Steven Forth is Ibbaka’s Co-Founder, CEO, and Partner. Ibbaka is a strategic pricing advisory firm. He was CEO of LeveragePoint Innovations Inc., a SaaS business designed to help companies create and capture value.

In this episode, Steven discusses the growing significance of showcasing economic value to customers and the challenges that companies encounter in accomplishing this, particularly with regard to  AI monetization. There is a strong emphasis on the necessity for better understanding and communication of the value delivered by SaaS products to enable more effective value-based SaaS pricing strategies.

Why you have to check out today’s podcast:

• Look into the latest AI monetization report for 2024 and gain insights into the strategies for monetizing AI
• Find out the key trends in SaaS pricing related to AI for the year 2024
• Discover the compelling reasons why AI is truly revolutionary and why it's crucial to embrace this transformative technology

"Don't panic and cut prices."

- Steven Forth

Topics Covered:

01:37 - How is AI going to significantly influence SaaS and pricing this 2024

03:38 - The impact AI is going to have on most businesses in the interface, functionality, and internal workflow levels

06:59 - What this AI monetization report is all about

09:46 - Looking on the value of the solution more than just the AI tool

11:05 - Why B2B SaaS companies are under increased pressure to justify their prices based on the value delivered to their customers

13:12 - Quantifying and truly delivering value to customers and product management's critical function in understanding value

16:05 - Significant insights on customer success department's role in value quantification

17:02 - Discussion about using SaaS versus obtaining perpetual license

22:38 - Summarizing the three major trends this 2024

24:47 - Expressing optimism that companies adopt better tool sets to assess, track, document, and communicate economic value

25:38 - Steven's impactful advice

Key Takeaways:

"Vast new areas of applications are going to be opened by AI and things that we couldn't do, or were too expensive to do in the past become easy to do and very affordable to do, already are today." - Steven Forth

"If you can demonstrate value, then you have a lot of weapons that you can use against these [larger competitors]." - Steven Forth

"AI is going to be moving rapidly towards monetization, which means it has to be able to demonstrate value." - Steven Forth

"There's an overall pressure to better manage SaaS spending, which is going to lead to pressure on SaaS companies to be able to demonstrate that they are actually delivering value, not just happy users." - Steven Forth

"Cutting prices is not going to solve your problem. That could just increase your churn. There's no guarantee that cutting your prices will reduce your churn." - Steven Forth

"You can't compensate for a lack of value by lowering your price." - Steven Forth

People/Resources Mentioned:

• Open View:https://openviewpartners.com/blog/tagged/research-and-analytics/
• Amazon: https://www.amazon.com
• Google: https://www.google.com/
• IBM: https://www.ibm.com/us-en
• Salesforce: https://www.salesforce.com/ap/?ir=1
• Oracle: https://www.oracle.com/ph/

Connect with Steven Forth:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stevenforth/
• Email: steven@ibbaka.com

Connect with Mark Stiving:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stiving/
• Email: mark@impactpricing.com