Premium Support

All right. So we are now live and two minutes ahead of starting the webinar on premium support. So I see we have a few people joining. That's great. We're going to give everybody a few more minutes to get on here. .

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All right, it is now four o'clock, sensor European. We are gonna give everybody just one more minute. I see that people are coming in. We are 20 now, so that's good. I think we had sort of, I don't know, 5,200 people sign up. So usually it's sort of about half that actually make it to the time here. So.

And so Alexander says thanks for organizing this webinar. Thank you for attending it. So this is why we do it. Okay.

All right, so we are now on time, so the one minute past four. I don't know who of you are joining from Europe, who are joining from the US or elsewhere. Regardless, good afternoon, good morning. My name is Ulrich. I am the founder of Willingness to Pay. So we are a pricing consultancy. We focus on B2B SaaS. We think we're very good at it. So that's my reason for being here. We've done sort of, and I've personally done 150 or so projects for what I would call complex B2B SaaS solutions. And obviously a lot of those have had premium support or other service offerings as part of it. I have previously had other webinars where I have talked about services at length in. different frameworks and I'm sort of fundamentally a big fan of services. I think they have a tremendous value add. And I think that they are a underutilized, under-monetized and under-appreciated part of growing a business. we are, we as in willingness to pay, we are partnering with Pricing SaaS. to run some reports. Pricing SaaS can be found exactly on, exactly where you think on pricingsaas.com. And I'll try and sort of see here. We have the community here. So I wanna go through the agenda in just a second, but what I wanna say out of the gate here is that the recording and the slides will be made available. So we'll send it to you on an email. to everyone, and then also it will be forever available on the community. So community.pricing.sas.com, where if you're not already a member, you should be. This is also where you get to ask follow-up questions or discuss some of the content if you'd like that. And also some of the previous webinars that we've had are on there as well. So if you want to check those out, that's the place to go. OK, so for the agenda today, I wanted to go through these.

different sort of bullets here. So the first is to answer the question. And I've tried to sort of come up with a, let's say a more like sort of a framework approach, like try to sort of break it down. Because I say, when should you charge for premium support? The fact is that everybody does some sort of support for customers. Even in high volume B2C context, you usually do something for customers in some way. So the question really is when you monetize it. And then I'm going to talk a little bit about how to design support offerings. And then finally on how to price and sell support offerings, maybe more on how to price them. And then we're just going to have Q &A. I don't think necessarily that the presentation itself is going to be super long. So I'm going to talk for hopefully 20, 25 minutes or so. So half past and then we're going to open up the floor of questions and answers. So that's how it's going to If you have questions in the meantime, so the way that Riverside, the software that we're using works is that you can speak to me because yeah, that's how it's set up, but you can write. So there is a chat and I will try and look at it as we go along. But in any case, all the questions I'll just go in at the end, was answering from like the first one. throughout. So if I ever say something you don't understand, just like try to shout out in the chat and I'll try to catch it and go back and explain a bit more. But if you just have an overall question and it could be a general like conceptual question or it can be a, what should I do in my situation? Which is as follows, very happy to answer both kinds of questions. just, yeah, it's the chat where that all happens. Okay, so let's get going. Yeah, that's me. I am today a little bit sick. That's also my voice is a little coarse. So I decided to go with hoodie and a cap. So that's my emotional safety today. But I also wear shorts sometimes and pretend to be an actual consultant. There you go. So when should you charge for preview support? I look at it in the following way.

It's a bit of it sort of business school, microeconomics, sort of 101. So I basically think that the components that we need to answer that question are the fault. So we sell an overall solution, like the software we sell, and the net value, the value surplus, so the technical term will be the economic surplus, would be something like the promise of what that solution does. times the probability of the likelihood that you actually get it done for the customer. So that is the expected value. So the potential value times the probability minus the direct and indirect costs. So the direct costs is your price, what you charge customers and the indirect costs are the, the effort and friction and the time that the customer has to take on themselves to actually use your solution. Right. So If they have a user that has to use your software, then that person's salary and effort training and so forth is an indirect cost. So essentially, if you have a very, very high promise, like we can make your ton of money and the probability is 100%, then okay, we're going to make a ton of money. And if we have no indirect cost, it just happens automatically. then we have a lot of precision value. And then if the price, the direct cost is just a fraction of that, then potentially the customer would say yes, because the net value is positive and very largely so, so we make money. So it looks something like this. Expected value is the combination of probability times promise. Then you have price and indirect costs and then whatever's left over, that's the value surplus. Essentially if the value surplus is big enough, compared to alternatives, customers buy your thing. Okay, so what does this have to do with premium support? Well, I think that premium support directly sort of interferes into this sort of key equation here in the following way, in that the major way in which premium support, any support really, affects this equation is that it...

