Impact Pricing

Why you have to check out Today’s podcast: 

• Check out what market segmentation is 
• Know the strategies used to get information from customers without the survey questions feel 

• Learn why it is essential to communicate and know the problems of persons inside your client’s company and help them improve their jobs 

Valentin Radu is the founder and CEO of OmniConvert, a growth enabler for mid-size eCommerce websites looking to become customer-centric.  It is being used by top companies worldwide, like Avon, Orange, WWF, Wordstream, Whirlpool, etc. Valentin has spoken to over 100 International events over the last six years, including DMEXCO, Mobile Web Congress, SMXL, etc.   

In this episode, Valentin talks about how his company, OmniConvert, uses technology that allows its customers to choose different market segments.  Through these segments, customers get personalized experiences on all touchpoints Learn more of this in this episode and discover how valuable it is for their customers to get that buying experience. 

“I think you should take a look at your churns. So, if you are in the software as a service industry, take a look at your churn. Because once you understand how your churn works for various segments of customers, you might want to change your pricing from being a month to month to annual.” 

 – Valentin Radu 

Topics Covered: 

01:32 – Valentin describes what his company OmniConvert does 

02:35 – How OmniConvert does market segmentation and its relevance to the buyer’s experience 

04:45 – How he orchestrates different messages to different segments 

07:33 – Detailing how they educate their customers on what they offer 

10:24 – How knowing their target customers and the services they offer relates to pricing 

12:27 – Tactics used to determine the segments when customers go to their client’s website 

16:19 – Valentin tells other sales strategies to ask questions to customers that don’t look like survey questions 

19:21 – The importance of communicating to people inside the customer’s company on their problems and how to help them do their jobs better 

21:05 – Valentin answers the question if they teach pricing to their customers  

22:10 – Narrating an example when he helped their customer put the right wording around their product that improved their conversion rate by 18% 

27:17 – A price of pricing advice that would impact the business of the listeners 

Key Takeaways: 

“I feel it's highly important that unless you don't know who you need to target, you don't need to spend any penny in an acquisition.” – Valentin Radu 

“The first thing and the most important thing is that if you don't know the value that you're giving, and if you don't know who's your target, and if you don't know if you are selling a painkiller or a vitamin, you don't have to mess with the pricing” – Valentin Radu 

“This job of optimizing and crafting different website experiences, it's a job of crafting psychological experiences so that people are behaving differently. And that's why you always need to adjust your strategy.” – Valentin Radu 

“Things like a buyer's guide for customer experience software is pretty important. And that's why you need to do this kind of material so that you are revealing the value of your product for people, which are different and will look product from different angles.” – Valentin Radu 

Connect with Valentin Radu: 

• mailto:[email protected] 
• LinkedIn 

Connect with Mark Stiving 

• Email: [email protected] 
• LinkedIn 
• Twitter 

Why you have to check out today’s podcast: 

• How to come up with good pricing for cloud-based products 
• The goal of waterfall analysis and why companies should do it 
• Why you should not be afraid to raise prices 

Samuel Saavedra is a pricing professional and commercial deal architect with strong supplementary skills in contract negotiations, contract management, program management, bid management, and proposal response. His strongest industries are Fintech – Financial Services, Telecom – Data Centers and Cloud Services. 

In this episode, Samuel talks about how he uses his data center cost models to create the infrastructure cost behind payment offerings, and how he leverages his pricing expertise to develop waterfall analyses across the service portfolio to address revenue leakage and declining margin points, and how data analytics tools help him in adding insights into transactional data. 

“Don’t be afraid to raise your price.”  

– Samuel Saavedra 

Topics Covered: 

01:33 – What got Samuel into Pricing 

03:06 – Why cost-plus pricing is not enticing 

03:50 – Samuel explains how to calculate a software development cost 

04:54 – How to partner with companies and gain a percentage of profit through the years you partner with them 

06:20 – Challenges on monitoring the actual profit a customer gains for partnering with a software vendor  

07:47 – Product Pricing: basis and factors 

09:02 – Describing the build-run-cost model  of a data center 

13:07 – What is cloud-based pricing all about 

14:30 – What makes waterfall analysis fascinating and why not many companies are doing it 

16:33 – How to go about the  waterfall analysis  

17:53 – What things to take into consideration when you use data analytics 

20:46 – His best pricing advice: “Don’t be afraid to raise your price.”  

