Impact Pricing Podcast

Ajit Ghuman is the Director of Product Management, Pricing, Packaging, and Customer Experience at Twilio. He is the author of the book Price to Scale. He’s had Director of Product Marketing title at several companies, and he added pricing to his title in 2019. Ajit is fascinated by ancient mysteries.

In this episode, Ajit educates us on pricing and packaging as he shares why he’s passionate when it comes to changing the monetization stack, especially on companies being able to change pricing strategies a lot quicker than today.

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Why you have to check out today’s podcast:

• Learn how pricing can done through a four-step framework;
• Find out how to create a pricing system that can work well with all strategies; and
• Understand why it’s an advantage to be able to change pricing strategies quickly

“I think of pricing in a four-step framework. The four steps are packaging, pricing metric, tariff structure, and then price point.”

– Ajit Ghuman

Topics Covered:

01:44 – How Ajit got into pricing

03:09 – Ajit talks about his book, Price to Scale, sharing the reason behind writing it and its key concept

04:40 – Backstory as to why Ajit wants to change the monetization stack

08:12 – Why the term quote to cash doesn’t bother Mark vs. how Ajit sees it

11:01 – We need better systems to let the strategy come to life

13:16 – How to create a code to cash (pricing) system that can work well with all pricing strategies

16:33 – Do companies do this practice in pricing?

18:30 – Talking about companies not monitoring usage of their product

19:59 – How often should companies tweak their packaging?

23:08 – How Ajit and Mark decide what feature goes into what package

25:31 – Why Ajit is a bit averse to good, better, best

29:40 – Ajit’s pricing advice

30:35 – Connect with Ajit

Key Takeaways: 

“You have the best pricing strategy in the world, let’s say you hire Mark Stiving to help you with your pricing, and you have the best thing on paper, but your systems don’t let you operationalize it, so you’re stuck in the water. That’s what I’m saying. We need better systems to let the strategy come to life.” – Ajit Ghuman

“You’re not going to have people write code all the time to do this. Otherwise, your main product will suffer. So just like you used to spend money on product analytics in the past or some other piece of core technology, I think there is a realization companies are having now, like somebody needs to build best practice products that do these things so that we can hook up into their APIs or their SDK and just do it.” – Ajit Ghuman

People / Resources Mentioned:

• Price to Scale: https://ajitghuman.com/pricing-book/
• Code to Cash podcast: www.codeto.cash/author/ajitpal/
• Dor Sasson: https://www.linkedin.com/in/datapm/

Connect with Ajit Ghuman:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ajitpalghuman/
• Email: [email protected]

Connect with Mark Stiving:   

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stiving/
• Email: [email protected]

Full Interview Transcript

(Note: This transcript was created with an AI transcription service. Please forgive any transcription or grammatical errors. We probably sounded better in real life.)

Ajit Ghuman

I think of pricing in a four-step framework, everybody has their own. So the four steps are packaging, pricing metric, tariff structure, and then price point.

Intro  

Mark Stiving 

Today’s podcast is sponsored by Jennings Executive Search. I had a great conversation with John Jennings about the skills needed in different pricing roles. He and I think a lot alike. If you’re looking for a new pricing role, or if you’re trying to hire just the right pricing person, I strongly suggest you reach out to Jennings Executive Search. They specialize in placing pricing people. Say that three times fast.

Mark Stiving

Welcome to Impact Pricing, the podcast where we discuss pricing, value, and the codified relationship between them. I’m Mark Stiving, and our guest today is Ajit Ghuman. Here are three things you’d want to know about Ajit before we start. He is the Director of Product Management, Pricing, Packaging and Customer Experience at Twilio; I think he runs the whole place. He is the author of the book Price to Scale. He’s had Director of Product Marketing title at several companies, and he added pricing to his title in 2019; can’t wait to hear why. And Ajit is fascinated by ancient mysteries, and I’m kind of fascinated by that, too; that’s pretty interesting.

