Kate McCullough:

Welcome back to RevOps Review, a new podcast on all things RevOps. I’m joined today by DocuSign pricing leaders, Jan and Maggie. I'm just going to take a minute and let them introduce themselves. But basically, on this podcast we're going to go through what you could be thinking about in terms of pricing in general and best practices there, also in the market right now, and just areas of expertise that they can share and trends they're seeing. Jan, can you give a little bit of background about yourself?

Jan Pasternak:

Sure. Great to be here. Thank you, Kate. I have built my career out of creating pricing strategies and creating pricing organizations in companies that maybe didn't have a dedicated pricing team before. I've done it a few times over at Microsoft, LinkedIn, Citrix, LogMeIn, Zoom, and then now at DocuSign I'm leading the pricing and offering strategy. I'm pretty passionate about setting up good practices and good strategy, but also I have quite a lot of experience in the operational side of things. How to make it happen and practice. I can talk broadly about not only what the philosophy of pricing is, but how it can be implemented.

Maggie Bouscaren:

Yes. Hi, I'm Maggie Bouscaren. I'm on Jan's team at DocuSign. I'm a Director of Pricing strategy, working closely with product management, marketing, sales among other teams to help bring unique value to customers via our products. My past experience has been grounded in thinking about different business and growth models across tech, ecommerce and financial services.

Kate McCullough:

Awesome. Kicking off, I just want to start with a fundamental question, which is: when you're thinking about pricing, both of you working in concert, what objectives do you set out to help guide the pricing process? Is it market share, revenue, segmentation, reach into competitive spaces? What are some key bolder focus items that you have that help you navigate as you're thinking about pricing? This is for... We talked to startups, big and small, we also talked to enterprise at mid-market and I know it's probably different for each, but what are some core fundamentals that you like to think about or advise CEOs and execs to think about as they're looking at pricing?

Jan Pasternak:

I'll let Maggie jump in because I know that she feels strongly about those, but I think the first thing that is often skipped and that's being aligned to the company objectives and I think that everybody in the organization has sometimes a different view of what the company objective is because for a product team, it's going to be more of a adoption of the new functionality or a new product. Their KPIs, their OKRs, their goals are about spreading broadly of what they just built for the CFO then it's going to be probably margins. For the head of sales, it's a top line growth and hitting the next quarter's number. I always joke that 80% of my job as the Head of Pricing is aligning the executives on what we are actually trying to solve because it's not obvious that it's revenue.

Let me give you some examples from the companies that I worked at. For instance, Zoom was in or still is in this broad expansion phase and in this phase for this company that margins are not necessarily the most important. It is the reach and the number of customers because the idea and the strategy is that we get them in the door through video conferencing and then we're going to apply and upsell other services and products. Whereas even in the same category in video conferencing, when I worked for Citrix on GoTo Meeting because of the place where the organization was in, because of the market at the time, the focus was on margins. I want to emphasize that we need to drive executive level alignment of what we are trying to solve, margins, direct revenue, reach, churn mitigation. There are multiple elements that we can solve for. Unfortunately, usually we cannot solve for all of them at the same time.

Kate McCullough:

Is there a prioritization that you think about at all? Maybe do you have a comment on that or just when you're looking at not solving for everything at all at once, where do you maybe start?

Maggie Bouscaren:

Right, I think to build off of what Jan was saying, I think an important part of pricing and packaging is to align with, I always start the initial business case conversation with the product managers I'm working with as they're innovating and building out their roadmap, what is the role of this product also in our portfolio because every product or feature even within the portfolio can play a different role. I think, Kate, one thing to also consider is if we're going to drive reach, for example, the product has to be very intuitive. Because it needs to be more self-service, even founded on product-led growth versus something that we think is super unique from the competition and we're planning on using it to drive direct revenue and charge for it. That may be something that maybe is more complex and requires services onboarding, but that's okay because there's enough customer value and willingness to pay in that offering.

I think you also have to consider where the product can best play and then align the pricing and packaging both for the business objectives but also within the portfolio set. Then another comment is consideration for both the product lifecycle and the maturity of the market. If this is a new product and we realize we're just releasing MVP functionality, it may be super important to drive adoption and therefore we'll be willing to forego some of the pricing and offer a deeper discount in order to get into the hands of more people and prove out proof of value and use those customer win stories to then gain more monetization and more revenue later on. Similarly, in a mature market versus a more nascent market, earlier adopters, you'd think about pricing and packaging differently depending on how saturated the market is and how familiar customers are with the product and the value it can provide.

Kate McCullough:

On that topic. Go ahead, Jan.