20:53 – Why you should not be afraid to raise prices 

Key Takeaways: 

“When it comes to enterprise banking software, the way it’s typically priced is there is an annual license for the software. Then, there’s going to be a base price, like say, it gives you so many millions of payments or wire transfers and so on. And then there’s going to be tiered pricing.” – Samuel Saavedra 

“Cloud-based pricing is all about elasticity, scalability, capacity, et cetera. So you figure out what that is based on your assumptions of the customer’s uptake, number of transactions, number of customers growth over time. So you model that. Then they, in turn, come up with their numbers of uptake and growth over time. Once you’ve got the nitty-gritty out of the way, then there’s the actual pricing, which is as you know, what is their perception of the value you bring.” – Samuel Saavedra 

Connect With Samuel Saavedra   

• Email: [email protected] 
• LinkedIn     

Connect with Mark Stiving    

• Email: [email protected]    
• LinkedIn    
• Twitter  

Why you have to check out today’s podcast: 

• How to come up with good pricing for cloud-based products 
• The goal of waterfall analysis and why companies should do it 
• Why you should not be afraid to raise prices 

Samuel Saavedra is a pricing professional and commercial deal architect with strong supplementary skills in contract negotiations, contract management, program management, bid management, and proposal response. His strongest industries are Fintech – Financial Services, Telecom – Data Centers and Cloud Services. 

In this episode, Samuel talks about how he uses his data center cost models to create the infrastructure cost behind payment offerings, and how he leverages his pricing expertise to develop waterfall analyses across the service portfolio to address revenue leakage and declining margin points, and how data analytics tools help him in adding insights into transactional data. 

“Don’t be afraid to raise your price.”  

– Samuel Saavedra 

Topics Covered: 

01:33 – What got Samuel into Pricing 

03:06 – Why cost-plus pricing is not enticing 

03:50 – Samuel explains how to calculate a software development cost 

04:54 – How to partner with companies and gain a percentage of profit through the years you partner with them 

06:20 – Challenges on monitoring the actual profit a customer gains for partnering with a software vendor  

07:47 – Product Pricing: basis and factors 

09:02 – Describing the build-run-cost model  of a data center 

13:07 – What is cloud-based pricing all about 

14:30 – What makes waterfall analysis fascinating and why not many companies are doing it 

16:33 – How to go about the  waterfall analysis  

17:53 – What things to take into consideration when you use data analytics 

20:46 – His best pricing advice: “Don’t be afraid to raise your price.”  

20:53 – Why you should not be afraid to raise prices 

Key Takeaways: 

“When it comes to enterprise banking software, the way it’s typically priced is there is an annual license for the software. Then, there’s going to be a base price, like say, it gives you so many millions of payments or wire transfers and so on. And then there’s going to be tiered pricing.” – Samuel Saavedra 

“Cloud-based pricing is all about elasticity, scalability, capacity, et cetera. So you figure out what that is based on your assumptions of the customer’s uptake, number of transactions, number of customers growth over time. So you model that. Then they, in turn, come up with their numbers of uptake and growth over time. Once you’ve got the nitty-gritty out of the way, then there’s the actual pricing, which is as you know, what is their perception of the value you bring.” – Samuel Saavedra 

Connect With Samuel Saavedra   

• Email: [email protected] 
• LinkedIn     

Connect with Mark Stiving    

• Email: [email protected]    
• LinkedIn    
• Twitter  

Why you have to check out today’s podcast:

• Learn the two mistakes Bill encountered in his journey in pricing and avoid making them 
• Know how the sales enablement tool works during the late-stage deals 
• Discover how SaaS salespeople were compensated 

Bill Wilson is the co-founder and CEO of SalesRight. Over his two decades of working in the Canadian software industry, he has closed millions of dollars in deals — all driven by his dedication to enhancing Canada’s software industry. Bill’s thoughtful and team-centric approach to leadership builds environments that promote innovative thinking and passionate problem-solving.  Previous to SalesRight, Bill was the CEO of app-agency MindSea, which has developed some of the top rating apps in North America, often featured by Apple. 

