Best Practices For Software Pricing And Licensing

Forrester speaks with dozens of software company executives each year who are finding it difficult to decide the best way to package and price their software products, especially as they move their solutions to a cloud-based business model. Technology changes have made familiar metrics such as per processor obsolete, but there is as yet no consensus on what alternatives the industry should use instead. This report summarizes the best practices that Forrester has identified from studying leading software providers' pricing and licensing, and also from helping hundreds of software buyers negotiate and manage software contracts. It will help sales enablement (SE) professionals such as pricing managers and product marketing managers decide how to package software into price list products, pick licensing metrics for those products, and define discounting rules to guide sales teams to the optimum price level. This report is particularly relevant to the technology industry but also useful for marketers in other industries as they add software services to their offerings.