- Your pricing strategy and your pricing page
is one of the biggest things
that determines the success of your SaaS business,
believe it or not.
It sets the tone of exactly which segment of the market
you're going after, the type of sales process,
the type of marketing process,
how much you can spend on inquiry
all of these things come together
because of your pricing strategy.
And your pricing page
is where all of this gets communicated.
So, in this episode,
I'm gonna dig into the three principles
you absolutely need to know,
to make sure you transform your pricing page
and eloquently communicate exactly,
how you price your product.
Intro
(upbeat intro music)
What's everybody, welcome to Unstoppable.
I'm TK, on this channel,
I help SaaS founders like you,
accelerate the growth of your SaaS business
with an Unstoppable strategy.
If you are new to this channel, welcome.
Be sure to hit the subscribe button and that bell icon.
I drop a video like this three times a week
with the TK energy, so be sure to get notified with it.
So hit the subscribe button and the bell icon
and then you will get notified.
If you are part of the community already.
If you're part of my SaaS, Go-To-Market coaching program,
welcome back, it's really great to see you guys over here.
So when I was back at ToutApp,
we went through multiple iterations of our pricing page
and our pricing strategy.
And we probably clocked easily a 100 hours
through the course of the business.
We had a self-service business,
we had a sales driven business.
We needed to make sure that the two businesses
didn't cannibalize each other.
We needed to make sure that we effectively maximize
the amount of revenues we were collecting per customer,
our DRR was going up.
We need to make sure that our CAC to LTV ratio was right.
All these things came into this one central thing,
which was our pricing strategy and our pricing page.
So, through all those twists and turns,
having gone through this already,
here are my three principles,
three principles on how to actually make sure
you nail your pricing page and your pricing strategy.
So if you're excited to dig in,
go ahead, smash that like button
for the YouTube algorithm and let's go right into it.
Okay, so the first principle is this,
know the difference between your design and your strategy.
A lot of times, founders will just jump,
and I did, I made the same mistake.
I would just jump into this magical template
that I got for a pricing page,
or I looked at Basecamp,
Basecamp 37signals was an inspiration of mine,
I looked at their page, I'm like,
it's got to be like this.
And I would just jump into sort of the design of it.
Now, there's a huge difference between your pricing strategy
and your pricing page design, huge difference.
And I got some bad news for you.
You can have a really terrible design for your pricing page,
if the pricing strategy is right, you'll still convert,
it'll still be wildly successful.
You can have the most beautiful pricing page
but if your strategy is wrong,
it doesn't match up to the value you're delivering
you won't convert.
So you need to make sure you have a proper pricing strategy.
If you wanna dig more into exactly
how to build a pricing strategy,
be sure to check out this video.
I go into a very specific set of principles to follow
to actually develop your pricing strategy.
That's not what this video is about,
this is more about how you actually present it.
So, make sure you know the difference
between the design versus the strategy.
You don't have to go right now,
I'll link to it below, don't worry.
But get your strategy right first.
You get the strategy right,
then it'll make sure that you are cognizant of exactly how
your DRR is gonna be greater than a 100%.
How much you can spend on a customer,
what kind of sales processing you have.
All those things will fall into place
when you get the strategy right.
If you don't have a strategy right,
then you'll just be missing out.
So that's principle number one.
Principle number two is,
in your page, in your pricing page and in your homepage,
first decide if you're gonna put pricing up or not.
This is not an obvious answer
and there's a strategy around this in itself.
So, the question becomes,
do you have a talk to sales button
or do you have a pricing page?
Do you like at all publish your pricing?
And I don't think you should just assume
that publishing your pricing is the best thing to do.
So you're trying to figure out,
all right, do we have a talk to sales button?
Do we have a start free trial button?
Do we have a pricing page?
Be sure to check out this video
where I go into a lot more details
and exact principles to follow
for making sure that you make the right decision here.
It's not obvious, it's not a one size fits all.
There are principles to follow around this,
I'll link to that video below as well.
Hopefully you're not getting frustrated in that,
okay, TK told me I'd have a beautiful pricing page,
and he's telling me to do all this other work.
Yeah, the beautiful pricing page won't matter
unless you get this stuff down right.
And this is the, what really makes a difference.
My goal here is to bring you content
that helps you succeed not makes you feel good,
so, sorry not sorry, I guess.
Anyway, before I go into principle three
on exactly what to put on your pricing page
and how to think about the design.
Let me just pause here for a second.
If you're starting to see the power in this,
if you starting to see, look,
there's a difference between design and strategy
and strategy is more important.
There's a difference between the two
talk to sales and start free trial,
and whether I should publish or not,
we should figure this out.
Can I just get a yes in the comments below,
also smash that like button for the YouTube algorithm.
Also, if you are building a SaaS business
and you're trying to figure out your strategy
and getting all these pieces right,
be sure to download my 5-Point SaaS Growth Strategy Guide.
It's completely free and I'll link to it below.
Let's go to principle number three.
So principle number three is,
you will likely have downloaded a template
for a pricing page.
You maybe have looked at Drift's pricing page,
or HubSpot's pricing page or Basecamps pricing page,
or Asana's pricing page.
Fortunately, right now, there's plenty of great examples
of pricing pages.
