Brand Value for Big Sales: Insights from Satish Dharmarajan

I like to run the following thought experiment. Imagine that I'm auctioning off a coffee mug. Auction it off in a classroom, or a keynote room, and maybe I can get people to bid say $15 for my coffee mug. And then when I hand the coffee mug over, I intentionally pull out a $50 bill and show them, hey, this $50 bill was in the coffee mug. Well, why didn't I get paid for that? Because the buyers didn't know that it was there. Their perception was, it was a coffee mug. Now imagine I reach back and I grab a second coffee mug and I auction that one off. Now I might get $40. But what if there is an no $50 bill in this coffee mug? The real point, is that what our buyers believe has everything to do with their willingness to pay. It actually has nothing to do with what's true. Hopefully as marketers, as business people, we try to help clients believe the truth. But if we've built products that are better than our competitors, if we have $50 bills tucked into our coffee mugs and our buyers don't know it, we can't win the deals. We don't get paid for it. 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/

27 Jul 20222min

Sagar Thakur is the Business Planning & Pricing Strategy guy at Outreach. He worked in SaaS Monetization Strategy at VMware, and he plays way too many instruments. In this episode, Sagar talks about the challenges and opportunities of a pricing role as he explains why costs don’t drive pricing.   Why you have to check out today’s podcast: Discover the challenges and opportunities of being a pricing person, and why it’s challenging but beneficial to have pricing departments as internal consultants Find out what the three-step process is on how to tie value creation and value capture process together Understand why prices aren’t based on costs but on value/the customers’ willingness to pay   “Don't start with pricing. Start with assessing value, quantifying it, understanding it, getting your handle on what value is with a specific feature or product, how it scales, how customers perceive it, where they start, where they end.” – Sagar Thakur   Topics Covered: 01:07 – How Sagar got into pricing 02:28 – The SaaS monetization strategy work he did in VMware 03:48 – The tradeoff: Organizing product portfolio and applying different price metrics 06:42 – What Sagar thinks are the challenges and opportunities of a pricing job 13:11 – How do we build a pricing culture inside an organization? Is it really a pricing culture or is it a culture of value? 16:00 – Pricing departments as internal consultants 17:59 – Having the perception that price is based on costs 21:09 – Sagar’s pricing advice 21:57 – Pricing table topics game: “Costs don't drive pricing. Willingness to pay drives pricing.”   Key Takeaways: “In general, simplicity is better until you can make sense, but then if the tradeoffs become too steep, now you need to add the complexity as a color from that perspective.” – Sagar Thakur “The ability to narrate a story or why is it that we're doing what we're doing and being able to support that, it's completely sort of a social / creative / engagement kind of job versus what most people think as an engineering sort of like analyze and say this is the perfect price. Dirty little secret in pricing is that there is no mathematically correct answer. It's a range of solutions which is possible.” – Sagar Thakur “It sort of starts from education, moves to empowering. You can come up with everything on your own. It has to be a collaborative process. And then it's the energized piece, which is like show the organization that this is helping so that we can further attach our pricing perspective to the growth plans of the company and how that helps.” – Sagar Thakur “I think rightfully so that pricing is a central piece to the puzzle of any company's sort of growth strategy, like how they do business and what not.” – Sagar Thakur   People / Resources Mentioned: Outreach: https://www.outreach.io/ VMware: https://www.vmware.com/ Dharmesh Shah: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dharmesh/ Selling Value: https://www.amazon.com/Selling-Value-Deals-Higher-Prices/dp/1737655217   Connect with Sagar Thakur: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sagar-thakur/   Connect with Mark Stiving:  LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stiving/ Email: mark@impactpricing.com

25 Jul 202224min

This is an Impact Pricing Blog published on June 15, 2022, turned into an audio podcast so you can listen on the go. Read Full Article Here: https://impactpricing.com/blog/buyers-value-journey-map/ 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/

22 Jul 20222min

We all want our salespeople to sell more value. What does that actually mean though? If we think about it, our customers, whether they be consumers or businesses, they buy value. They exchange money for the value they perceive that they're going to get from our product, however they want to measure that value. Our job as a salesperson needs to be to make sure our customers, our buyers, understand how much value our product might be able to give them because the more value they perceive the more we can charge, the more likely we are to win the deal. Our job as a salesperson selling value then is to increase how much value our customers perceive from our products. 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/

