmark validated decisions. Now, on to today's show.
Welcome to today's episode of the Metrics at Measure Up podcast. Today, I am joined by James D. Wilton, the author of Capturing Value, The Definitive Guide to Transforming SaaS Pricing and Unshackling Growth, and also the managing partner at Monevate. We'll be covering four primary topics with James today. First, actual value versus perceived value, which matters most in pricing. Second, price metric evaluation criteria. Third, we'll discuss some innovative monetization strategies happening here in 2025 and beyond. And fourth, measuring a customer's willingness to pay. So with that, James, would you mind taking a moment to give a brief overview of your journey to becoming a guest here on the Metrics at Measure Up podcast? Have you heard about Liveflow? It's the easiest way to automate spreadsheet FP&A. Liveflow updates QuickBooks Online in zero actuals in your models without breaking your formulas. Finance leaders are transforming everything from forecasts to board reports into live 24x7 control centers. Some are even avoiding switches to expensive ERPs with no formula, real-time consolidation. Thousands of companies are making life easier with Liveflow. Join them at liveflow.com.

**James D. Wilton** (2:01)
Good to be here, Ray.

**Ray Wright** (2:03)
Yeah.

**James D. Wilton** (2:03)
Hi, everybody. My background is I've been in consulting about 20 years or so, started off in go-to-market into strategy and ops, and I stumbled across pricing strategy largely by choice, about half, sorry, by accident, I beg your pardon, about halfway through my consulting career, and it took me by surprise. It was way more strategic than I was expecting. There was a lot more room for creativity than I was expecting, and so I was hooked really, and I decided that I wanted to spend the rest of my consulting career focused on pricing. A few different roles. I ended up at McKinsey. I was brought in to lead the pricing service line for Fuel, which was the part of McKinsey's offering that was focused on startups.
Scale-ups and other fast-growing tech companies. I did that for a few years and then decided to found my own pricing consulting firm, Monevate, in 2021 We've grown relatively quickly. We're now about 15 consultants.

**Ray Wright** (3:06)
So I have to ask, I wrote my first book about a year and a half ago and realized, man, it's a lot of work. But what was the challenge for you to actually decide to write a book on pricing?

**James D. Wilton** (3:16)
Yeah, it was a lot of work. It's taken me about four years to get Capturing Value out, I think. So you don't want to rush these things, right? But no, really what made me right, it was, I've met a lot of startups and growing companies over my consulting time, and I frequently speak to people in the leadership team of a SaaS startup, who have just been told by either the board or the CEO that, hey, we would now like you to build us a new pricing strategy. And these people typically don't have any experience in pricing. They've never done it before. And for anybody who has done pricing before, know that it's difficult. You have to really know a lot about all the different areas you need to plug into, the different options that you have, and so on and so forth. And of course, it's really risky. If you go and you get your pricing wrong, you can end up with a lot of churn and a lot of customer blowback. And so it's a bit of a hospital pass sometimes for these guys. So I really wanted to write a book for these people. If you've been told that you need to build a pricing strategy for a SaaS product or any kind of tech or digital product, really, and you don't know how to do it, you can read Capturing Value. It'll walk you through all the different steps and the different decision points that you need to make. It'll give you enough theory that you can understand what you need to be thinking about. It'll talk you through the different options that you have within each one of those areas. And it'll walk you through the steps that you actually need to go through to be able to actually build it out. So even if you walk into the situation, you don't know what you're doing, after reading Capturing Value, you should be able to have a good starting point to figuring out.