Welcome, Ajit.

Ajit Ghuman

Thanks for having me on, Mark.

Mark Stiving

Hey, how did you get into pricing? Where did that title come from?

Ajit Ghuman

I started with a company called Narvar, which was my last company. I’ve dabbled in pricing a little bit in other product marketing roles. Most of my time in SaaS has been in product marketing. As I took on a heavier pricing-oriented PM role, I realized I was good at what I was doing, I liked what I was doing, and I just decided to dedicate myself completely to this new field. So that was the experience; it was at Narvar. And now, I’m just doing pricing.

Mark Stiving

You’re just doing pricing. So the title – at least on LinkedIn – your title is Product Management.

Ajit Ghuman

Yes. I think for different teams, the title can be a little different. Which team pricing resides in can be a little different. So it is product management, but it is a pricing role within the product management team.

Mark Stiving

Nice. I also like the fact that you have the word packaging in your title because I personally find that pricing and packaging are inseparable.

Ajit Ghuman

Completely. Packaging is a little hard to execute sometimes, depending on which company you’re in, but moves the lever a lot.

Mark Stiving

Nice. So, you wrote the book Price to Scale. Why did you write it? By the way, I read your intro so I know the answer to this question, but I’m going to ask so everybody else can hear it. So why did you write the book, and what is it over all about?

Ajit Ghuman

One of the key reasons I wrote the book is I could not find an introductory pricing text on SaaS products when I was doing pricing at Narvar. After having gone through the process, at the time, I thought I knew something. As I started to write the book, I realized that I needed to learn more. But basically, I was reading a lot of blogs, SaaS blogs; there are a lot of blogs, here are five ways to do something, and the seven strategies, but that wasn’t helping me. So, I read a lot and slowly started to build a framework for doing pricing. Eventually, the frameworks different pricing people have started to look similar. And then I think the person who I really liked, Thomas, is a venture capitalist. I liked his work quite a lot, so then I started to integrate a lot of the things that I read. I interviewed a lot of other pricing experts, and that’s how the book all came together.

Mark Stiving

It’s actually pretty fascinating because I did the exact opposite for my book. I’m a pricing expert, and I had to study subscriptions, and Thomas was one of the people that I studied; I read his blogs all the time.

Ajit Ghuman

Yeah, I highly recommend.

Mark Stiving

Great influencer, yeah. Nice.

In the very few seconds that we had before we hit the record button, you had said that you want to change the monetization stack.

Ajit Ghuman

Yes.

Mark Stiving

So I want to dive into this and understand what the heck you’re thinking and what that means. Go ahead and pontificate for a few minutes. Tell us what that means.

Ajit Ghuman

Yes, that’s a good question. This is going to be a longer term thing. I’m not exactly changing a lot of this right now. I have started a podcast called Code to Cash. So when you think about sales-led pricing, a sales-led growth motion, for example, you’ll hear the term “quote to cash” very often. And when I was not even a product marketer, I would hear this term and I would get confused. Like, what is quote to cash? It’s such a weird name. Something to cash, something to sale. Like, why don’t you just say what it is? Like you’re just trying to sell something and price it. Why is it such a weird name? And why does it only start after the quote? What is this quote thing? Because you want to create a pricing strategy and then you want to sell your product. Why do I have to be straight jacketed into these terms? That’s where this sort of insight started. And the pain I felt mostly at Narvar because after having worked on pricing strategy, I got an alignment in very short order. Most of the pain was in implementing these systems called CPQ, which took forever. You had to hire external technical consultants to do the work. When you did the work, you had to change your pricing strategy because the software would not load your strategies into it. You did not have any way to change anything in the software. That’s one insight.

