Impact Pricing

This one is the 6 of Hearts from the Selling Value card deck.

I work with clients frequently about creating these value tables. And what we essentially do is we identify, what are the best features in the product? What problem does that feature solve for the client? What's a quantifiable result that client may expect? And then, what's the amount of profit that client may be able to get when they achieve that result?

In a way, you could think of this as an ROI calculator. But the problem is, you can't go in with an ROI calculator and tell a buyer, 'Hey, you're going to go make this much money if you buy my product.' They don't believe you.

In fact, if you use the document and everything that we put on there, it's probably not accurate for every single customer. In fact, it's probably not accurate for any customer.

So, our recommendation is always, when you've created the value table, think of it as a thought process, this is where the value could be. And now we go talk to a buyer. And we understand, do you have this problem? 'Oh, yeah.' What kind of result do you think you might expect? 'Oh, let's see if we can figure out the profit to your company if you achieve that result.'

We use this as a map, as a document to help us understand where we're going, but we don't use the document to say these are the facts for any given client. So, we want to use the information, not the details of the document.

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, 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, [email protected].

Now, go make an impact.

Connect with Mark Stiving:

• Email: [email protected]
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stiving/

As the founder and CEO, Joe Woodard empowers small business advisors to transform small businesses. He works toward this vision as the host of the annual Scaling New Heights conference, the host of Woodard Alliance, the head of Woodard Institute and various speaking and writing engagements he performs throughout the accounting and bookkeeping professions.

In this episode, Joe discusses how to design a subscription pricing model that prioritizes building strong relationships with clients, empowering them, and generating a long-term impact on their businesses. This approach also helps increase the lifetime value of clients.

Why you have to check out today's podcast:

• Get an in-depth discussion on pricing result versus pricing transaction
• Understand how charging relationships works in a subscription pricing model
• Uncover how to price human connections that go beyond financial reasons

"Be bold with pricing. You are worth more than you think you are, and definitely more than your clients think you are." - Joe Woodard

Topics Covered:

01:29 - Talks about getting differentiated from the rest with his degree in classical Greek

03:37 - How his career path ended in Pricing

04:25 - What is so significant about the subscription business model?

06:16 - How do you price a relationship?

10:08 - Going in-depth into pricing for a relationship

13:40 - Measuring the service-provider-client relationship

15:12 - Going beyond financial outcomes when measuring the economics of relationship

16:25 - Discussions around Mark's objections: 'I don't see how you price for it [relationship]

17:02 - Pricing human connection that transcends economics

20:57 - The danger about price segmentation in relation to pricing relationship

22:03 - Pricing segmentation's end-goal in a subscription model

23:38 - Healthy subscription versus toxic subscription

25:48 - Driving customer lifetime value plus creating experiences for engagement

27:43 - Joe's pricing advice

29:19 - Connect with Joe

Key Takeaways:

"We're intensely focused on the customer's outcome, and our outcomes become a means to that outcome. And therefore, we are pricing the relationship we have with the client because it's about the outcomes we're driving in that relationship." - Joe Woodard

"I am delivering, within the context of a relationship, value. And part of that is, I'm giving you attention at the individual level. Not a newsletter, not cookie cutter answers. There's something where you're individually being touched." - Joe Woodard

"Relationship economics is about the business outcomes or the business benefits that are gained by being in a relationship." - Joe Woodard

"The intensity of the relationships increases based on the value that you've added in the amount of attention that you're able to give." - Joe Woodard

People / Resources Mentioned:

• Ron Baker: https://impactpricing.com/podcast/ep44-ronald-j-baker-trash-the-timesheet-exploring-opportunities-in-subscription-businesses/

Connect with Joe Woodard:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/quickbooksadvisor/
• Website: https://www.woodard.com/

Connect with Mark Stiving:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stiving/
• Email: mailto:[email protected]

This is an Impact Pricing Blog published on March 16, 2023, turned into an audio podcast so you can listen on the go.

Read Full Article Here: https://impactpricing.com/blog/interesting-starlink-price-changes/

If you have any feedback, definitely send it. You can reach us at [email protected].

Now, go make an impact.

Connect with Mark Stiving:

• Email: [email protected]
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stiving/

This one is the 6 of Spades from the Selling Value card deck.

Make it simple for buyers to decide. One of my favorite sayings is, "A confused buyer won't buy."

