Is the market shifting?  Saas products have always focused on enablement: enabling expert employees and teams to do their work better. The shift I'm noticing is away from enablement tools for expert employees to outsourcing expertise to software. Real time data driven action without human bias? Avoiding analysis paralysis? Buyers' interest and comfort with these solutions seems to be growing. Especially on the sales, marketing, and customer retention fronts.  Is it an over reaction to missed quotas, low inbound leads, and increased churn? Is it being driven by the bubbly promise of the AI revolution?

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Or, is everyone just enabled by now? 

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Hardly. Over the past few months and after dozens of conversations specific to Stage, an intuitive and agile solution to pricing and packaging, I'm reminded of an old saying from my time on Wall Street: "People are drowning in information and starving for knowledge". Specifically, many Saas companies want the flexibility to adjust, test, and iterate on their offerings, but the engineering costs and the business risk of changing pricing leads to inaction, or even worse, to low-confidence changes. 

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Some questions we've been hearing:

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How should we determine pricing for early customers?

Should we use a freemium offering or a free trial? Neither? Both?

How can we experiment to decide quickly between seat-based and usage-based models?

Is our current pricing too complex?

Is our simple pricing capturing the real value of our offering?

Should we offer different pricing to mid-market and enterprise customers? How should that pricing be different?

How often should we change our pricing?

How can we effectively package our software into different pricing tiers?

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Stage is hard at work to quench this thirst for knowledge around pricing.  While we wouldn't ask you to turn over this mission critical endeavor 100% to software, we are committed to providing a process using your proprietary data to make informed, confident decisions.

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From determining preferred pricing models, plan creation and management, through integration and support, Stage supports your P&P through the full cycle. 

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Stay tuned. (And let me know if you have questions I missed above!)

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