Mar 22, 2021
Axel Kirstetter is a global and multilingual technology executive with start-up and large-cap experience for companies achieving accelerated growth targets, category leadership, and successful exits (Datasite, COLT, TomTom, Intralinks). He has been in the cloud space since 2000, subscription economy since 2003, SaaS sector since 2006, and tackling product-led growth since 2017.
In this episode, Axel shares how you start from a transaction nature of a product, then find your best market fit, work around what pricing is relevant to support it. Eventually, you look at the genuine subscription model that best gives you the chance to achieve your revenue objectives.
Why you have to check out today’s podcast:
“Keep optimizing, keep iterating; it's never done. Don't overthink the quantitative elements because you do have the possibility nowadays to quickly and rapidly adjust once you are in market. So really keep optimizing, keep working away at what the price point is.”
- Axel Kirstetter
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Topics Covered:
01:24 - How he became so good at all issues around pricing and started a career at it
02:26 - How does he define his title as Content Marketing and Pricing VP?
03:51 - Product people talk about Pricing but don't really understand in the detail level what Pricing does
05:17 - A degree of maturity and sophistication as to how you do pricing discovery and value discovery
07:06 - Axel’s thoughts about a subscription
09:17 - Taking a look at Salesforce subscription pricing
10:02 - What do most associate 3.0 with?
11:07 - What is 4.0?
13:46 - The difference among consumption, subscription, and recurring revenue
16:49 - Are Coke and Uber a recurring revenue model?
22:24 - Combining subscription with consumption notion
24:57 - Which one to use: subscription business model or recurring revenue business model
25:55 - Axel’s perspectives on these three revenue buckets of winning customers, keeping customers, and growing customers
28:23 - Which one to focus on: going after recurring revenue or asking what’s the right business model
Key Takeaways:
“There has to be a degree of maturity and sophistication as to how you do pricing discovery and really value discovery. And that takes understanding the sort of product-market fit; it requires a bit of understanding of how your salespeople would negotiate.” - Axel Kirstetter
“A company is willing to be very clever about a subscription versus a consumption mode. I think being online is fantastic because it makes you findable that you don't have to gravitate towards the notion of you know, subscribe to over 12 months, when all you do is you need it at certain peak times at certain convenience levels.” - Axel Kirstetter
“We need to think beyond just the gold-silver-bronze approach. Because it's more than just a subscription. It's more than just sort of meeting the needs of investors; you have to meet the needs of the end consumer.” - Axel Kirstetter
“Subscription has varied flavors to them. Think which type of subscription model works for the client circumstance.” - Axel Kirstetter
Resources Mentioned:
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