And you can bet that for their specific audiences
and for their pricing strategy,
they have split tested the crap out of all
their pricing pages.
So, I'm less concerned about the design
and how you present it,
but when you're presenting it and you've decided that,
okay, we know what our pricing strategy is,
we know that we're going to have a pricing page,
what do we put?
There are some critical principles to follow
in how you're presenting the pricing page.
There's essentially gonna be two types of pricing
that you land with.
The first one is just a straight up pricing.
For example, one of my SaaS businesses
is Unstoppable Sunday.com.
It helps founders plan their week
and go into Monday with an Unstoppable plan
and punch the Sunday jitters, we all have them.
We have a flat pricing model,
it's nine bucks a month, that's it.
It's just nine bucks a month,
you can start a free trial.
And so, if you're have a simple model like that,
like Roam Research, they got to a millionaire real fast,
it's a note taking app.
They just have a simple pricing model.
It's just 15 bucks a month.
And if you have something like that,
essentially what you really want is two options.
You wanna have a monthly, plus a yearly and discount.
So you wanna say, this is how much it costs monthly,
and if you pay for the year, you get a 20% discount,
boom, easy, done.
And a lot of times if that's your pricing strategy
and you have a pricing page, keep it dead simple and easy.
And just communicate that and people will do the math.
And like, yap, nine bucks a month and I get this,
that sounds like a good deal or 99 bucks a month or that,
whatever it may be.
I get a good deal and I can actually save money,
that's powerful.
The biggest thing about our pricing page is,
you wanna present some options.
If you just have one option,
then people will either, will make a binary decision.
If you present some options,
they're like, well, I have some options
I can think about it, start trial
and it's super powerful.
So you always wanna show a monthly and a yearly,
if you have a flat pricing structure.
Now, suppose you don't have a flat pricing structure,
you have different tiers.
You have your free plan and you have your starter plan,
you have your gold plan.
The key thing to do here is,
don't call them the starter plan,
the gold plan and the bronze plan.
And we went through so many naming conventions
at ToutApp, it was insane,
but ultimately here's the best practice, are you ready?
The best practice is name your plans,
according to the customer journey or your value ladder.
Meaning, every customer that you're ever gonna have
is on a certain journey.
Oftentimes it's based on company size,
like that's just what it is.
Sometimes it's based on their level of complexity.
What you wanna do is,
understand where this person is in their customer journey,
so that they can self identify and go in
and say, yep, this is for me.
And they can actually then upgrade over time.
So, instead of having a free starter,
gold, bronze plan which means nothing,
name your plans and present them
according to the customer journey.
Meaning look, if you're just starting out,
start with a starter plan,
the amateur plan or the beginner's plan.
If you are a mid-market mid-size business
and you have reasonable number of things, then go here.
If you are an enterprise company,
you have all these requirements, go here.
And always, when you have this customer journey piece,
the value ladder, always have an outrageous value ladder.
I remember when we started ToutApp,
we were $30 a month, so we were like,
just $30 a month or pay for the year, like easy.
Then we add tiers, so we added $30 a month
and like a $99 a month and we added,
we had no enterprise customers,
we had no idea this was gonna be a thing.
We just added a 199 plan,
and I was shocked, the first day,
someone just signed up for the 199 plan.
I'm like, what is happening right here?
And that's what gave birth
to our sales driven business, honestly.
So, what you should have is a value ladder.
What you should have is one extra Hail Mary plan,
that's an outrageous price
just to see if people click and eventually they will.
And what you should also have,
as you get to the highest price levels
is still an option to talk to sales.
Sometimes, for bigger clients,
there's gonna be an option.
They're just gonna wanna talk to a human.
And maybe you are including a chat bot
or you have a talk to sales,
either way have that option in there.
So, to recap.
First of all,
know the difference between design versus strategy,
strategy is more important,
I'll link to that video down below.
You should definitely watch that next.
Then figure out if you should have a pricing page at all,
or you should just have a talk to sales button.
And I'll link to that video,
where I go into more of that down below as well.
And lastly, when your pricing page,
sure got the beautiful design,
but if you have a flat pricing model,
do a monthly plus a yearly,
so that there's options.
Otherwise, name your plans and show your plans
based on the customer journey value ladder.
So that they can self identify and say,
yup, that's me, I'm the mid-market,
I don't need the full blown thing enterprise thing,
or I'm the beginner, I just wanna get started.
They'll self identify and they'll go in
and they'll feel understood.
So those are my three principles for your pricing page,
so you can transform your pricing page.
You can eloquently communicate your pricing strategy
and you can actually grow faster.
If you got value from this video,
be sure to smash that like button.
If you have a friend, a SaaS founder
that's also struggling with these things,
please share this video with them,
it means the world to us.
I drop a video like this three times a week
with actionable strategies
to grow your SaaS business faster.
So be sure to hit the subscribe button and that bell icon.
If you are building out a SaaS business
and I invite you to download my SaaS growth strategy guide.
Inside of it, I give you a whole bunch more resources
on exactly how to build the growth strategy
and execute on it to grow faster.
Just go to getunstoppable.com/strategy
to download that guide.
And lastly, remember,
everyone needs a strategy for their life and their business
but when you are with us,
yours is gonna be unstoppable.
I'm TK and I'll see you in the next episode.
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