Author: Steven Forth

Earlier in November, TechCrunch published an article entitled: “What’s the right NDR target for SaaS startups? And why pricing could be key to moving the NDR needle.” In this paper, the author, who publishes frequently on the topic of Pricing and NDR (Net Dollar Retention or more generally NRR for Net Revenue Retention), explores some of the key points from the article and adds some further thoughts on how pricing and packaging strategy are central to growing NDR. Pricing and NDR is a critical theme for pricing professionals as we go into 2023, as the author explains. Steven Forth is a Managing Partner at Ibbaka. He can be reached at steven@ibbaka.com.

The Pricing Advisor, December 2022

Earlier in November, TechCrunch published an article entitled: “What’s the right NDR target for SaaS startups? And why pricing could be key to moving the NDR needle.” Here are some key insights from that article:

  • “Modern software companies are set up to sell more of their product to existing customers over time” – the measure of this is NDR.
  • NDR “helps investors understand just how much built-in growth momentum a company has.”
  • “Investors, focused on more efficient growth than last year, are likely putting more emphasis on the metric” (the metric being NDR).

To demonstrate these points, Techcrunch dives deep into the OpenView Saas Benchmarks report to see how companies are doing with regard to the NDR metric. Some companies are achieving truly astonishing NDR numbers. Snowflake ‘s NDR is about 200%, which as Tom Tunguz has indicated, generates incredible growth in value.

Net Revenue Retention Impacts the Value of Your Company

  • NDR varies with the size of customers you are targeting (and Snowflake is an outlier)

Net Revenue Retention Impacts the Value of Your Company

  • Combining NDR with CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost) gives deeper insights into the performance standards that investors will be holding companies to:

Net Revenue Retention Impacts the Value of Your Company

OPENVIEW’S RECOMMENDATION: THAT PRICING, RATHER THAN EXPANDING ONE’S PRODUCT MIX, IS THE LEVER FOUNDERS SHOULD FOCUS ON TO IMPROVE THEIR NDR

How pricing and packaging can optimize NDR

The standard way of calculating NDR is as follows:

Net Dollar Retention =

(Recurring Revenue (RR) at Start of Period + Expansions + Upsells – Churn – Contractions)/

RR at Start of Period

These are the inputs into NDR and any pricing strategy meant to improve NDR needs to balance each of these variables.

Classic pricing talks about the Volume Optimizing Price, the Revenue Optimizing Price, and the Gross Margin Operating Price. These are all different prices. Pricing optimization for NDR is more complex as it has to balance the impact of price on each of these variables and their interactions. Let’s start with a price increase.

A price increase will generally:

  1. Increase average contract value, hitting the ‘Expansions’ variable.
  2. Have some impact on churn: this is generally reasonably small up to the point where one hits a price wall, at which point the price will cause churn which can overcome the expansion.
  3. For companies with a usage-based pricing component, a higher price can cause a reduction in usage, especially during a recession where business activity may be down.

The impact of usage-based pricing on NDR is going to be very important in 2023 and there is no one cookie cutter solution. There are a number of scenarios to consider. All of these depend on three things:

  • How to balance a usage pricing metric with other pricing metrics
    • What percentage of revenue should come from usage vs. more stable metrics like number of users or a platform fee?
    • Historically the revenue growth optimizing balance has been trending upwards from about 20% usage-based pricing contribution to about 30% usage-based pricing contribution (Zuora and Ibbaka data) but will this trend hold in 2023?
  • How to balance price changes
    • Will increasing prices generate enough additional revenue to compensate for the increase in churn?
    • Will decreasing prices generate enough additional usage to compensate for lower prices?
  • How to design pricing to optimize cross-sell and upsell
    • Role of each package in framing price and value.
    • Role of each package in cross-sell and upsell.

There will probably be no one size fits all answer to these questions. Different parts of your customer base will respond in different ways so you need to look at your current customers and segment them for how you will increase NDR for each segment.

Net Revenue Retention Impacts the Value of Your Company

One of the critical concepts in pricing is Value to Customer (V2C). This metric measures how much value you are providing to your customers. V2C must be higher than LTV (Lifetime Customer Value).

V2C > LTV

Usage based pricing is a good way to make sure the V2C/LTV ratio (the value ratio) stays in the target range as value and usage change.

Net Revenue Retention Impacts the Value of Your Company

Pricing and packaging for NDR is top of mind for many B2B SaaS companies at present, especially as the economy seems to be headed for a recession.

A word of caution here, any recession may be short lived and will not be the same in different countries and software categories.

As you prepare for a recession, prepare for the world after a recession:

Some companies will do themselves long-term damage as they try to optimize NDR during a recession. Make sure you are not one of these companies.

Be careful to:

  • MAINTAIN THE VALUE RATIO (V2C/LTV) FOR YOUR CUSTOMERS
  • DO NOT REFRAME YOUR PRICING AT A LOWER LEVEL (SET A NEW ANCHOR PRICE)
  • DO NOT DESIGN PRICING FOR A RECESSION THAT WILL TRAP YOU WHEN THE ECONOMY EMERGES FROM A RECESSION

NDR is a critical metric and it will remain so. B2B SaaS companies are valued on trends and not on point data. Investor decisions, and your valuation, will be based on the trend and not just on NDR at some point during a session. Design and build for long-term value.

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