Increases the probability that the solution will actually work right? So if I have some sort of It's a big enterprise solution and I'm selling to banks and I'm promising that they will be compliant so that they can save a lot of say regulatory fines and whatever it is if I can somehow also guarantee that it will work maybe because I have Thousands of existing customers word work. They understand how it's gonna work They maybe see that I am heavily committed with a lot of experts to make it work. So I'm going to ensure that it works by applying all my skilled people to the solution. Then they actually expect that they get the value that is on the 10 of the product. And then that's good. If they didn't have all that reassurance, the probability, they would say, okay, sure. If it works, it's worth a lot, but They don't have any track record. They don't have any market share. can't explain how it worked. And they're just going to like hand me access to the software and not help me use it. So maybe my expected value is very low, even though my potential value is high. So I think this is really where support and services come in is that they increase the probability closing in on a hundred percent that customers will actually get the value out of the thing that they're buying. And that is a tremendous unlock because if you're solving a real valuable problem, then what happens is actually that the value of your service is dependent upon the value of your solution. Right. So let's say you, you're the value of your solution is a million bucks. And let's say that the, without the service, there is a 10 % chance that they will get the value. So there's the 10 % chance that they'll get the million bucks. But let's say that with the service, there's a 50 % chance that they'll get the value. So that means that the value of the service is the 40%, is the 400,000. So the value of the service is a factor of the solution itself and not on the salary of the people that does the service, et cetera, et cetera, which I think is a key dynamic of premium support. The other one, of course, is that presumably when you do

premium support or any other service in the business, you do it at least to an extent instead of the customer themselves doing it. Right? So if you do a lot of the onboarding or the data migration or the internal training or whatever it is, then they don't have to do it, which means that they save on the indirect cost. So whenever we add services, we increase value, expected value, and we decrease cost by decreasing the indirect cost. And then overall, that means that the value surplus, that's all the white red stuff on the right hand side, just increases, making it a lot better in terms of the value proposition to the customer. I will also say, I run a lot of validation interviews. So we have new pricing and packaging. We take them to our clients' clients and say, hey, how do you like this? And one of the almost sure fire questions we will always get is, How is the onboarding? Like how are you gonna help us or ensure us that this will actually work? Like we like what we hear, but if it doesn't work and you're not gonna help us use it, we like it less, right? So it is a key factor also in customer decision. So this is how I see sort of, or break down the value of service in a way. And then if you take it then and say, okay, so how does this apply to when? So I've just. created these sort of brackets of different sort of types of companies and different stages. I've just said a startup is anything before five million, the scale up is five to 30. A real business, yeah, sorry, but a real business is somewhere from 30 million to having a significant market share, let's say 20%. So you're a real baller or player in this market. And then if you're a market leader, then really you have sort of 20 % or more of the market. So you're the one to beat in this market. I would say that promise in terms of we had these sort of, you remember, this is the equation, promise times probability minus indirect and direct cost. So the promise presumably is high in all of them. Like you're solving a big problem regardless of whether you're starting off with your market leader. You could say that market leaders usually have multi-product, have a deeper thing. So maybe they have more promise, but let's just keep that.

However, the probability that you could actually deliver on the promise is tends to be lower in a startup and higher in a market leader. Like the market leader has track record. They have proof. have all these things indirect cost. That's a little bit. That's that depends. Sometimes you actually have more indirect cost for the market leader. That's really what the startup does. They just something they do something easier and better. But sometimes you also have a lot of indirect cost with the startup because they don't have their shit together yet. So you have to sort of do a lot of work to actually get the solutions work. But because the promise is so high, the tech, whatever it is, does a really important thing, you endure it anyways. And the direct cost, that's the price you charge for the solution. Usually the market leader can charge more, the startup has to price lower, so that's lower. So what we see here is that the market leader has high promise, high probability, some indirect cost. That also means that they can charge high direct cost. The startup has high promise but low probability, meaning that they charge low direct costs. So your pricing of the solution is a direct outcome of the promise type probability formula here. So where does service fit in? Well, services, they affect the indirect cost, reduce it, and they increase the probability, right? So that also means that you can basically, as a startup, scale up, you can pluck the holes of your low probability or your large indirect cost by adding services. You can say, okay, so maybe the solution itself isn't good, but we'll do whatever it takes and we'll sleep in your offices and we'll make it work. And people think you're endearing and they love you for it. So they'll say, sure. It seems you're very committed. So we trust that you'll get it done. So their expected probability now goes up, willingness to pay goes up. You can charge more for your solution. So services really go in and plug these holes and you just take more work off the customer's account, do it for them, white glove service, all these things, which makes the overall value proposition a lot better. So this is really how I see about monetizing a premium support, like how it functions sort of economically inside the engine of an account. So you can charge for services as soon as the probability that you can deliver on your promise

