The most recent Customer Education University course, How to Build and Run a Strategic Customer Education Operation, is coming to an end, and students are finishing the final assessment and collecting their certificates of completion. Congratulations to all who completed the work. Among the many topics covered in the course, one of the most popular, judging on how much time we spent on it, was how to price training.
We didn't just talk about what price to charge, but also how to start charging for training to customers who are used to getting it for free.
Pricing is a touchy subject for a variety of reasons. Most of the software companies I speak to fall into one of two pricing camps. They either believe in charging for training as a primary business approach (open source software companies are good at this), or they believe training should be part of the service in the software subscription. The former believes in earning revenue from training and the latter believes training should be offered with a primary goal of helping customers adopt the product and, of course, renew.
Tags: a16z Podcast • Business of Customer Education • Customer Success • Pricing Strategies • TSIA