Trust as a Pricing Lever: How Customer Trust Affects Pricing with Stéphane Joanis

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