If you think about it, we're all afraid to make mistakes. We don't want to make mistakes. And the more difficult we make the decision, the more likely somebody thinks, a buyer thinks, they might make a mistake. We want to make the decision really simple, really clear, really obvious, so that our buyers don't think they're making a mistake.

There are two techniques that are really common in simplifying this decision process. One is Good-Better-Best. If you have a complex price list, a complex set of options, buyers get confused. They really don't want to make that decision. They don't want to make a mistake. But if you can simplify the decision into a good-better-best offering, it's so much easier for buyers to make that decision, and they're so much more likely to make it.

Another place we often see the simple decision for buyers is called The Decoy Effect. This is a psychological aspect in pricing. But a decoy effect is essentially good-better-best, but it's where you make the better price and the best price really, really close to each other.

And so, buyers look at that and it's easy to make a decision between best and better because it's a slight, or maybe even no price increase, and they get a lot more. And so, yeah, I can choose best over better. And once they know they can make an easy decision, they feel like they're not going to make a mistake.

So the rule here, make it simple for buyers to decide.

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, [email protected].

Now, go make an impact.

Connect with Mark Stiving:

• Email: [email protected]
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stiving/

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. Steven is what I consider one of the great pricing thinkers in our industry.

In this episode, Steven enlightens us about hybrid pricing models and explains why we should adopt it. He also shares why pricing people need to change the way they see AI along with the work they do in pricing.

Why you have to check out today's podcast:

• Understand one of the unstated rules of pricing that talks about pricing power along with insights into future risk
• Find out how artificial intelligence (AI) can help address concerns regarding the connection between pricing and predictability, and why pricing people should change how they see AI in line with pricing
• Discover the reason on why most of us need to adopt hybrid pricing models and why the two pricing metrics in that should be independent of each other

"Most of us need to adopt hybrid pricing models, and the two pricing metrics should be independent of each other. If the two pricing metrics track each other closely, why bother having a hybrid pricing model? You need two metrics that are relatively independent of each other, and that will give you the flexibility you need to respond in a difficult economic environment."

– Steven Forth

Topics Covered:

00:42 – Steven's insights on what a hybrid pricing model looks like

02:30 – Issues on pricing model that applies credits/tokens to usage

04:44 – Predictability; whoever has the best insight into future risk has the greatest pricing power

09:37 – Pricing people vs. the recent trend: AI and how it sets prices

12:02 – The Achilles heel of value-based pricing, and the hybrid pricing practice in companies

18:09 – What real value-based pricing is about

20:52 – An optimal pricing model if you want to combine two metrics

24:31 – Confused buyers don't buy and renew

27:18 – Three reasons why calculators don't expose their logic

28:42 – Steven's pricing advice

29:42 – Connect with Steven

Key Takeaways:

"If you have enough data, you can actually get pretty good at predicting future usage." – Steven Forth

"One of the unstated rules of pricing is that whoever has the best insight into future risk has the greatest pricing power. The better we get at prediction, the more accurate we can get at pricing, and the question then becomes, who has the data to make those predictions? And I think in many cases, it's actually the vendor who has better access to data." – Steven Forth

"This whole question of predictability and pricing is going to be a key question for pricing over the next three to five years, and the artificial intelligences are going to help us to answer that question much better than we've ever been able to answer it before." – Steven Forth

"If you're optimizing value for the customer, you're optimizing the amount that they're willing to pay you, so if you just do it to optimize revenue, you'll end up shooting yourself in the foot because you'll trigger that negative feedback loop." – Steven Forth

Connect with Steven Forth:

• Email: [email protected]
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stevenforth/

Connect with Mark Stiving:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stiving/
• Email: [email protected]

This is an Impact Pricing Blog published on March 8, 2023, turned into an audio podcast so you can listen on the go.

Read Full Article Here: https://impactpricing.com/blog/pricing-professionals-have-trained-incapacity/

If you have any feedback, definitely send it. You can reach us at [email protected].

Now, go make an impact.

Connect with Mark Stiving:

• Email: [email protected]
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stiving/

This one is the 7 of Diamonds from the Selling Value card deck.

So, when you talk to your buyers about value, they do shift the way they think from spending on an expense toward investing. Because typically when you or anyone is shopping for something, we're thinking, how much do I have to pay and what are the features that I'm going to get? And we stop thinking about the value of what it is that we're buying.