And the second insight is in other companies, a lot of the ability…when I was talking to a lot of pricing experts, they were mentioning, “Hey, if I need to change a pricing metric, my product team needs to put it in the release schedule. My engineering team needs to prioritize it. If I need a new packaging, my engineering team needs to prioritize it.” So I realize it’s not a quote to cash problem; it’s a code to cash problem. That’s why I even started the podcast with Dor, who’s building a company in this space. I think you interviewed him before.

Mark Stiving

Yeah. I want to make sure that everybody understands the words you just said. You’re saying code to cash.

Ajit Ghuman

Yes.

Mark Stiving

Okay, got it.

Ajit Ghuman

Yeah, that’s what I’d eventually like to change. Like, one, establish. I think we need to have a vocabulary for a monetization tech stack, and we have to do things a little faster, because at least when it comes to sales, lead companies, pricing takes a long time to release, and we have accelerated everything. Website testing, AB testing happens in weeks. You can do tons of things quickly at SaaS scale, but we’re still sort of burdened by this sort of Web 1.0, legacy CPQ sort of technology that has high failure rates and takes six months to nine months to even implement.

Mark Stiving

Yeah. So let me dig into this a little bit. It turns out that what you’re talking about is really similar to something I’ve been thinking a lot about lately. That is, ‘what is pricing?’ Because I often think of pricing as more than ‘how do I put a price on the number?’ In fact, I always think of it as that; it’s more than that. And I often think of it as ‘how do I choose the right packaging?’, ‘how do I do the right market segment?’, ‘how do I pick the right pricing metric?’. There’s all these decisions that have to be made, and in fact, you could say, ‘which products do I build?’ Or ‘how do I communicate it in the marketplace?’ Or ‘what’s the value message proposition I’m giving?’ There’s tons of stuff that doesn’t have to do with putting a number on a product. Then I think of as pricing, mostly because they revolve around the concept of understanding customer-perceived value. So, tie all that together.

So, you and I are probably thinking along the same lines, but when you said the words quote to cash, that doesn’t bother me. And it doesn’t bother me because I look at it as someone wants to get the process down that says, ‘Once I quote the system, how do I do – maybe negotiation is in there, but certainly, how do I get the invoice out? How do I do the accounts receivable?’ There’s real work that has to be done from the time we quoted it until we get the check in the bank, and we want to know that we didn’t mess that up. So did I misunderstand that or am I underplaying that phrase, quote to cash?

Ajit Ghuman

No, you’re not underplaying. I think you’re representing fairly. It is a process that is being described. But I think, let’s say put yourself in the shoes of a founder for a second. You’re a founder, you have a DevOps team, you have a sales team. They say, Hey, Mr. Founder, we figured out a pricing strategy, thanks to an analyst or the product marketing team. Now we have to implement this Q to C system, and everybody does this. You just need to buy this. Just buy it. You need to buy CRM. Just buy it. Everybody buys CRM. Nobody gets fired for buying this. But I think there is a missed opportunity.

As you would agree, pricing is a very strategic activity. You change the pricing levers, you really got to get a lot of leverage in such an economic climate. You want to change for optimizing for margin, you can do it. You want to optimize for adoption, you can do it. But these systems are limited to selling a tactical activity like “It’s just quote to cash. Don’t worry about it. We won’t talk to you about it. After one year, we’ll send you the check, and then your sales team will sell it.” And the only conversations you are having with the sales team is, “Did you make your number? Did you make your number yet? What’s the sales productivity?” It’s like you have an engine in front of you and half or at least a fourth of the engine, you can’t touch those knobs. You can touch the knobs of the sales productivity, but you are not allowed to get in the queue to see box, because made out to be a process, right? You need to make it a strategic function, and as the pilot of your company, you need to be able to turn those knobs.

So that’s my viewpoint on this, that it’s become very tactical and it needs to be elevated back to ‘this is a central monetization strategy thing and here are the knobs to control this thing.’

