Steve Keifer for Future of SaaS Festival

Speaker: Steve Keifer, VP Growth, Ordway

Steve Keifer: I'm Steve Keifer, the Vice President of Growth at Ordway, and for the past 20 years, I've had various different product management, sales and marketing leadership roles at different cloud and SaaS providers. I'm currently in my third early stage high growth startup, which is a company called Ordway. We provide usage-based billing and subscription billing to cloud and SaaS providers, Fintech, IOT, AI, ML providers, anyone with an innovative business model.

Steve Keifer: At the Future of SaaS Festival, I'm gonna be talking about usage-based pricing, which is a topic that's received a tremendous amount of buzz in the marketplace over the past 12 months And for good reason. If you look at some of the recent IPOs of companies that use that type of pricing, they've achieved faster growth rates and higher levels of net retention and lower customer acquisition costs. It can be a really powerful pricing model that can help you with new customer acquisition. But it's also very complicated, and if you're not careful, you're gonna end up with a model that doesn't scale very well.

Steve Keifer: In my session I'm gonna be talking about strategies for success with usage-based pricing for various different parts of SaaS organizations. For sales, we'll talk about how to convert customers from pay-as-you-go models, to longer term contracts that look more like recurring revenue. For product organizations, We'll talk about the different pricing strategies that you want to consider, different discounting models, different billing policies you need to think about as you commercialize new offerings. For customers success, we'll talk about how to educate customers on the complexity, the invoices that they get, so you can build trust, up sell, cross sell and grow those accounts. And last but not least, for finance and operations, we'll talk about how you can mirror, rate, bill, and recognize revenue for usage-based pricing models.

Steve Keifer: The sessions I most look forward to watching are related to customer success. The key to long term growth at any SaaS or cloud provider is not new customer acquisition, but the ability to consistently grow through upselling and cross selling your existing accounts. I think customer success is hugely important and doesn't get enough conversation in the SaaS community.