is strong enough to deliver a net positive value surplus without the service, right? So let's go back here. So if you can make this one positive without adding services, so the probability itself, given the solution, maybe the UX is good enough and all the integrations are good enough, whatever it comes out of the box, good enough to deliver enough probability compared to the promise that it outweighs the indirect and the direct costs. So you have net positive value. At that point, you could start to charge for the service because there is net value to charge from. And then when you should charge for that service really is dependent on how much money you want to leave with the customer because the service added net value surplus can really speed up sales. So if you are a startup, let's go back here, you want to become a market leader. Market leader means that you have a lot of business and you have a lot of market share. So if you don't have a lot of business, you don't have a lot of market share, you might want to use the services to accelerate your business so that you can grow. And that is a balancing act. So you basically want to say, okay, so at what point Do we think that we are now having a solid foundation of a business? We're at scale up stage, maybe later scale up stages, we're turning into real business. And we now think that we have a lot of customers in-house and we could monetize them more and grow with that as opposed to trying to have a high sales velocity. And that's really where I think you should consider pricing for the previous import. There can be other arguments as well. which I haven't written down. One of them actually is that you want to offer better premium support. And so the argument works like this. If you have premium support and you don't charge for it, there tends to be this catch 22 almost where your customers do not really value it. So they may be overuse it in different ways. So you feel exploited a little bit. Some customers are really difficult. And on the

inverse side, your team members who deliver the support actually in a weird sense also do not value it that much because obviously you're not charging for it. So it's free. Like my time is not that important. I'm working for free for the clients and so forth. So by charging for it, you suddenly put a value on it and that works both externally with the customers who now perceive it as valuable and internally to your team that now says, Hey, you're fulfilling a very valuable function. You're, you know, let's say your time is charged to 300 euros by the hour for this customer. So that also means that you need to show up as a professional and deliver that value to the customer. And that actually can have a possible, a positive sort of feedback loop effect inside the business as well. So it's a little bit, it can be sort of a, a fix to professionalize yourself to start to. to charge for premium support. But outside of that effect, looking at the sales velocity and the net value outcome here, I think are the right things to look at. so how to design support offerings. So I use. Basically, you can say that any support offering is going to be comprised of a ton of different, let's say features. So it could be something like, is there phone support? Is it just taking support? Is it email? Is it a named account manager? Is there a response time or resolution time? Is there multiple languages? Is it direct second level support? Is it, we have an SLA? So people pull in a lot of these features inside of an offer. I usually sort of sort these features into two major buckets and say, hey, we have these two directions. That's sort of what we have here. And I call them scope and access. So scope is what you do inside of the premium support and access is how you do it or how easy it is for the customer to get it done. So examples could be scope would be, are we just bug fixing?

Are we doing anything inside the system that a super user could do? Let's say we are creating user profiles, we're resetting passwords, we are running reporting, like whatever this system does, I can just call support and they do it for me. We're doing maybe quarterly business reviews, so more professional service type stuff. Maybe we do sort of senior technical support. Maybe we do monitoring services, reporting, et cetera. So these are all extra things you do for a customer that can be that I would put inside scope. That's sort of what you do, which is opposed to what I call access. So access is how you do it. So it could be, okay, so can I get all these things done, but I can still only do it by filling out the form on the website or going through the form on the product. Or can I email someone? Can I email a specific name person? Can I call that person? Do I have the direct phone number to the CEO? So that would be sort of startup premium support one-on-one is like, I just call the founder and he fixes my problem. Can I call him at night 24 7 Christmas Eve? Like is this critical? We want whatever our bank to run whatever the software does. Can we get so in the name of account manager do we have direct access to second level support if we so we don't have to like go through the frontline staff and then get to like the technical guy that we know is going to solve our problem. Is it an in language? Is it a response and resolution time that we have promised? So are we going to? Are we going to skip the line, for example, are we going to wait in waiting line to sort of have it resolved depending on urgency and so forth. So usually a combination of scope and access features is what creates your premium support. So it's basically to say, so what I usually do is I just outline all the things we currently do in scope and access. And then I continue those lists with what we could do in scope and access. And then I say, okay, so what would be the most valuable outcome for the customers? And then we essentially create for you support for that. And then we lean into it. You can add what I also call commercial features. It could be something like guarantees, SLAs, or especially with penalties, or a good example of this. I don't think that necessarily they are an access or scope. are more, they are part of the commercial framework in the agreement. You can also,