Mark Stiving

Okay, I love what I’m hearing. Here’s what I don’t understand. In fact, every company, but especially big companies, they put processes in place, and the moment they put a process in place, whether it’s with a system or just the way people do things, in order to change, you now have to break a process. From what I’m hearing you say is you want us to be able to break existing processes quicker.

Ajit Ghuman

Yeah, I would say it’s like the waterfall and agile analogy, right? Like earlier software development was all waterfall and it would take a long time. And then at some point, I believe there was a book that was written about this gaming company that did everything very quickly. I’m forgetting the name. It’s one of the texts you read when you get into startups first. But it’s basically about that. Like, why do we need to wait for nine months for this thing to get started? And for every pricing change, why do we need two months for it to launch? Because nobody has that amount of time and startup plan. These startups are living and dying in six months to nine months to a year. So if your system is changing out only after nine months or your process has become so inflexible, that creates the bottleneck. So you have the best pricing strategy in the world, let’s say you hire Mark Stiving to help you with your pricing, and you have the best thing on paper, but your systems don’t let you operationalize it, so you’re stuck in the water. That’s what I’m saying. We need better systems to let the strategy come to life.

Mark Stiving

Okay, so I could not agree with that more, because every time I work with a big company, we brainstorm brilliant ideas and then I constantly hear “but we can’t do that.” In fact, I worked for a small company for a while, and it’s a small company, let’s call it a $20 million company, and it took them nine months to make a pricing change in their system. I was like, this is crazy.

Ajit Ghuman

Yes.

Mark Stiving

So what’s the answer? I mean, I get the problem that says, ‘hey, we want to be able to change pricing strategies quickly.’ But prior to, let’s say prior to SaaS, nobody understood the concept of a pricing metric. Nowadays, we apply pricing metrics to non-SaaS businesses because we understand the thought process, but prior to SaaS, we didn’t know what that meant. And so there’s a new pricing strategy that we haven’t heard of or thought of and no one’s created yet. How do you create a pricing system or a code to cash system that says “I’m going to be able to capture the next pricing strategy, whatever that happens to be”?

Ajit Ghuman

Yeah. So right now, what I’m evangelizing is really a category. This hasn’t become a product yet, or it’s a set of products, as I can see out there in the market. What I see is a set of technologies that are coming together, as a way of speaking about the problem that is now coming together, which is solving some of the bottlenecks. Like, for example, the company who you consulted with could potentially go to one of these new companies. So very often, what the company is challenged with is developer time, right? I have to create entitlements; entitlements, meaning like the feature flags for the products need to be turned on and off and scaled across all customers. The metering needs to be added, like you were mentioning. And many times, you may need a user base metric, you need the usage based metric, you may need multiple metrics together. So you’re not going to have people write code all the time to do this. Otherwise, your main product will suffer. So just like you used to spend money on product analytics in the past or some other piece of core technology, I think there is a realization companies are having now, like somebody needs to build best practice products that do these things so that we can hook up into their APIs or their SDK and just do it.

Now, I have no skin in the game. I’m just a pricing person in my company, so I am not evangelizing anybody’s products. But I’m observing that if this doesn’t happen, people are going to continue to be stuck because they’re going to say, ‘Well, we sell a CRM system, for example, and it’s not our core job to launch pricing stuff, so it never gets prioritized in the roadmap.’

The consciousness of monetization in the organization also needs to start to emerge. The consciousness of monetization is generally only held by the CEO. The VP of product heads down, other people, heads down, VP of sales. There’s things about that, but really is more about scaling the pricing that was given to them.

So what I’m observing is monetization consciousness is increasing. Anyway, the market right now is avoiding profitability more. People are realizing they have to change pricing. And then a new set of companies are already ready to meet this challenge. So what I’m observing and I foresee in the future is that product teams are going to say, ‘Okay, just tell me what is the best stack out there so that I can fix my product, make it more agile on the front end, and then on the back end for sales operations, maybe something that’s more implementable than CPQ,’ which I don’t see in the market today; I’m not sure exactly what that will look like, but it will come together to meet the needs of the industry, to have something be more agile.