And if we have the opportunity to help our buyers understand, hey, when you go solve this problem, what's the value of solving that problem? So maybe, yeah, you're going to pay me a lot of money, but think about all the money you're going to make in additional profit because of the fact that you bought an implemented and used my product.

And if we can get them focused on the value, they become a little bit less price sensitive and they trust us and like us even more. So, my recommendation is, talk about value way more than we talk about features and 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, 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, [email protected].

Now, go make an impact.

Connect with Mark Stiving:

• Email: [email protected]
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stiving/

Dick Sobel was with Emerson for 21 years where he mostly worked on pricing roles. Currently, he is the managing director of PricePoint Partners, a company that helps clients achieve significant gains in price realization and profitability with salesforce implementation utilizing cloud-based Acuity Margin Management BI software.

In this episode, Dick talks about the work they do at PricePoint Partners as he points out the importance of assessment and consulting in coming up with optimal solutions to clients' problems. He also touched on the topic of AI interference in the pricing world.

Why you have to check out today's podcast:

• Learn the work that PricePoint Partners does, the range of clients they serve, and how they could help your company in pricing
• Find out why you can't rely on AI alone in doing prices and why AI can do better in B2C than in B2B
• Find out why today is the best time to raise your prices

"Inflation's persistence is here to stay for a long time. And if you're not doing something right now, you are really missing out."

– Dick Sobel

Topics Covered:

01:49 – How Dick got into pricing

04:40 – How Emerson did pricing before, and how they moved to value pricing as time went by

06:50 – The work that PricePoint Partners does, and the range of clients that they support

08:21 – Is PricePoint Partners a software company, or a consulting company?

10:23 – What prompts companies to focus on pricing

13:19 – Does PricePoint Partners charge for assessment?

14:58 – Why assessment is an essential part in consulting, and why you should definitely pay for it

17:25 – Why you should be careful in using AI, and why pricing people and clients are still more comfortable

22:02 – Dick's pricing advice

23:32 – Connect with Dick Sobel

Key Takeaways:

"Somebody has to be in charge somewhere that can at least gather the crew together and make it [changes in pricing strategy] happen." – Dick Sobel

"At least for the people that I deal with, I don't feel comfortable having or I don't think they're even comfortable in having black box artificial intelligent price recommendations where "Okay, here's the price you should charge for this product, for this SKU". And it's given to the salespeople arbitrarily. There's got to be this human interface still. And so, yeah, you can look at it, but be careful." – Dick Sobel

"This idea of "Well, you know, we're just going to try to hold the line", you keep doing that, you won't have a business." – Dick Sobel

People / Resources Mentioned:

• Emerson: https://www.emerson.com/en-us/global
• PricePoint Partners: https://pricepointpartners.com/
• Resilience Capital: https://resiliencecapital.com/
• Salesforce: https://www.salesforce.com/ap/
• Vendavo: https://www.vendavo.com/

Connect with Dick Sobel:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/richardsobel/
• Email: [email protected]

Connect with Mark Stiving:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stiving/
• Email: [email protected]

This is an Impact Pricing Blog published on March 1, 2023, turned into an audio podcast so you can listen on the go.

Read Full Article Here: https://impactpricing.com/blog/wow-a-price-decrease/

[powerpress]

If you have any feedback, definitely send it. You can reach us at [email protected].

Now, go make an impact.

Connect with Mark Stiving:

• Email: [email protected]
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stiving/

This one is the 7 of Clubs from the Selling Value card deck.

Anytime you're in a sales situation, we think to ourselves, Hey, we need to be selling against our competition. We need to point out why we're better than our competitors.

Yeah, and maybe we do. I'm not going to say we don't need to do that.

However, if we take the time to help the buyer understand, what's the underlying problem they're truly trying to solve? What's the value of solving that problem? And how it is that we help them solve that problem? It builds trust. They start to know that we understand their situation, we understand their problem. They believe that we'll be better at solving it simply because we've expressed the fact that we understood it.

Oh, and when we help them build the business case, they are grateful because they need this information to help sell up inside their organization anyway. Because no one's going to buy something unless they know that it's going to help them make more money. And so, we need to help our buyers create that business case.

So, it really is imperative that even if you know you're going to have competition, take the time to help your buyers understand the value of solving the problem. Not just focusing on why we're better.

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, [email protected].

Now, go make an impact.

Connect with Mark Stiving:

• Email: [email protected]
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stiving/