The Next Frontier of SaaS Pricing - with Bill Wilson, Pace Pricing

**Ray Wright** (0:00)
Hello, I'm Ray Wright, Founder and CEO of Benchmarkit, and your host of the Metrics that 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 Bill Wilson, the founder and CEO of Pace Pricing. I'll be covering four primary topics with Bill today. First, the top trends in SaaS pricing and how SaaS companies are adapting to these trends. Second, the risk and rewards of changing pricing models, especially on existing customers. Third, an overview of Bill's fast framework. And fourth, I'm going to ask Bill to bring out his crystal ball on where AI pricing is headed. So with that, Bill, please take a moment to give a brief overview of your journey to becoming a guest here on the Metrics of Measure Up podcast. So you know your SaaS metrics, but how are you going to improve them over the next two quarters? Start with scale matters. Scale matters helps strategic CFOs and go to market leaders and cover how go to market performance is impacting SaaS metrics. So you know exactly where to focus for better outcomes. Say goodbye to forecast surprises and misalignment between GTM and finance and hello to actionable insights and empower your leadership team to drive meaningful performance improvements. Metrics of Measure Up listeners get 40% off scale matters, go to market data audit, but only until the end of Q1. Visit scalematters.com/metrics to clean your offer today.

**Bill Wilson** (1:58)
Thanks so much Ray for having me on. Yeah, so I am Bill Wilson. I am the CEO and founder of Pace Pricing and I help B2B SaaS founders nail their pricing with data back strategies. So I got into pricing early on in my career, probably 2007 when I was building an agency, and we had built a tool internally to help us sell, and it was very based around kind of the good, better, best kind of packaging approach. From there, we were selling to a lot of B2B SaaS companies at the time, and a lot of them were asking us about how to, if they could use this tool that we had built because they thought it was really cool. And so we decided after much prodding for my sales, my head of sales, that we would go off and we'd build a product. So we built a company called SalesRite, and it was designed specifically to help inside sales teams at SaaS companies with pricing in custom deals. And so fast forward a few years, we were acquired. And since then, I've taken all of that information I've gotten from all those B2B SaaS companies over the years, digging into all their pricing problems, and I've built a pricing practice where we go in and help companies, primarily in the 2 to 20 million range, really, really nail their pricing.

**Ray Wright** (3:03)
Okay. Well, you're the right person because you've helped hundreds of SaaS companies, and anybody who pays attention to LinkedIn or listens to podcasts, we hear that subscription pricing is legacy SaaS. Now we've got usage-based pricing, value-based pricing, outcome-based pricing, hybrid pricing. So Bill, what have you seen as some of the major evolutions of SaaS pricing over the last one to two years? I don't want to go too far back. Just what are the trends that you're really tracking today?

**Bill Wilson** (3:31)
Yeah, I think the biggest trend for me is you see a lot of people talking about per-seat based pricing and you see a lot of people saying that per-seat based pricing is dead. Now, while I think per-seat based pricing isn't the most optimal for most SaaS companies, it's still useful. So one of the biggest trends I've seen is that we need to get to this place where we have not only lateral expansion, where people are moving kind of left to right in our packaging structure. So think of a good, better, best. They start off in the base package and they move to the middle. Sort of the whole holy grail of expansion in B2B SaaS. The challenge is it doesn't work that well. It's really difficult to move people from left to right in most cases. People will land in the plan that they start off with and they'll stay there, and it's really hard to get them to move. So the antidote to that, of course, is vertical expansion. So how do we allow them to grow inside the package they're in?