Mark Stiving

So I would guess that there are a lot of companies out there right now that say they do what you just said.

Ajit Ghuman

Yeah, a lot of new companies have come up that are trying to solve bits and pieces of this problem.

Mark Stiving

Okay, so I’m going to toss out some names, and if you’re not comfortable, you don’t have to tell me, but there’s companies like well, Zuora is probably the big name, and then Chargebee, and then Chargify, and these guys all do quoting for SaaS, billing for SaaS. Are they covering this or not?

Ajit Ghuman

I think a lot of companies that are in the billing space, yes, but not a lot of companies are in the actual product space, like the metering. There are a few companies doing that. So you want to change pricing metric. Most companies used to have fixed license, right? Then they moved to a user-based model. And then from user they are trying to move to consumption-based model, which is a little harder to implement. But for all of that, code also has to be written to meter the product, then send that data to the billing system and so on. You have to provision packages very quickly in this new sort of PLD-based world.

So those set of technologies also need to exist that allow your product to offer packages, to allow your product to meter. Then if the traditional data models for the CPQ system are so hidden away that you can’t touch them, they need to be connected too so that you can create a pricing strategy and implement it in a few clicks rather than wait nine months.

So there are some gaps which I don’t see players in the market for today, and then there are some with other players, like Dor. I partnered with Dor for my podcast, so I can mention him. He runs a company called Stigg. They say that they’re a pricing API, and so they do entitlements. I think they’re going to do metering too, but I’m not 100% sure. I’m completely agnostic to whoever solves the problem, but I feel like those problems are quite rampant right now. Nobody is really taking a strong stance and saying, ‘okay, this is what the industry is really suffering from.’

Mark Stiving

Yeah. One of the things I find fascinating in many of the companies that I work with is they don’t monitor usage of their product. And to me, that’s insane because even if you weren’t doing usage-based pricing, the information gives you tons of ability to now make intelligent decisions about how am I going to package it and what are my market segments and who cares about what?

Ajit Ghuman

Yeah, I think the analytics companies were trying to solve that problem, like the mixed panels of the world or the amplitude analytics of the world. I’m not sure if people still monitor usage as teams. Many times, it just becomes like this DevOps behind the scene back-end monitoring system. And when engineering teams, say monitoring, they mean reliability and systems on time, right? And they will say that, ‘yes, we do measure usage, but we mean something else when we mean usage.’ And they say, ‘well, we are monitoring all the time.’

So I think, again, it’s like this consciousness of monetization of what part of my product is being used, what is valuable, right? Like that consciousness is a little bit existing more in the GTM teams rather than in the engineering and product teams today.

Mark Stiving

Yeah. Doesn’t that help your customer success department do a better job, keeping customers and growing customers?

Ajit Ghuman

Yep.

Mark Stiving

Absolutely.

So how often do you think companies should be tweaking their product? Because we talk about packaging, and I think of packaging, the easiest way in the SaaS world, I think of packaging as what features go in what package. You might think of different packages for different market segments. You might think of different packages and good, better, best realm. How do we decide which features go in which package? And how often should we be tweaking that?

Ajit Ghuman

Tweaking packaging? Much more than today. Because today, this hardly ever changes for companies. Companies that do it manually, like at Narvar, the packaging was all manual; we didn’t have to provision anything, I think our professional services team could just turn things on or off, or at least we made it easy turn features on or off. Even the bottleneck was more on the CPQ side. Packaging we could implement within three months to four months if we agreed on the new package set.