So you can, for example, say hey, if you have premium support, you get the professional services time and material hours for 20 % less or 30 % less. So there can be certain discounts involved in the overall. You can also say something like hey, if you get the professional, the premium support, maybe some of the add-ons would be cheaper. Maybe the whatever the on-prem deployment that we charge for is cheaper if you get the. previous support. There's not really a rule for like as long as you can explain it and try to make a good argument to the customer, you can combine all these like commercial economic incentives in the model and you can tie them to your previous report. That is fine. It's really a matter of whether it can you can narrate it in the sales process, but discounts and guarantees. There are some of the there are some of the usual suspects. I'll give you an example here. So this is a a four tier support model I designed for customer. So what we see here in the core, is basically the basic support that is free. Then we have a 24 seven support that is designed around a lot of access, but actually not a lot of scope. And then we have the previous support, which is designed around scope, but not access because we found out with this particular case that we had some very large customers that They were actually were not interested in scope, but they were interested in access. They were interested in us picking up the phone at night. If something was wrong and we needed bug fixing, but they could actually run a lot of the stuff themselves. But we also had a lot of small customers that they weren't interested in 24 seven support, but they needed a lot of help like super user type. Can you push the buttons for me help? And so we decided to also create an offering for them. And then of course we created sort of a premium 24 seven, which basically combined the two, so both scope and access. And then we had three tiers in our packaging called Essentials, Business and Enterprise. You see those at the bottom. we scoped the price points based on the tier. So if I was an enterprise customer, the support was more expensive compared to if I was not. And so you see some of these features are very...

Let's say scope oriented and some of them are very access oriented. So for example, we have a response priority, skip the line, classic access feature. And then we have something like, usage support, how to classic scope feature. Here's included everywhere. We have, something like create users, like service requests, all of these. they are all sort of part of the scope and part of the premium. So. This is just the basic framework that I use here in terms of like where to put it from a packaging point of view. You can basically input it into an existing product like you have like the enterprise tier. So to say hey, we have the enterprise tier and we're going to put these sort of scope and access services inside of the tier. So sort of premium support included as an enterprise customer. You can spin it out, have it as a specific add on. You can have it even tiered. That's a little bit what we did here with the example I showed premium support, super premium support, different versions. You can have that with split into business and technical support. So this can be something like, Hey, over here, we're going to do the quarterly business review. We're going to do the professional services. We're going to do these things, but over in the other support package, we have a specific type of scope that is more technical. basically business support and technical support can be used whenever you have very different. kinds of specialists in the organization, let's say technical and business people, and you want to offer them as two separate things. So that can also be a way to just split it on two types of scope. And then of course they can have different sort of access aspects as well. You can split out the recurring types of service, that will be premium support. And then you don't necessarily need to have premium onboarding. or any kind of onboarding or ad hoc one time services included there. So you can split that out as well. Do I have a favorite? I think this one, just having it as a place. This is so simple, just have it as an add on. I would say that what some people.