20 Jul 20221min

Christine Carragee has been working as Carragee Consulting’s Business Consultant for more than six years now. She's done two different stints at the Vendavo – first as their Senior Pricing Consultant then as a Principal Consultant – so she certainly understands pricing. Christine was a Senior Pricing Analyst at Capella University. She lived on three continents before she was four years old. In this episode, Christine explains why it’s a must that you consider the segmentation of individuals when doing pricing in higher ed as she shares her pricing journey with Capella University.   Why you have to check out today’s podcast: Find out how Capella University sets their price to students; Discover how financial aids such as scholarships and loans help you create good quality for the university; and Understand why it’s a must that think about the segmentation of individuals when doing pricing in higher ed   “A huge portion of higher ed pricing is through the grants and scholarships and loans. And so, what you're initially paying at the time that you're doing your coursework is very different from what the total cost of a program is for you.” – Christine Carragee   Topics Covered: 01:47 – How Christine got into pricing 03:02 – Learning about airlines from her roommate and the book Hard Landing 05:01 – Trying to put economic value to a university; Segmentation of individuals in higher ed pricing 08:48 – Capella University’s two tuition structures; Grants, scholarships, and loans in higher ed pricing 12:54 – What Mark loves about the way they do pricing in higher ed 14:48 – Looking at how competitors do pricing + accepting high achievers and issuing financial aid 17:04 – Christine’s pricing advice for the listeners 18:15 – Table topics: “Pricing champions drive pricing change”   Key Takeaways: “There's a huge portion of pricing in higher ed that you have to think about the segmentation of the individuals, where they are in their life and then what their personal and professional goals are. There's a big pressure on colleges and universities to provide educations that have a financial ROI. But if you think about the history of university, especially in the U.S., many, many of the universities started as seminary schools or they started as state institutions with land grants, and they were more about having an educated population for a general purpose, involvement in society, and they were not the career track programs that we think of them as today.” – Christine Carragee “You can admit people who couldn't afford to come but have very high grades and have those personal statistics that make your institution look better on average by issuing financial aid.” – Christine Carragee “That's a self-reinforcing cycle, where once you become established or you have a reputation around having very good quality students, then it's going to attract more people who want to go to school with high achievers.” – Christine Carragee   People / Resources Mentioned: Vendavo:https://www.vendavo.com/ Hard Landing book:https://www.amazon.com/Hard-Landing-Contest-Profits-Airlines/dp/0812928350   Connect with Christine Carragee: LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/christine-carragee-83642b226/   Connect with Mark Stiving: LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/stiving/ Email: mark@impactpricing.com

18 Jul 202221min

This is an Impact Pricing Blog published on June 8, 2022, turned into an audio podcast so you can listen on the go. Read Full Article Here: https://impactpricing.com/blog/to-fee-or-not-to-fee/ 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/

15 Jul 20223min

Last week, we talked about economic value and how businesses are able to calculate how much money are they going to make or save based on buying and using your product or solution. Sadly, consumers can't do that in almost all situations. I love this one blue shirt I get from Brooks Brothers but there's no way to calculate how much money that shirt makes me or saves me. Instead, it's a feeling I get. It's the fact that I've gotten compliments when I've worn that shirt. So, I have a willingness to pay for that shirt over other shirts. I value it more than I value other shirts. The only way I can think of to measure the amount of value is based on my willingness to pay. And this is true with our clients as well. When we start thinking about how much does a customer or a consumer value our products, we probably need to be thinking in terms of willingness to pay. 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/

13 Jul 20221min

Dale Harrison has been consulting in life sciences for seven years now, but he's been an executive in biotech for 16 years. Dale started his career as a physicist. In this episode, Dale shares how he’s able to not make biotech products a commodity as he tells us the stories on how he gets inside the minds of both their customers and competitors.   Why you have to check out today’s podcast: Understand the importance of stepping outside the product and the company when it comes to making a product stand out in the market; Discover why it’s a must that you get inside the head of both your buyers and competitors, especially with seeing where your competitors are blind in their framework; Find out how to get inside the mindset of your buyers and competitors through stories of tricks that worked   “Pricing has little to do with analysis. Analysis is a supporting role, but only supporting. The real issue with pricing is getting inside the head of the customer, and equally importantly, inside the head of your competitor.” – Dale Harrison   Topics Covered: 01:02 – Dale’s work around commercial development and its relation to pricing 01:45 – Why Mark despises the word commodity + selling products in the synthetic DNA business back in the 2000s 04:28 – Not making the products a commodity by trying to get into the mindset of the buyer 09:25 – More about the story; The “Got Probes” T-shirt 13:01 – Merging the company with a larger partner and becoming the VP of Sales and Marketing 14:10 – Telling the story about getting inside the heads of the competitors 17:08 – Were they able to charge a higher price because of the red cap? 21:14 – The challenge of keeping customers continuing to reorder and focus on you and not be looking elsewhere 24:05 – Dale’s pricing advice for the listeners   Key Takeaways: “Commodity is a mindset. It's not about the product. It's about a failure of imagination around the product. But there are products that are much more commoditized than others.” – Dale Harrison “Again, these are very boring products, so if you talk about the product, no one's going to be interested because everyone already knows it. Nothing's changed and there's literally nothing to talk about. So, you have to talk about something different than the product and then tie it back to the product.” – Dale Harrison “The deal is whatever market you're in, every competitor imagines that they have some highly rational pricing process, and the fact is they don't. What they have is a framework – a mental framework – and their framework is their blindness. And if you can understand what their framework is, you understand where they’re blind. When you know where they're blind, you know how to work around them without them even seeing you.” – Dale Harrison   Connect with Dale Harrison: LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/dalewharrison/ Email: w.harrison@gmail.com   Connect with Mark Stiving: LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/stiving/ Email: mark@impactpricing.com

11 Jul 202228min