Q: What is best practice?
A: Renewal pricing fails when you isolate it in a spreadsheet or slap it on like a sticker at the end of a subscription. I see pricing as a function of five elements of an inter-connected system. Do this well and you win revenue on repeat.
- Market position: your customer’s quest for performance, defined by specific barriers they face and drivers to improve.
- Product efficacy: designing to dismantle barriers and fuel drivers.
- Customer results: measuring the wins and perception of value your solution enables.
- Revenue capture: the value-price exchange lever, scaling as your customer wins.
- Operating capability: removing barriers and driving growth for your business and customers.
I speak with the customers of subscription brands. I investigate performance needs, value and the relationship with price. It gives me a value-based lens on renewal pricing.
Does your solution help a customer make a decision they care to measure? If your customer can finish the sentence, ‘they help us with…’ (what I call a SubsNoun), you’re in good shape.
Three categories of need keep showing up across the customers I speak with. Content: saying what is happening. Context: joining dots. Creativity: helping see what is possible. Executives value creativity for themselves, context for their leadership and content for their teams.
What determines pricing power is not only the category of need. It’s the stakes. Price reporting is high stakes content so there’s a lot of pricing headroom. Your market information is also content, but lower stakes. An AI summary may be good enough.
I have sold and renewed and designed subscriptions for a long time. I continue to have conversations about the reasonable exchange of price and value. And I use pricing techniques in my work. But to me, the best test is sensing if you are having to push instead of creating pull.
Many organisations have to push their solution to “close” a deal and this costs them. When you push, the sales cycle is expensive. Renewal pricing dented by discounts, special terms, and churn. Pull happens because you are fuelling your customers’ performance.
Q: What does outstanding performance look like?
A: Outstanding publishers obsess about their customer’s changing world. They know who bought a solution and why, who needs to use it and more. They do this to protect their base and then grow it predictably which means they:
- Understand how the solution improves performance. In B2B, this means departments, functions and people, by seniority.
- Avoid the seat trap. More seats on your pricing spreadsheet is not more revenue. It is a discount you haven’t noticed yet.
- Make sustained revenue from a strategic list of customers. They increase the number of these customers and learn to price and scale value.
- Capture value they already create. Publishers undervalue what they do because they don’t ask what it’s worth. Price for briefings with content, presentations to teams. Onboard like it’s a premium service you charge for, then test if you can.
- Discuss how to expand value mid-cycle. If you’re not delivering then you’re finding the problem before renewal pricing does.
- Investigate quality of revenues, by segment. How much revenue renewed (Gross Revenue Retention – GRR), and what are those same customers worth now (Net Revenue Retention – NRR). The gap between these two numbers tells you if you are leaving money on the table, or selling the table.
The ultimate test? Your champions articulate the case for renewal in a language their business understands. And when they move to a new organisation, they bring you with them.
Three top tips
1. Find “the long money”. Make customer value and revenue trends visible to your teams. Protect your base, then grow from it. Think pull not push. Align incentives to customer value. Reward customer success for referrals. Reward sales for retention.
2. Before you give, ask. Reps with only price to play with discount every time. Give them levers and they negotiate. A referral call with a prospective subscriber converts faster and longer.
3. Diagnose pricing before you act. Pricing is a component, not a cure. Is it a product problem, a process problem, or an incentive problem? Did the customer inherit the service? Has the buyer moved on? Was it bought to solve a problem they no longer have? These point to a different fix in the system.
Andy Burden led high growth teams at Datamonitor and Procurement Leaders, before founding Substribe in 2018. Our proven approach combines deep subject matter expertise with GenAI and human judgement to find and fix growth levers, and is based on 500+ customer conversations, 50+ brands, and a network of practitioners.
Mob: 07788 442 447
E-mail: andy@substribe.co
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/andrew-burden
Web: substribe.co
Andy and the other contributors will take part in a ‘Subscriber Retention Special – Q&A’ webinar on Tuesday, 12th May. Click here for more information and to register.
This article was included in the Subscriber Retention Special, published by InPublishing in April 2026. Click here to see the other articles in this special feature.