do with a lot of luck, especially if you have high ticket accounts is that you just make premium support non-optional. and it's one of sort of the hacks that I've just seen work again and again is to say, hey, we have a premium support option. It's 15 % of the base price. And it's not a choice. It's just, part of what we deliver to you. So you're deciding to charge on it, but you're not offering the option of not buying it. So it can be a brilliant way to monetize it as an evidence as well. So how to price and sell these. So I have this sort of framework, if you, I'm not going to go through it in detail. I have another webinar. There's a recording online on the YouTube channel. I think also in the pricing SaaS community and our website, willingness to pay.com where you can see that. But basically I split services into eight different sort of commercial models or layers where number one is we do it for free and that's basically what I suggest you start doing with premium support when you're a startup like the net value isn't there yet so you just need to do it for free and then you probably end up with number eight a service concept so you just say hey premium support is 15 % of the entire ticket price of the account but you can then of course add different other types of services so Depending a little bit on what your solution is and what kind of professional services you supply, you can have all sorts of other like time and material professional services, capacity, prepaid scoped, like prepaid hours. All this is fair game and it doesn't necessarily need to be included in the premium support. So it's more so that when you start to monetize services, you need to carve out the specific thing that you can do in premium support, which is I think should be unlimited. So you don't count hours. You just say, Hey, we're going to offer this scope and this access. And that's what we charge for. And then anything that goes beyond that, let's say any bespoke configuration work, bespoke development work, any kind of, let's say consulting type work, you have all these other models two to seven to, monetize those. So with that,

I would just say that the way that I usually price for these things is that for premium support, you can either do it as any other product with a pricing metric. So price per employee, for example, or you can do it with, and I usually try to price it per something that is stable. So I usually don't like premium supports that is priced per ticket or per request. For some businesses that's the right thing to do. But I usually try to price it with something that doesn't change so that we know the price upfront at the beginning of the year. And it's very transparent and it's just prices the size of the customer. I think for premium support, it has now become more or less globally accepted. The premium support just becomes a percentage of the total price of the rest of the solution. So if I'm selling a solution for a hundred K, then previous support can usually be anywhere between 10k and 20k. So 10 % to 20 % of the base price of the solution. And that would be my recommendation as well. You can because it just seems to be accepted. If for whatever reason that becomes too variable, maybe you have a lot of users base and it like goes up and down and you just need something a little bit more fixed. You can definitely just use a fixed price and just say, Hey, this is 25K a year or five K year, whatever it is, and just put that on your tier. Um, and then, and then that's the price, but aim for that 10 to 20 % range. And I would say that it's, it's something that you mature into. Right? So I think Oracle, for example, they have 20 or 22 % all in. actually combine something like business and technical support into a of a full support package. and they are at the high end, so 20 % or so of the total solution value. Usually when you're a startup, you want to start with maybe 5 or 10%. Just lean into a little bit slightly. You want to make sure that the net value is there. You want to work on your internal professionalization of these things, et cetera. So I think that's a really good way to start. And then you can work from there with just increasing the price point relative.

of your premium support to everything else. Okay. With that guys, I'm actually just going to open the floor for questions. So as stated, I don't have, I had like 25 minutes. I think I actually made that time more or less on the presentation. So let me have some questions on premium support.

think we got to around 45 people here. if you're not box, let's have some questions. So. I'll see here. Johnny asks, do you see companies wrapping onboarding into premium support and success, especially for enterprise? Yes, I do. I don't like it. So why? And simply because there is usually a willingness to pay for onboarding in itself. So why not charge for both? Also, especially for enterprise, sometimes onboarding can actually be a huge upfront spike in cost. It's actually expensive to do onboarding right for the right customers. And it can also be one of these, it can be harder to scope, right? Because you might have a lot of onboarding, especially if you do migration, technical integration, like there can be a lot of things inside of onboarding that's a little hairy. So basically the... There is willingness to pay for onboarding, especially in enterprise. I would say that for onboarding costs, I've talked about that elsewhere, anything below 25 % of the ACV, like annual contract value, is usually just accepted. Between 25 and 50 % is usually looked at a little bit, but negotiated, but overall accepted. And sometimes depending on the solution, you can even charge from 50 to 100 % or even more of the annual fee on onboarding. And that's at a point where you probably want this cash, the onboarding cash to offset the customer acquisition cost. So you want to time the Coq payback basically by having this larger fee like first year and the onboarding upfront to offset the Coq to actually have your growth economics fall through. And so it has that positive benefit and customers want to pay for it.

And so forth. So I think it's one of these where people are a little bit squeamish charging for both things and you should just like get used to it. People want to pay for it. It's Danielle says, how do you get existing customers who are getting premium support but not paying for it to pay for premium support or renewal? By telling them they have to, right? Saying, hey, we are now maturing as company and you know, we are actually, You are the type of customer where we want to offer you the premium support option. And what you can do, of course, is that you can actually double down on a status. Hey, we're professionalizing it. It's going to get even better, but you need to pay for it. Or you can downgrade to the unpaid version where you don't get support. It's a one-time thing like this conversation, and it's going to give you a ton of value. Most customers get it.