How does an expert in developing apps found his way to be an industry thought leader in pricing?  And how he effectively channeled his knowledge in complex SaaS pricing to offering intelligent and interactive pricing solutions?  Bill Wilson will answer all these questions in today’s episode. Tune in and learn more about the SaaS pricing structure and metrics, how sales enablement tool works, and his concept on sales compensation plans. 

“You’ve got to be confident that what you’re doing is worth the money.”

 – Bill Wilson

Topics Covered: 

01:32 – Bill narrates how he shifted from creating apps to become an expert in pricing 

03:33 – Two things that he considers his biggest mistakes in pricing 

05:37 – What he found out with value-based pricing 

06:19 – Bill explains what the late-stage deals in SaaS are all about 

08:50 – Bill tells about the sales enablement tool they used for late-stage deals 

12:26 – How to structure pricing 

15:39 – How to present complex pricing models 

16:29 – Talking about the metrics they use to understand how customers buy 

19:38 – Insights on the sales compensation plans for SaaS 

21:50 – Bill details what an average contract value (ACV) means 

24:37 – A price of pricing advice that would impact the business of the listeners 

Key Takeaways: 

“We started selling things more in a packaged way. And that was sort of my real introduction into the pricing space because I realize now that it’s basically the core of pretty much everything. One of the surefire ways you want to increase your revenue is to raise your prices, like all of the pricing and context around that. So that’s how I got into it. It was sort of a requirement as I grew the business.” – Bill Wilson 

“During discovery and during qualification, we get as much information as we can, and we should know what’s important to our prospects. But there’s nothing like them telling you by actually interacting with the pricing, and they’re looking at some scenarios that you didn’t think of. And that’s the kind of metrics I’m talking about, understanding how they buy.” – Bill Wilson 

“If someone sells a deal, don’t dribble in their commission every month.  As you get paid, pay them the commission upfront. They’ve got to eat, and they’ve got to see the upside. And if there’s a deal that is sliding sideways and they churn out in six months, will you just clot back off a future deal? Like you don’t.  It requires a bit of accounting magic, but you can make it work. And I think it gives the upside and the right place for the salesperson incentivizes them correctly, and also incentivizes them not to bring in people who are going to churn out good clients that see the value.” – Bill Wilson 

“I think the biggest thing for me is choice and being able to give people a few options that make sense for them and allow them to participate in that pricing conversation and surface it as early as you can.” – Bill Wilson 

Connect with Bill Wilson: 

• mailto:[email protected] 
• LinkedIn 

Connect with Mark Stiving 

• Email: [email protected] 
• LinkedIn 
• Twitter 

Why you have to check out today’s podcast:

• Learn the two mistakes Bill encountered in his journey in pricing and avoid making them 
• Know how the sales enablement tool works during the late-stage deals 
• Discover how SaaS salespeople were compensated 

Bill Wilson is the co-founder and CEO of SalesRight. Over his two decades of working in the Canadian software industry, he has closed millions of dollars in deals — all driven by his dedication to enhancing Canada’s software industry. Bill’s thoughtful and team-centric approach to leadership builds environments that promote innovative thinking and passionate problem-solving.  Previous to SalesRight, Bill was the CEO of app-agency MindSea, which has developed some of the top rating apps in North America, often featured by Apple. 

How does an expert in developing apps found his way to be an industry thought leader in pricing?  And how he effectively channeled his knowledge in complex SaaS pricing to offering intelligent and interactive pricing solutions?  Bill Wilson will answer all these questions in today’s episode. Tune in and learn more about the SaaS pricing structure and metrics, how sales enablement tool works, and his concept on sales compensation plans. 

“You’ve got to be confident that what you’re doing is worth the money.”

