Samuel Saavedra – Why You Should Not be Afraid to Raise Your Prices

Why you have to check out today’s podcast:  How to come up with good pricing for cloud-based products  The goal of waterfall analysis and why companies should do it  Why you should not be afraid to raise prices    Samuel Saavedra is a pricing professional and commercial deal architect with strong supplementary skills in contract negotiations, contract management, program management, bid management, and proposal response. His strongest industries are Fintech – Financial Services, Telecom – Data Centers and Cloud Services.  In this episode, Samuel talks about how he uses his data center cost models to create the infrastructure cost behind payment offerings, and how he leverages his pricing expertise to develop waterfall analyses across the service portfolio to address revenue leakage and declining margin points, and how data analytics tools help him in adding insights into transactional data.    “Don’t be afraid to raise your price.”   – Samuel Saavedra    Topics Covered:    01:33 – What got Samuel into Pricing  03:06 – Why cost-plus pricing is not enticing  03:50 – Samuel explains how to calculate a software development cost  04:54 – How to partner with companies and gain a percentage of profit through the years you partner with them  06:20 – Challenges on monitoring the actual profit a customer gains for partnering with a software vendor   07:47 – Product Pricing: basis and factors  09:02 – Describing the build-run-cost model  of a data center  13:07 – What is cloud-based pricing all about  14:30 – What makes waterfall analysis fascinating and why not many companies are doing it  16:33 – How to go about the  waterfall analysis   17:53 – What things to take into consideration when you use data analytics  20:46 – His best pricing advice: “Don’t be afraid to raise your price.”   20:53 – Why you should not be afraid to raise prices    Key Takeaways:    “When it comes to enterprise banking software, the way it’s typically priced is there is an annual license for the software. Then, there’s going to be a base price, like say, it gives you so many millions of payments or wire transfers and so on. And then there’s going to be tiered pricing.” – Samuel Saavedra    “Cloud-based pricing is all about elasticity, scalability, capacity, et cetera. So you figure out what that is based on your assumptions of the customer’s uptake, number of transactions, number of customers growth over time. So you model that. Then they, in turn, come up with their numbers of uptake and growth over time. Once you’ve got the nitty-gritty out of the way, then there’s the actual pricing, which is as you know, what is their perception of the value you bring.” – Samuel Saavedra    Connect With Samuel Saavedra    Email: [email protected]  LinkedIn        Connect with Mark Stiving     Email: [email protected]     LinkedIn     Twitter