Agile Pricing: Why it Matters, Solving Usage-Based Pricing Challenges with Griff Parry

Barry Edney started his pricing career in Sposea, a digital pricing and consultancy company aiming to drive profitability by simplifying price data optimization, management and execution. It was in May 2021 when he started his own consulting firm called Burning Issues Consulting, where they help businesses deliver better top-line and margin results by focusing on where change needs to happen quickly – the burning issues. In this episode, Barry talks about the importance of knowing the right questions to ask the right people so you can sell value the way your customers need it in their business.   Why you have to check out today’s podcast: The importance of asking the right people the right questions in order to know what your clients really value; Why you should focus on value selling and avoid benefit selling; Why it’s a must for you to make sure that what you’re selling are the products that are giving you the big margin   “Focus on the margin drivers. If you have to be really cautious on your costs, focus on your products that generate your highest margin, and manage the rest of your portfolio for cash.” – Barry Edney   Topics Covered: 01:00 – How Barry got into pricing 03:21 – Considering the cost to serve in relation to delivering value 04:18 – One product, different audiences, and different levels of value 06:44 – Perceived value vs. intrinsic value 08:05 – Not knowing what your customers really value + asking the right questions 13:40 – Examples of open-ended questions 15:31 – Why you should avoid benefit selling 17:48 – Creating, communicating, and capturing value: Thinking about solving problems vs. building features 22:26 – Barry’s piece of pricing advice for the listeners   Key Takeaways: “When you start measuring the value that you deliver, it is so much easier to articulate it to your clients.” – Barry Edney “The value has to be presented in a different way. There has to be a different value or a different aspect of the value you can deliver.” – Barry Edney   People / Resources Mentioned: Sposea: https://www.sposea.com/ Burning Issues Pricing Consulting: https://www.burningissuesconsulting.com/ AkzoNobel: https://www.akzonobel.com/   Connect with Barry Edney: Email: edney@burningissuesconsulting.com; barryedney@gmail.com Website: https://www.burningissuesconsulting.com/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/barryedney/   Connect with Mark Stiving: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stiving/ Email: mark@impactpricing.com

30 Touko 202225min

This is an Impact Pricing Blog published on April 13, 2022, turned into an audio podcast so you can listen on the go. Read Full Article Here: https://impactpricing.com/blog/dont-forget-the-customer/ If you have any feedback, definitely send it. You can reach us at mark@impactpricing.com. Now, go make an impact. Connect with Mark Stiving: Email: mark@impactpricing.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stiving/

27 Touko 20222min

Value-based pricing really is impossible to do perfectly. In order to do value-based pricing perfectly, I would have to be able to read every customer's mind. I have to determine how much a customer is willing to pay for our product. And it's impossible to do that. However, there are techniques and tactics that we can constantly use to get better and better. We can use techniques to help buyers understand more of our value, which will increase their willingness to pay. As we start focusing our entire pricing strategy, and then we can shift our selling strategy to creating and capturing as much value in the buyer's mind, this is how we're going to win more deals at higher prices. We hope you enjoyed this memecast. This impactful insight came from the book, Selling Value, which I wrote to help salespeople win more deals at higher prices. If you have any questions or feedback, please email me mark@impactpricing.com. Now go make an impact.   Connect with Mark Stiving: Email: mark@impactpricing.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stiving/

25 Touko 20221min

Stéphane Joanis started his career as a Chemical Engineer. It is with Thermo Fisher that he got involved in business and pricing, and just this January, Stephane launched his own consulting business which he calls SJ Performance, LLC. This is where he practices his expertise in B2B Instrumentation Pricing as he and his team provides coaching to help you build a strong pricing culture in a way that provides confidence and leads to trust. In this episode, Stéphane educates us on the importance of achieving organizational transformation in a company as you value the trust in the relationship you have with your customers.   Why you have to check out today’s podcast: The importance of having people from different functional groups to talk about and practice value-based pricing and keep each other in check How the creation of strategies that inspire trust with your customers help your sales velocity to go up The power organizational transformation has in shifting from conventional pricing practices to having a value-based mindset in pricing   “The data is a means to the answer, towards getting insights. But it’s a foundation. Only data can trump politics. So, I think it's important to get your data and extract value from that data. Out of the specifications, go and get what is that value to your customer.” – Stéphane Joanis   Topics Covered: 01:40 – How Stephane got into pricing; the importance of trust 03:32 – On building trust: Attack the processes, not the people 05:55 – Starting his business to guide people towards organizational transformation 06:28 – What organizational transformation is all about 08:56 – The trick to see something as a loss vs. as a gain 11:13 – How to help people have a value-based mindset: Specification language vs. value language 14:00 – Talking to customers and splitting up win-loss 16:07 – Formula of sales velocity and how that relates to trust 19:31 – “I will raise your price to the extent that I'm not breaking your trust” 23:12 – Intuitive/statistical hearing as a way to talk to customers 25:01 – Stéphane’s pricing advice   Key Takeaways: “Everybody has a different point of view. There's so much psychology behind it. As you pointed out, there's a trust element. We have to agree to disagree. We have to have a certain level of trust, because everybody has a different objective with price. And so, how do you get everybody together, and how do you get prices aligned between them? It requires a certain level of trust if you want to do it well.” – Stéphane Joanis “That's the key to organizational transformation. It's not just about a process; it's about the people as well.” – Stéphane Joanis “You have to show what the customer is losing for them to truly appreciate what you have to offer and the value of your product and service.” – Stéphane Joanis “There's a price to trust.” – Stéphane Joanis   People / Resources Mentioned: SJ Performance, LLC: https://sjperformancecoach.com/ Pricing with Confidence: 10 Ways to Stop Leaving Money on the Table: https://www.amazon.com/Pricing-Confidence-Leaving-Money-Table/dp/0470197579 SPIN Selling by Neil Rackham: https://www.amazon.com/SPIN-Selling-Neil-Rackham/dp/0070511136 Selling Value by Mark Stiving: https://www.amazon.com/Selling-Value-Deals-Higher-Prices/dp/1737655217 The Speed of Trust by Stephen Covey: https://www.speedoftrust.com/#the-book Data and/or Value (blog): https://impactpricing.com/blog/data-and-or-value/ Focus on insights and not data (blog): https://www.sjperformancecoach.com/blog/focus-on-insights-and-not-data   Connect with Stéphane Joanis: Website:https://sjperformancecoach.com/ LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/st%C3%A9phane-joanis-6509921a/ Email: sjoanis@sjperformancecoach.com   Connect with Mark Stiving: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stiving/ Email: mark@impactpricing.com