 – Bill Wilson

Topics Covered: 

01:32 – Bill narrates how he shifted from creating apps to become an expert in pricing 

03:33 – Two things that he considers his biggest mistakes in pricing 

05:37 – What he found out with value-based pricing 

06:19 – Bill explains what the late-stage deals in SaaS are all about 

08:50 – Bill tells about the sales enablement tool they used for late-stage deals 

12:26 – How to structure pricing 

15:39 – How to present complex pricing models 

16:29 – Talking about the metrics they use to understand how customers buy 

19:38 – Insights on the sales compensation plans for SaaS 

21:50 – Bill details what an average contract value (ACV) means 

24:37 – A price of pricing advice that would impact the business of the listeners 

Key Takeaways: 

“We started selling things more in a packaged way. And that was sort of my real introduction into the pricing space because I realize now that it’s basically the core of pretty much everything. One of the surefire ways you want to increase your revenue is to raise your prices, like all of the pricing and context around that. So that’s how I got into it. It was sort of a requirement as I grew the business.” – Bill Wilson 

“During discovery and during qualification, we get as much information as we can, and we should know what’s important to our prospects. But there’s nothing like them telling you by actually interacting with the pricing, and they’re looking at some scenarios that you didn’t think of. And that’s the kind of metrics I’m talking about, understanding how they buy.” – Bill Wilson 

“If someone sells a deal, don’t dribble in their commission every month.  As you get paid, pay them the commission upfront. They’ve got to eat, and they’ve got to see the upside. And if there’s a deal that is sliding sideways and they churn out in six months, will you just clot back off a future deal? Like you don’t.  It requires a bit of accounting magic, but you can make it work. And I think it gives the upside and the right place for the salesperson incentivizes them correctly, and also incentivizes them not to bring in people who are going to churn out good clients that see the value.” – Bill Wilson 

“I think the biggest thing for me is choice and being able to give people a few options that make sense for them and allow them to participate in that pricing conversation and surface it as early as you can.” – Bill Wilson 

Connect with Bill Wilson: 

• mailto:[email protected] 
• LinkedIn 

Connect with Mark Stiving 

• Email: [email protected] 
• LinkedIn 
• Twitter 

Why you have to check out today’s podcast:

• Learn how to achieve better outcomes for your customers and products through a customer-first approach
• Understand how you can harness data to produce insights you can use to reduce customer churn and increase satisfaction and upselling opportunities
• Discover why Customer Success is the new growth plan for your company to grow faster

Jay Nathan is a B2B SaaS executive with a deep focus on revenue growth, customer experience and driving customer success throughout organizations. His expertise is in managing and transforming all post-sale customer operations to grow revenue and deliver a differentiated customer experience.  

In this episode, he shares how Customer Imperative helps companies scale revenue by deploying customer success teams, processes, and technology. With a deep focus on B2B SaaS, they serve CEOs, CROs, COOs and Customer Success leaders to help grow revenue faster while improving the customer experience. 

Customer Success is uniquely positioned within an organization to be able to help identify those opportunities to expand. And in fact, that is where the primary value of Customer Success is.”

–Stacy Sifleet

Topics Covered:

00: 51 – All about Jay Nathan and his role as a Customer Success expert

03:30 – The relationship between Pricing and Customer Success

05:14 – Customer Imperative:  what they do for B2B SAAS clients in delivering technology-enabled customer success operations

06:07 – How they help a business to optimize their customer success metrics

07:12 – The system they use to facilitate customer success

08:36 – Customer success and onboarding: the end to end journey roadmap

11:17 – Customer success for retention and expansion: gross retention and net retention, the primary value of customer success

16:58 – 3 basic value levers other than building the right product: market segment, pricing metric, and packaging

17:58 – What is the use of usage data and usage metrics in determining customer success?

22:38 – Jay’s pricing advice: Think Large, think globally. But act pragmatically.