I think one of good things with people support is that it has a very tangible direct cost for you to deliver, which also means that people know that you have to cover that cost. So it's actually an easy thing to charge for just because of that. Maggie asks, do you feel like one-on-one customer success should generally be a paid service for scale-ups? So one-to-one customer success. I don't really know what the one-to-one part here is, Maggie, but so I'd rather say customer success should generally be a paid service. I'm going to go back to where do you get the most bang for your buck? So if you have customer success that is really helping you to scale an account in terms of making them adopt the product and just grow the account and your pricing model and packaging model like supports that expansion motion, you don't need to charge for it because basically you want to be able to deliver this kind of support to every one of your customers. But if it's more, but if you have these customers that just need lot of help and it's it's generating value for them, but not in terms of them adopting more product, that's where you then start to then start to charge for it. inside of the consideration of whether this is speeding up your sales or not. But I think for a scale up, I would generally say that you're at a point where you can start to charge for a simple premium support of like 10 % of your ACV. That would be the norm. Most people would do it. Your customers would get it. It would be fine in almost all instances. So, rule of thumb, charge for it. Shiv asks, How do you think AI will impact premium support offerings? Are there new aspects to the offering that can be added? Will there be downward price pressure? Services can now be delivered for cheaper leveraging AI. Yeah, so I think basically AI raises the bar, right? So we just saw Klona file their support people, restating AI, and then now rehiring support people because some of the support tickets actually need a human. So I think this is a really good example of saying, hey, I think we can get a lot done with

support tickets that are run by AI. So basically just means that whatever non-premium support you have, core support, basic support, included support, that just like the expectation of what that can do is just hire tomorrow with AI than it was yesterday. So, but that doesn't mean that you don't have a really premium solution and that those premium solutions can keep their price point because now people know that, if I have a human, then it's because this human can do something the AI cannot. And they're also empowered to solve problems in a way that the AI is not. So that is worth something extra. And I would also say that for especially enterprise accounts, do not sleep on the fact that a human can be accountable and can be yelled at by the customer at an appropriate time and the AI cannot. And for a lot of accounts that are paying six, seven figures for their solution, they absolutely want to be able to yell at someone. And so, and that is just a part of support is to be that person that steps up and have that hard conversation with the customer. yeah, raises the bar, but there's still room for the paid version. Steven asks, if premium support is provided through AI, does that change the value perception and the pricing? So same question. So I'll just extrapolate on it here and I'll say that. So what you actually have. So you have a higher expected level on base support because of AI. One of the great things with AI is that everybody understands that it costs money. So I think depending a little bit on how that support looks, you can actually charge, you can start to charge for it a little bit earlier, especially if you have like high volume support, if you have a lot of tickets, especially if that is voice as a modality, like I can just speak my support ticket. especially if it's sort of a genetic, has to sort of change a lot of things. So basically I'm using more smarter and more expensive models to run my AI support. I think that definitely will also enable you to charge for sooner. And I am expecting that it just becomes a, like almost like a cost line item in a lot of proposals where you're just like, yeah, we have the AI support and it's like a token price or a ticket price and it's whatever that is, some sensor or

dollar and that's just how it works. We have it already with call centers, right? So we see that call centers have been gone replacing the human agents with the robot agents and that some of these are, and then basically the AI that runs the robot agents is basically priced on calls based on not having to include a human agent in the loop. So we have a lot of these already. So from the... provider of the AI support into the business that then use it towards their customers, you're already pricing it. So I think it's just a matter of, yeah, so the net value equation of when somebody just pushes that cost through to the customer. And because you're already paying for it in a very specific way to your AI provider, it becomes a really easy argument to just put it on the invoice. So DS asks here, yeah, it's not a question. It's just like praise. I take praise as well. Thank you. That was a very dense with substance, really great presentation. I appreciate it, DS. Thank you. Ryan says, will there be a recording of the webinar available? There will. It will be on this community space, community.pricing.sas.com. It will also be on my YouTube. That's YouTube. It's just called SaaS Pricing, basically the handle on YouTube. So if you just search SaaS pricing on YouTube, you'll find it. Sebastian asks, Sebastian says, do you think charging for live chat is a good feature to add to peer support? So live chat is just, it's an access feature, right? So do your customers value that access feature or would they value another access feature more? I think that's the question here. Alvaro asks when trying to enter the market, do you think a low cost pilot? It's a good strategy while the customer really don't see a believe in value delivered. What about the pricing after the pilot? So this is something that I haven't talked too much about today with this. But I think one of the great things with services in general is that they are really easy to design because if you're designing software, have to.

