Personalities in the Pricing Community (and how to interact with them) with Robert Ribciuc

This one is the Joker 1 from the Selling Value card deck.  You heard earlier that there are really three types of buyer's value journeys. Those happen to be analytical, relationship, and trust.  In the analytical relationship, there's typically a lower level person who's doing a lot of side by side comparison between your product and a competitor's product, and our buyers are by far the most price sensitive in that situation. Or we could go all the way to the trust journey, and that is where they come to us. They ask us, "Hey, what do you do? How do you help us solve our problems?" They never even look at a competitive alternative. And in that situation, they're the least price sensitive.  The relationship journey is the one in the middle, where people would come to us and say, "Hey, how do you help us solve our problem?" We guide them. They build a great relationship. They really like us. And then they say, "Yeah, but we have to go look at competitive alternatives." We've built up enough goodwill and probably tweaked their thinking that we have the competitive advantage. And so, they're not going to be as price sensitive as they would be if they were in a relationship journey. But they're still more price sensitive than it was just a trust journey.  So, you could think of these three different journeys (the analytical, relationship, and trust) is how our customers go learn about the value of our products. But at the same time, it's how price sensitive are they going to be when it's time to negotiate the price. It's really important that we understand which journey each buyer is on. We hope you enjoyed this example of Pricing Table Topics. What you just heard was done without a script. If you want to get better at speaking about pricing and value, grab a deck of our cards, pick a card, read the saying, and then talk for one to two minutes about what that card says. You'll become a better speaker and expert. 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/

30 Aug 20232min

Ian Campbell is the author of Wall Street Journal Best Seller "The Value Sale". As Chief Executive Officer of Nucleus Research he is responsible for the company’s investigative research approach, product set, and overall corporate direction. He is a recognized expert on the return on investment (ROI) and total cost of ownership (TCO) analysis of technology and has written and presented extensively on a range of organizational topics and the importance of matching technology to business organizational objectives. In this episode, Ian shares how you can create optimal pricing by understanding how customers use your product and find value in them.   What you will learn from this episode: Learn how to quantify a product's value in measurable terms Find out the three value propositions you can derive from when helping people find and understand their product's value Discover how to restructure your conversations to help people recognize the value you offer and you get empowered to price that value   “Look at the customer value, how is the customer achieving value from your product and price according to that.”  - Ian Campbell   Topics Covered: 01:42 - How he got into pricing 02:23 - What Nucleus Research is all about 03:26 - Understanding value with how customers use the product rather than vendor claims 05:20 - Defining Value 06:48 - The challenge with quantifying ROI with non-monetary value [customers' happiness] 09:00 - Thoughts on Mark's statement about B2B being more cognizant of value they want to receive 10:05 - Translating 'happier employees' into quantifiable terms 11:19 - Selling risk and who bears the most burden in dealing with security threats 15:32 - What's it like selling for emotional reasons 19:14 - How emotional decisions relate to Danny Kahneman's decision-making theories 20:29 - Why he uses the three-year horizon [but what if a client insist on using a 5-year time frame] 24:00 - Why there are only three value propositions you can derive from 26:15 - Helping people [existing and new customers] find value in your product 28:22 - How to structure your conversation that people understands and find value in your product 29:50 - Ian’s pricing advice   Key Takeaways: "Technology is around delivering value, not necessarily what's the best, but what's the best for you and understanding that." - Ian Campbell "When you talk about value, we look at value in four different categories, and there are value categories that are for instance happier employees. And that's not something I can necessarily quantify, but for a customer and for a company, that could be something very, very valuable for them and that could be their objective." - Ian Campbell "Today, more than ever, it's important to draw a link between what you sell and how you deliver bottom line benefits. Otherwise, you're going to have a tougher time beating out not just your competitors, but all of the other projects they could be doing." - Ian Campbell "If you're selling with value, realize that value is a tool to help you sell. Value is not a consulting project, don't turn it into a consulting project. Turn it into a tool that helps you close the deal." - Ian Campbell   People/Resources Mentioned: Daniel Kahneman: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Kahnemanhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Kahneman Salesforce: https://www.salesforce.com Gartner: https://www.gartner.com/enhttps://www.gartner.com/e Forrester: https://www.forrester.com/boldhttps://www.forrester.com/bold   Connect with Ian Campbell: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/iancampbellnucleusresearch/ Email: ian@nucleusresearch.com   Connect with Mark Stiving: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stiving/ Email: mark@impactpricing.com