23 Touko 202228min

This is an Impact Pricing Blog published on April 6, 2022, turned into an audio podcast so you can listen on the go. Read Full Article Here: https://impactpricing.com/blog/best-example-for-costs-dont-drive-pricing/ If you have any feedback, definitely send it. You can reach us at mark@impactpricing.com. Now, go make an impact. Connect with Mark Stiving: Email: mark@impactpricing.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stiving/

20 Touko 20223min

It's true, value-based pricing is the optimal pricing strategy. Value-based pricing simply means charge what our customers are willing to pay. If a customer is willing to pay us a hundred dollars, the best we could possibly do as a company is to charge that customer a hundred dollars. If we charge less, we left money on the table. If we charge more, the customer doesn't buy. So, it's impossible to do better than value-based pricing. Now, I'll agree, it's impossible to do value-based pricing perfectly, which we'll talk about next week. But understand, adopt the mindset of how is it that we can always focus on how much our customer is willing to pay, how much value our customer is receiving, and that's the absolute best we can do at setting and trying to capture pricing. We hope you enjoyed this memecast. This impactful insight came from the book, Selling Value, which I wrote to help salespeople win more deals at higher prices. If you have any questions or feedback, please email me mark@impactpricing.com. Now go make an impact.   Connect with Mark Stiving: Email: mark@impactpricing.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stiving/

18 Touko 20221min

Ed Arnold works as an Advisor at Ibbaka, a software provider for high growth companies that helps optimize planning and execution of key growth initiatives while improving company performance. He was the VP of Products at LeveragePoint for 10 years, and was able to work with the pricing legend, Tom Nagle. In this episode, Ed talks about the future of value-based pricing in the subscription economy as he discusses how product-led growth companies achieve their initial growth which later on leads to big wins.   Why you have to check out today’s podcast: Understand why pricing in value is the key in very clever segmentation in terms of creating user profiles in the market; Find out how product-led growth companies grow from being a small enterprise to being loved by a bigger market Discover companies that are product-led growth businesses and realize how much they’ve grown since day one   “Understand how your customer gets value from using your product, not from buying it; not in terms of what the product offering is in terms of features, but how they actually use it.”  – Ed Arnold   Topics Covered: 01:03 – Who is Tom Nagle? 01:41 – How Ed got into pricing + creating a tool and working with Tom Nagle 03:07 – Explaining what LeveragePoint is 03:50 – Future of value-based pricing in subscription: Value as a differentiator in the market 07:11 – Buying vs. negotiating a price: Knowing what you’re after 11:43 – Product-led growth practice as a brilliant strategy for business 13:55 – What Ed and everybody else likes about PLG – instant gratification 17:43 – Life-changing benefits of Slack 19:15 – Aligning pricing metrics 21:34 – Why usage-based pricing frustrates Mark 23:41 – Changing and having more than one pricing metric 27:13 – Ed’s piece of pricing advice for the listeners 28:06 – What Ed thinks about behavioral economics   Key Takeaways: “If you're thinking about what sort of animal you're hunting in the enterprise game, those are the whales. I think value is the only way you can differentiate yourself in the enterprise market.” – Ed Arnold “No corporate buyer ever heard of Slack until thousands of people in their company were already using it. So, in a sense, the business employee is a consumer, and that's how product-led growth companies are getting that initial growth. They're making it so ridiculously easy for people to start using it before the corporate procurement folks or even IT departments have any idea that they're using it. That's what makes that model so, so attractive for investors.” – Ed Arnold “We like to talk about three types of metrics. And you got to link those three together. Ideally, if you can link those three together, you're in Nirvana, because your price is aligned with value and it's aligned with usage and everything is great.” – Ed Arnold “When it's the right thing to do, and it makes sense, it does pay dividends. But it's tough. And I think it's really a leap of faith and doing it.” – Ed Arnold   People / Resources Mentioned: Ibbaka: https://www.ibbaka.com/ The Strategy and Tactics of Pricing by Tom Nagle: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1138737518/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_hsch_vapi_tpbk_p1_i0 Monitor: https://www2.deloitte.com/global/ LeveragePoint: https://www.leveragepoint.com/ Salesforce: https://www.salesforce.com/ Slack: https://www.slack.com/ Calendly: https://calendly.com/ Zoom: https://www.zoom.us/   Connect with Ed Arnold: Email: arnold@ibbaka.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/edarnold1/   Connect with Mark Stiving: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stiving/ Email: mark@impactpricing.com

16 Touko 202231min

This is an Impact Pricing Blog published on March 30, 2022, turned into an audio podcast so you can listen on the go. Read Full Article Here: https://impactpricing.com/blog/shrinkflation-the-hidden-price-increase/ If you have any feedback, definitely send it. You can reach us at mark@impactpricing.com. Now, go make an impact. Connect with Mark Stiving: Email: mark@impactpricing.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stiving/

13 Touko 20223min