After actually build it and I know that there's a vibe coding and things are getting faster and so forth. But but I would say that they're still not as fast to build as services because services basically is just you walking into a room with a customer and just starting to make promises right? So just yeah, you'll get a name account manager and you'll get like a 10 minute response time and a one hour resolution time and will do like all the languages 24 7 like you get my phone number. Whatever it takes exactly 30 seconds to. design or invent the most premium support offering ever. And then you need to deliver on it. That's the difficult part. But just the saying of it is the easy part. And then when you sell that, then you're going to curse yourself for having made all those promises. But you also find out which part of those promises were important to customers. And then you get to cut out the parts that you don't need to sit out 24-7 because people actually don't call you at night. They always speak English, so you don't need the multi language and so forth. So you can actually, you can cast a wide net with promises and then scope it down really fast to actually find the parts of the premium support offering that really matters to customers. So I think that makes sense. And then of course, if you're entering a new market, it's definitely one of the things that I would also use almost as a discounting strategy. So you can say, hey, back in... Like the old country, we usually charge like 20 % on the premium support because you're one of the founding customers in France or the US or whatever the new market is. We're actually going to offer this for free. So you basically throw in premium support for the first year, for the first two years or forever up to you for free to land the account. I would usually go time limited, but that's just me. And to really sort of make sure that they adopt and you learn those new customers in that new market because that's also an aspect of. John, thank you for yes, John says that you can find recorded webinars at pricing says the calm resources. And yeah, and I should also mention the report. So pricing says just came out with a premium.

Support report so that what does that mean? That means that? we they scraped 3000 SaaS pricing pages for every day for the last three, four years and used AI to summarize. So we have a lot of statistics in there in the report. So pricing.sas.com slash reports should get you there on monetizing premium support. So you can see what all the big boys do, how many actually charge premium support, how many don't. So definitely check that out. Alexander asks for SAS with ATV in the millions where large onboarding sometimes multi years the norm would you package previous support differently for the unique stuff to that customer implemented during onboarding compared to previous support for the standard product? So yeah, this is basically sort of an onboarding question again. If you're doing multi year onboarding projects, that's the time it shows goal project. It's one of a kind. Every time I would just do it like that and then you can still have a previous support. that kicks in on top of the license whenever that runs. If you're doing sort of eight figure deals, you basically always want to run usually your support offering some kind of metric like number of customers in the system, number of employees, even tickets if that makes sense here, because you want to be able to sort of scale the costs quite a bit. Sonja says, great, thanks. Thanks, Sonja. Danielle asks, how do you get the balance right? You don't want to reduce the level of support for non-premium customers to something that won't give them the value they need to hang around. Exactly. It's a churn question, right? So basically you want to say, we want to have the basic support good enough to keep the revenue compared to the price. So if you can increase the base support a little bit.

and reduce the churn rate and reduce or increase word of mouth. People love you more. That's a good investment. You should do that, but that's how you should think about it. so, and, and often people over invest actually in base support. They, they just like to be have heavy customers. So that's what we do. Okay. Austin says he a great session already. Is there more in this new book? Actually, the book doesn't have anything on support or services. I'm actually working on a second edition, so hopefully we should get that. So Lila says, please explain again why you subtract cost from the value equation. Is the calculation cost and the value? Yeah, the calculation, like the technical term is economic surplus. So, you know, saying like value is what you get, price is what you pay. That's basically it. So what I would just argue is that you pay more than the price. You also pay all the effort that you put into the solution. that's part of it. And you also pay, of course. the actual price and then the value is the promised value times, let's say the probability that it happens. So that's where we're at. guys, everyone, thanks for the questions. I see that we're still sort of 30 plus people in the, I think we hit 50 at one point. So great turn up. I appreciate it. Thank you so much. And go to the community page, community.pricingsas.com. Check out everything there. I'll hang around in the next couple of days to answer premium support related questions. You can always go to willingness to pay.com if you want to find my email right directly or reach out for anything else. Thank you for now and we'll see you at the next webinar. Cheers guys.