How often? I think you could probably have an experiment every quarter if you’re let’s say 30-40 million in revenue. If you’re more then maybe you wanted to do it a little bit more slowly. Depending on how big you are, these things cause a lot more change in revenue dynamics, market dynamics. But I’m a proponent of optimizing often, and the number one thing I realized after doing these pricing projects was there is no perfection to begin upfront. It’s not as if McKinsey is going to come. Like, I’m just using McKinsey as a placeholder; I have nothing against them. But they’re going to come every two years and give you the stone tablet of pricing, and that’s what you’re going to use. You’re obviously going to have to learn something. And then you may realize ‘this package doesn’t work’. You realize weird things, right? At Narvar, I used to see negative discounting for my lowest packages, and my sales team would complain about price, but I’m like, ‘You’re actually increasing the price to sell the product’. So, you realize these things, and then you’re like, ‘Okay, I have to change this thing, because I took the feedback, but it’s not bearing out in the numbers.’

Mark Stiving

Yeah. And as you were talking about that, it suddenly hit me that if I’m going to play with packaging often, I’m going to have many different customers that have many different package types with many different prices. And so we really do have a big problem or a big issue that says, ‘what’s my CPQ going to look like? What’s my quota cash will look like?’

Ajit Ghuman

Exactly.

Mark Stiving

So you’re saying I finally got this after 20 minutes of talking?

Ajit Ghuman

No, you’re getting it even more now, completely. So the data structure changes and everything changes and downstream.

Mark Stiving

Yeah, okay. So now it’s starting to make sense to me why this is such a big issue.

Ajit Ghuman

So many times, the packages, they’re not touching the package because then it will mess up the CPQ. So, the CPQ has become the thing that’s stopping you from making more money.

Mark Stiving

Yeah. I have to grandfather in my old customers or I have to get them on the new platform. There’s some tough decisions there to make.

Ajit Ghuman

Yeah.

Mark Stiving

Which if we could just let them be, we let them be and win new customers this way. Nice.

Ajit Ghuman

Exactly.

Mark Stiving

Okay, I understand. So now let me ask you the hardest question I ask anybody, because I don’t know how to do this. How do you decide what feature goes into what package?

Ajit Ghuman

I don’t think there’s perfect science, in my opinion. But the feature, here’s the process I take. I always start with the segment. The market segment for me is what determines how many packages I would need. I start with a one-to-one mapping between my core segments and packages, though I might increase or decrease the number of packages based on what I learned from that. Now, think of features as like a BMW Three Series. I’m designing it for somebody who’s like a professional, but maybe they’re not really an executive. Maybe they’re not just out of college. So it’s a certain tour of target segment I’m designing it for. And then based on that, I will choose. There will be some features that just have to work together to form, like the core of the car, if you will. And then there would be some extra features that would make me fit or tailor fit to that segment. And then basically, then, I would choose the feature.

So that is the ballpark approach that I would take to SaaS products is understand the needs of the segment – assign features to that segment, and then decide whether the segment think that that is something that they would expect to come out of the box or whether there is then a certain subset of that segment that would want to opt into other things or other more premium offerings. And those can then become add ons into that package.

There can be more statistics at then back this. You can do more surveys, you can do more things like conjoint. Depending on the product, the methods can change, but roughly, that’s the approach I would take.

Mark Stiving

Yeah, I like what you said. It’s not hugely dissimilar to what I do. I typically pick a market segment, and so we have different market segments, I define them based on the problems that people have, common set of problems. And then once I’m in a market segment, I always try to think about good, better, best pricing inside a market segment. And then what I like about what you said, which is really consistent with the way I think about it, is if I’ve done my good, better, best right, I can give them names other than good, better, best. It’s like here’s the functionality that you’re going to get or here’s the problems that you’re going to be able to solve. I think that that fits really well with the way you described it.

