# Course Ideas: Strategic Pricing for B2B SaaS

**Target Audience:** MBA students, 5-week course format

**My expertise:** 12 years SaaS pricing strategy consulting (Salesforce, HubSpot, Slack implementations), led pricing transformations for 20+ B2B companies

**What I want them to learn:**
- Why SaaS pricing is fundamentally different from traditional software (it's not just "subscription model")
- The four pricing models: per-user, usage-based, tiered, hybrid
- How to design pricing experiments without destroying revenue
- Packaging features into tiers (Good/Better/Best psychology)
- When to raise prices and how to communicate it
- Freemium economics: acquisition cost vs. conversion rate math

**Real-world problems I want them to solve:**
- A startup is giving away too much in free tier and can't convert
- An established company needs to shift from seats to usage-based (like Snowflake did)
- A company raised prices 30% and lost 40% of customers - what went wrong?

**Case studies I'm thinking of:**
- Slack's pricing evolution (free → $7/user → $15/user, how they navigated backlash)
- Salesforce's multi-tier strategy (Essentials, Professional, Enterprise, Unlimited)
- Zoom's freemium explosion during COVID
- Maybe Atlassian's unusual no-sales-team approach?

**Practitioners I could bring in:**
- VP of Pricing at a Series B SaaS company (talk about experimentation)
- Former Salesforce pricing exec (talk about enterprise tiers)
- Consultant who specializes in pricing transformations

**Not sure about:**
- How much quantitative analysis (price elasticity models, conjoint analysis) vs. strategic thinking
- Whether to include technical implementation (billing systems, metering) or keep it strategic
- How to structure assessments - case analysis? Pricing design project? Simulation?
- How much psychology (anchoring, reference pricing) vs. financial modeling

**Concepts I want to thread:**
- Value metric (what you charge for: seats, usage, outcomes)
- Willingness to pay (varies by customer segment)
- Price experimentation (A/B testing tiers, landing pages)
- Customer lifetime value (LTV) vs. customer acquisition cost (CAC)
- Expansion revenue (starting small, growing accounts over time)

**Student deliverable idea:**
Maybe they design a complete pricing strategy for a fictional B2B SaaS company? Include tiers, feature packaging, pricing page mockup, expansion strategy, pricing experiment plan?