28 Aug 202332min

This is an Impact Pricing Blog published on July 13, 2023, turned into an audio podcast so you can listen on the go. Read Full Article Here: https://impactpricing.com/blog/its-too-expensive/ 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/

25 Aug 20232min

This one is the 2 of Diamonds from the Selling Value card deck.  I'm often asked who should own pricing, and one of the departments that often comes up is finance. And of course, I'm not a huge fan of finance owning pricing. And the biggest reason is finance doesn't truly understand the value of our products. Usually that's going to be someone in product management, product marketing, or even sales, which I'm not a fan of them owning pricing either. However, finance so much wants to be involved with pricing. It's so crucial to their projections. It's so crucial to company growth, which they care a lot about. They really want to be involved with pricing, even though they don't understand value. So, how do we get them involved in pricing?  That's pretty simple. Finance has a bunch of quant people. They have access to every piece of data inside the entire company, and they have the desire to make us or help us do better in our pricing. And so, let's figure out what are the KPIs, the key performance indicators, that we really want to track inside our company. And let's ask finance to help track those, keep us on track, make sure that we don't see any anomalies. We know what the trends are.  Finance is a fantastic department to help us manage our KPIs. We hope you enjoyed this example of Pricing Table Topics. What you just heard was done without a script. If you want to get better at speaking about pricing and value, grab a deck of our cards, pick a card, read the saying, and then talk for one to two minutes about what that card says. You'll become a better speaker and expert. 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/

23 Aug 20232min

Amy L. Riley is an internationally renowned speaker, author and leadership development consultant. She’s worked with organizations such as Deloitte, Cisco Systems and Aon Hewitt and has over 20 years of experience working with leaders at all levels. In this episode, Amy shares effective ways of identifying your strengths, finding solutions to people's problems, and quantifying the results of your solutions. By doing so, you can accurately assess your ability to bring about transformation for your clients and determine your true worth.   What you will learn from this episode: Learn to know your strength and what value you bring so you know your worth Discover the benefits of receiving feedback to identify areas for improvement and areas to maintain to enhance your leadership skills Find out how to develop people skills so you become a more effective leader   "Encourage leaders to get feedback all the time." - Amy Riley   Topics Covered: 00:57 - What Amy is helping people with 02:09 - The value you bring--what's your worth? 04:22 - Best means to identify your strengths 06:49 - How does feedback benefit you as a leader and how to deal with self-delusion? 09:49 - Figure out your leadership legacy 10:52 - Fighting to be right versus fighting to be effective 11:49 - The thing with leaders admitting their mistakes 12:43 - What is a pivot and why pivot? 13:35 - The easy ways to find out where your strengths lie 14:50 - How to develop effective people skills 17:42 - Why the need to be open to feedback 20:00 - Amy sharing what her strengths and what problems she helps solve 24:22 -The potential outcome and its financial value that can be attained with Amy's expertise    Key Takeaways: “The value that we bring is inherent in our strengths." - Amy Riley "When we're looking to that leadership legacy for guidance, then we act bigger and bolder than any of our normal human considerations that might hold us back." - Amy Riley "If you do find yourself in those moments where you're fighting to be right instead of fighting to be effective, do give yourself some compassion, because we're human beings, and that's a human tendency.” - Amy Riley   People/Resources Mentioned: The Courage of a Leader®: How to Inspire, Engage and Get Extraordinary Results by Amy Riley: https://courageofaleader.com/products/   Connect with Amy Riley: Website: https://courageofaleader.com/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/amyshoopriley/   Connect with Mark Stiving: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stiving/ Email: mark@impactpricing.com

21 Aug 202327min

This one is the 2 of Clubs from the Selling Value card deck.  Salespeople are going to use every single tool they have available to them. Absolutely, they're going to use value selling if we've taught them how, and they understand, and they're doing a great job. But even if they're using value selling, it's very easy for them to offer discounts. And there's this attitude or belief that offering discounts helps close a deal faster. And maybe it does. Maybe when a customer or a buyer asks you for a discount, it takes longer to say no and explain why. And we could have just said yes and close the deal and we're done.  Wouldn't that be great if it worked that way? But here's the key. Every dollar that we discount comes straight off of our profit. We still have to cover all of our costs, and so our margin just got shrunk by more than our revenue did on a percentage basis. So, if we want our salespeople to not rely on price, we have to make it painful for salespeople to offer discounts.  How do you do that? Create a compensation plan that as they give bigger discounts, the percentage or the size of their deal goes down faster than the revenue goes down because salespeople are incentivized to close deals as fast as possible. And we want to make sure they're incentivized to close deals quickly at the highest possible price. We hope you enjoyed this example of Pricing Table Topics. What you just heard was done without a script. If you want to get better at speaking about pricing and value, grab a deck of our cards, pick a card, read the saying, and then talk for one to two minutes about what that card says. You'll become a better speaker and expert. 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 Aug 20232min