Key Takeaways:

“If you have data that you can normalize across your entire customer base, and even define metrics for your industry, as a SAS provider, let’s say I’m in real estate or event management, there are metrics and their benchmarks that are unique to each of those industries. And if I can sort of normalize those, I can use them in a number of ways one, I can use them to help me understand if my clients how they’re performing relative to their peers.” –Jay Nathan 

“The days of planning ahead and building a big top-down plan are just there, they’re hard, they’re gone, right. And we need to be much more agile in the way that we respond to competition and the way that we roll out our products to our clients, in just that agility, just speed means so much we work with a lot of private equity-backed companies.” –Jay Nathan 

“I think everybody wants to grow quickly, the idea of testing and seeing what works, and then implementing just that just makes all the sense in the world.” –Jay Nathan 

Resources and People Mentioned 

• https://tomtunguz.com/ 

• SalesForce 
• Zoom.us 
• Zendesk 

Connect With Jay Nathan 

• https://customerimperative.com 

• Email: [email protected] 
• LinkedIn 

Connect with Mark Stiving 

• Email: [email protected]    
• LinkedIn 

Twitter

Why you have to check out today’s podcast:

• Learn how to achieve better outcomes for your customers and products through a customer-first approach
• Understand how you can harness data to produce insights you can use to reduce customer churn and increase satisfaction and upselling opportunities
• Discover why Customer Success is the new growth plan for your company to grow faster

Jay Nathan is a B2B SaaS executive with a deep focus on revenue growth, customer experience and driving customer success throughout organizations. His expertise is in managing and transforming all post-sale customer operations to grow revenue and deliver a differentiated customer experience.  

In this episode, he shares how Customer Imperative helps companies scale revenue by deploying customer success teams, processes, and technology. With a deep focus on B2B SaaS, they serve CEOs, CROs, COOs and Customer Success leaders to help grow revenue faster while improving the customer experience. 

Customer Success is uniquely positioned within an organization to be able to help identify those opportunities to expand. And in fact, that is where the primary value of Customer Success is.”

–Stacy Sifleet

Topics Covered:

00: 51 – All about Jay Nathan and his role as a Customer Success expert

03:30 – The relationship between Pricing and Customer Success

05:14 – Customer Imperative:  what they do for B2B SAAS clients in delivering technology-enabled customer success operations

06:07 – How they help a business to optimize their customer success metrics

07:12 – The system they use to facilitate customer success

08:36 – Customer success and onboarding: the end to end journey roadmap

11:17 – Customer success for retention and expansion: gross retention and net retention, the primary value of customer success

16:58 – 3 basic value levers other than building the right product: market segment, pricing metric, and packaging

17:58 – What is the use of usage data and usage metrics in determining customer success?

22:38 – Jay’s pricing advice: Think Large, think globally. But act pragmatically.

Key Takeaways:

“If you have data that you can normalize across your entire customer base, and even define metrics for your industry, as a SAS provider, let’s say I’m in real estate or event management, there are metrics and their benchmarks that are unique to each of those industries. And if I can sort of normalize those, I can use them in a number of ways one, I can use them to help me understand if my clients how they’re performing relative to their peers.” –Jay Nathan 

“The days of planning ahead and building a big top-down plan are just there, they’re hard, they’re gone, right. And we need to be much more agile in the way that we respond to competition and the way that we roll out our products to our clients, in just that agility, just speed means so much we work with a lot of private equity-backed companies.” –Jay Nathan 

“I think everybody wants to grow quickly, the idea of testing and seeing what works, and then implementing just that just makes all the sense in the world.” –Jay Nathan 

Resources and People Mentioned 

• https://tomtunguz.com/ 

• SalesForce 
• Zoom.us 
• Zendesk 

Connect With Jay Nathan 

• https://customerimperative.com 

• Email: [email protected] 
• LinkedIn 

Connect with Mark Stiving 

• Email: [email protected]    
• LinkedIn 

Twitter

• Learn how Mark discover his pricing superpower through a heartbreak 
• What it is with LinkedIn’s algorithm that made him decide to build a close-knit community of pricing experts called Champion of Value’ 
• Find-out what subscription value management is all about  

Today, we have no guests. It’s just going to be Mark talking about the far better things ahead with Impact Pricing. 

Listen in to hear the exciting things that Mark has in store for companies, entrepreneurs, and experts that will help them price offerings to capture more of the value they create.  

“In pricing what we have to do is we have to look at each person’s decisions.  They’re going to buy my product or not. They’re going to buy my product or my competitor’s products. They’re going to make that decision in their own best interest. And our job has to be to understand that decision they’re about to make and help them understand that it’s in their best interest to choose our product.” 

