The world is moving from products and services to subscriptions, favoring access and transformations over ownership and deliverables. The advantages to a subscription model are many, including: Predictable revenue; not selling services, but creating annuities with a lifetime value that far exceeds whatever you paid to acquire them; collective knowledge of your customers, which is a competitive advantage that cannot be duplicated; the customer relationship is at the center of the firm; not pricing a product or service, but rather a series of customer transformations, peace of mind, and convenience; and it is easier to predict demand and plan capacity more effectively.

Learning Objectives

•  Identify strategies utilized by businesses that have made the transition to a subscription-based model
• Understanding the nine types of subscription business models 
• The psychology of selling subscriptions
• How to develop new accounting information to represent the economics of a subscription business

Implementing a subscription business model for firms is hard work and not for everyone because it requires professionals to think differently than they have in the past about what it is, exactly, that customers value and what you are asking them to pay for. Join Ron Baker, founder of VeraSage Institute, for a thought-provoking session on why and how the subscription business model will be an inevitable part of the firm of the future.

Two things change when you transition to a new business model: Your pricing strategies and your internal dashboard—the KPIs you look at. Uber and Airbnb do not utilize the same dashboard as taxi companies and Marriott hotels. KPIs for subscription-based businesses are well developed, and this session will describe some of the more critical ones. We will also explore customer centric KPIs that measure how customers define the success of your firm.

Learning Objectives

• We work in an Intellectual Capital economy, not an Industrial economy, or service economy, and why that difference is critical
• Why the traditional metrics of efficiency—that are over a century old—are no longer relevant to measuring the effectiveness of intellectual capital
• Subscription Economy KPIs
• The critical difference between a Key Performance Indicator and a Key Predictive Indicator
• Managing by Results versus Managing by Means

McKinsey reports that the subscription e-commerce market has grown by more than 100% per year for the past seven years. Further, subscription-based companies are growing eight times faster than the S&P 500 Index. In five years, we will have the option to subscribe to almost everything, and your firm will have to confront that fact, whether or not you transition to a subscription-based model.

This session will teach you what is involved in pivoting to this new business model.

Learning Objectives

• Three strategies to pivot to subscriptions
• The Smile Curve
• Pricing the Relationship and Portfolio
• The Hierarchy of Value
• How to guide customer transformations