This one is the 2 of Hearts from the Selling Value card deck.  When you get an RFP, you have to decide, are you going to bid or not. Believe it or not, that's actually a decision you get to make. You do not have to respond to every RFP that comes through. And my advice, if you are not involved in the creation of the RFP, or at the very least, if you cannot have conversations with the decision makers or executives of the group who created that RFP, you have a very low chance of winning. And so, the time and energy that you spend replying to the RFP makes you feel like you're doing work, but odds are really good you're not going to win that deal. There's somebody else that has already built a relationship with the client, understands exactly what the client wants, is able to create a response to that RFP that fits them almost perfectly. They've built the rapport so the client's going to give them the benefit of the doubt no matter what.  If you're going in blind to an RFP, you're probably not going to win.  Let's test that. From here on out, every time you respond to an RFP, just keep track. Did I help write this? Do I know the leaders? Do I get conversations with the executives? And if the answers are no, and you go ahead and bid, see how many of those you actually win. And I will bet you the percentage of those is so low you realize it just isn't worth your time to bid RFPs where you're not already involved. We hope you enjoyed this example of Pricing Table Topics. What you just heard was done without a script. If you want to get better at speaking about pricing and value, grab a deck of our cards, pick a card, read the saying, and then talk for one to two minutes about what that card says. You'll become a better speaker and expert. 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/

16 Aug 20232min

Steven Forth is Ibbaka’s Co-Founder, CEO, and Partner. Ibbaka is a strategic pricing advisory firm. He was CEO of LeveragePoint Innovations Inc., a SaaS business designed to help companies create and capture value. In this episode, Steven discusses the challenges of pricing AI, primarily due to the limited availability of data. He emphasizes the importance of shortening the time required to build value models in order to easily establish pricing.   What you will learn from this episode: Discover the complaints and challenges associated with pricing AI Enhance transparency in establishing the price point with creating value models Find out the most recent advancements in AI pricing concerning language models and software, which greatly enhance productivity   "Once you have a good value model, coming up with pricing is maybe not trivial but it's certainly much easier."  - Steven Forth   Topics Covered: 01:15 - Discussing complaints about AI through the Value Models 07:57 - Steven's added thoughts to Mark's suggested solution to achieve pricing transparency [limitations in creating value models] 11:43 - The need for more trainings for language models used in pricing 14:25 - What is Copilot by Microsoft and what it is capable of doing that can help salespeople 17:04 - How is Copilot might disrupt the market especially Google Workspace user 17:50 - Survey of people's willingness to pay $30 a user for Copilot [and whose group is more willing to pay more] 22:20 - How were the users segmented, are they all Copilot users, and finding out people's reaction to AI 23:37 - The amazing capabilities of these two AIs 24:57 - What could happen if Mark Stiving will use AI to write his fourth book [The need for great prompt engineering] 28:12 - How are AIs going to be priced 29:59 - Microsoft Copilot as a 'Will I' question   Key Takeaways: "If you can build a value model and validate a value model, then you can fairly easily, I believe, derive pricing from the value model." - Steven Forth "We should be able to customize a language model based on our training and integrate mathematical AI from a place such as Wolfram/Alpha to greatly scale up our ability to build value models so that we could legitimately do a thousand a year or so." - Steven Forth   Resources/People Mentioned: Craig Zawada: https://impactpricing.com/podcast/ep95-defining-no-touch-and-self-serve-pricing-with-craig-zawada/ PROS: https://pros.com/ Vendavo: https://www.vendavo.com/ Zilliant: https://www.zilliant.com/ McKinsey: https://www.mckinsey.com/ Wolfram/Alpha: https://www.wolframalpha.com/ iGenius: https://www.igenius.ai/ Hugging Face: https://huggingface.co/ OpenAI: https://openai.com/ Figma: https://www.figma.com/ Notion: https://www.notion.so/product   Connect with Steven Forth: Email: steven@ibbaka.com   LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stevenforth/   Connect with Mark Stiving: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stiving/ Email: mark@impactpricing.com

14 Aug 202332min