Ajit Ghuman

I think the difference is slight and the slight difference is I map a package to a segment. I’m a little personally averse to good, better, best, and I’ll tell you why. This has been my experience at Narvar when I was designing packages, and this is also something like a story that Johnny Chang from I think he was at Koopa; he just changed his companies. He’s a guru in packaging. You must speak to him if you have not already. He was mentioning this instance at Gainsight where they had good, better, best. Everybody was just using the middle package. Why? Because that was reasonable in price. And even within that package, they had shelf wear. So sometimes, if it’s not well optimized to the segment, it causes you to lose revenue because you would otherwise have picked the more higher priced package, especially if people can see all the packages together. And even there, if the features are not well distributed, if there is shelf, there means that sales can’t come back and then upsell those features again.

So that was something I saw all the time, like poorly designed packages. And especially if somebody doesn’t put thought and just applies a framework like good, better, best, like first, you got to think about your segments, is all I’m saying. Sometimes, if you just apply that, then you will have all of these dynamics that limit your upside potential that may actually put downward pressure on your initial sale price because customers are like, “Well, I’ll just go and pick the cheaper one. You’re giving me everything in. That’s what I need anyway.” So that’s where I try to be much more conscious of how many packages there are.

Mark Stiving

Understood, and I will agree with you that it is bad to do bad. It is possible to do bad good, better, best.

Ajit Ghuman

Yeah.

Mark Stiving

On the other hand, we often hear the phrase land and expand, right? So we’re in this business because we want to land and expand. So, what does expand mean?And by the way, I think of this as win, keep, grow. We have to win customers, keep customers, grow customers. So how do we grow customers? Well, if I get them to upgrade from good to better and better to best, I’m growing customers. And so well designed good, better, best packaging helps us in that expansion capability. That’s my view of the world.

Ajit Ghuman

Makes sense.

Mark Stiving

Cool. Ajit, this is so much fun, but we’re going to have to wrap it up.

Ajit Ghuman

Yup.

Mark Stiving

As I wrap it up, though, what is the one piece of pricing advice that you would give our listeners that you think could have a big impact on their business?

Ajit Ghuman

Sure. I think I’ll leave you with, I sometimes do like these short half-an-hour calls to help people in the communities I’m in to give them some feedback on how to think of pricing. So what I follow is I think of pricing in a four-step framework. Everybody has their own, but this for me really helps clarify for people. So first, I do packaging. So the four steps are packaging, pricing metric, tariff structure, and then price point. And how this maps to, let’s say, if you’re a founder, is packaging like we were just talking about packaging and the good, better, best drives a lot of enterprise value for you, it drives different. You can have 2x or 5x multiple, 10x multiple depending on the package you have. So that’s a leverage lever in your hand. Then it’s the pricing metric that aligns value to the customer. And a well-selected pricing metric, when you reduce churn may result in happy customers. Then there’s tariff structure that allows you to turn the knob for predictability and risk. So between taking on more risk or being more predictable, you can turn that knob and then finally it’s the price point, the price level itself. So there are different objectives and different knobs in your aircraft to meet those objectives that together, for me, are the pricing framework I follow and recommend.

Mark Stiving

Nice. Ajit, thank you so much for your time today. If anybody wants to contact you, how can they do that?

Ajit Ghuman

Just follow me on LinkedIn, it’s Ajit Ghuman. I’m publishing podcasts on a bi-weekly basis, and happy to connect as well.

Mark Stiving

Okay, and your podcast name was Code to Cash.

Ajit Ghuman

Yes.

Mark Stiving

Perfect. I’m going to have to go find it.

Ajit Ghuman

Yeah, we just started. We’re nowhere near as experienced as you. We’re just learning.

Mark Stiving

No worries. To our listeners, thank you so much for your time. If you enjoyed this, would you please leave us a rating and a review? You can get instructions on how to leave a review by going to www.ratethispodcast.com/impactpricing. And finally, if you have any questions or comments about this podcast or pricing in general, feel free to email me [email protected]. Now, go make an impact.

Mark Stiving 

Thanks again to Jennings Executive Search for sponsoring our podcast. If you’re looking to hire someone in pricing, I suggest you contact someone who knows pricing people contact Jennings Executive Search.