– Mark Stiving 

Topics Covered: 

00:51 – Jay Baer of Convince & Convert talk at National Speakers Association Conference, what is the issue with LinkedIn viewing analytics for your shared posts that unable followers to see your content 

02:22 – Mark discovering his pricing superpower through a heartbreak, why people make a decision in their own self-interest 

08:20 – Why Mark can’t trust Linkedin- not getting your content out to everybody who wants to see it 

08:33 – Building the Champions of Value community and the launch of Impact Pricing’s upcoming courses  

09:32 – Subscription Value Management 

11:05 – Solo cast, Interview, or both? What do you want to hear?  

People and Resources Mentioned 

• Jay Baer of Convince & Convert 
• National Speakers Association 

Connect with Mark Stiving 

• Email: [email protected]    
• LinkedIn 
• Twitter 

• Learn how Mark discover his pricing superpower through a heartbreak 
• What it is with LinkedIn’s algorithm that made him decide to build a close-knit community of pricing experts called Champion of Value’ 
• Find-out what subscription value management is all about  

Today, we have no guests. It’s just going to be Mark talking about the far better things ahead with Impact Pricing. 

Listen in to hear the exciting things that Mark has in store for companies, entrepreneurs, and experts that will help them price offerings to capture more of the value they create.  

“In pricing what we have to do is we have to look at each person’s decisions.  They’re going to buy my product or not. They’re going to buy my product or my competitor’s products. They’re going to make that decision in their own best interest. And our job has to be to understand that decision they’re about to make and help them understand that it’s in their best interest to choose our product.” 

– Mark Stiving 

Topics Covered: 

00:51 – Jay Baer of Convince & Convert talk at National Speakers Association Conference, what is the issue with LinkedIn viewing analytics for your shared posts that unable followers to see your content 

02:22 – Mark discovering his pricing superpower through a heartbreak, why people make a decision in their own self-interest 

08:20 – Why Mark can’t trust Linkedin- not getting your content out to everybody who wants to see it 

08:33 – Building the Champions of Value community and the launch of Impact Pricing’s upcoming courses  

09:32 – Subscription Value Management 

11:05 – Solo cast, Interview, or both? What do you want to hear?  

People and Resources Mentioned 

• Jay Baer of Convince & Convert 
• National Speakers Association 

Connect with Mark Stiving 

• Email: [email protected]    
• LinkedIn 
• Twitter 

• Learn how pricing in retail is done, the strategies to implement to get the right data analytics for value pricing 
• Why throwing out a number before a customer tells you your value to them is a mistake 
• Understanding  the impact of category management on retailer prices and performance: theory and evidence 

Stacy Sifleet is a consultant whose expertise includes pricing strategy, business process improvement, change management, inventory, S&OP, advanced problem solving, strategic planning and procurement. 

In this episode Stacy shares how using data analytics, correctly, identifies value levers for customized pricing, especially in the B2C market. 

“I think it is important that once you figure out what you want your pricing strategy to be, figure out how to make it easy for your team to execute it.” 

–Stacy Sifleet 

Topics Covered:  

00:45 – Stacy’s backstory in pricing 

01:22 - Her biggest mistake in pricing: Why throwing out your number to a customer without knowing your value to them is a mistake 

06:10 - Differences between B2C and  B2B in business systems’ pricing 

08:53 - How using data analytics, correctly, identifies value levers for customized pricing 

09:40 - What is category management is all about and its relation to value pricing 

16:11 - How pricing in the retail industry is done? 

20:39 - Stacy’s favorite data tools and strategy she implements to get the value pricing right 

Key Takeaways:  

“When I think about B2B, I think the sales team, even if the're working on  a specific account, they really should be diving into the data across their account and say.’ How are these customers different? Which of these customers add more value to the business?' You cannot do that just by  conversation, you have to look at the numbers.” –Stacy Sifleet 

Connect With Stacy Sifleet 

• https://www.supplyvelocity.com 
• Email:[email protected] 
• LinkedIn   

Connect with Mark Stiving    

• Email: [email protected]    
• LinkedIn    
• Twitter