Podcasts about impact pricing

How do you set the right price when AI is changing everything, except your customer's expectations of value? In this episode we are joined by Mark Stiving, pricing strategist, host of the Impact Pricing podcast, and original designer of Pragmatic Institute's Price course. Mark shares how understanding customer value and willingness to pay can guide smarter product decisions and unlock revenue, whether you're pricing traditional software or AI-powered innovations. Mark explains why pricing isn't just a number. It's a reflection of how well you understand your customer. He also unpacks how product teams can use AI to uncover buyer insights, refine segmentation, and align pricing with outcomes, not just features. And for those building AI products, he dives into emerging best practices, from outcome-based pricing models to choosing the right metrics that reflect delivered value. Whether you own pricing or just influence it, this episode is a masterclass in connecting what you build to what people will pay for. For detailed takeaways, show notes, and more, visit: www.pragmaticinstitute.com/resources/podcasts Pragmatic Institute is the global leader in Product, Data, and Design training and certification programs for working professionals. Learn more at www.pragmaticinstitute.com.

Join Mark Stiving for a unique dual-guest conversation with Jon Jennings, longtime Impact Pricing sponsor and successful pricing recruiter, and Ryan Walter, a pricing veteran with over 15 years of leadership experience who recently transitioned into recruiting. Together, they reveal the insider's view of private equity pricing transformations, from deal diligence to exit strategies. In this episode, they explore why private equity firms are investing heavily in pricing capabilities, how to determine the right level of pricing leadership for different situations, and the evolving landscape of pricing careers.  The conversation covers everything from pre-acquisition planning to AI's impact on pricing roles, offering valuable insights for both pricing professionals and business leaders.   Why you have to check out today's podcast: Learn the critical difference between hiring a pricing person and orchestrating a pricing transformation. Understand the decision framework for determining whether you need a manager, director, or VP-level pricing leader. Explore why portfolio companies often resist pricing initiatives and how to overcome that resistance.   “In the private equity space, part of the diligence is we think there's an opportunity of pricing improvement of some dollar amount to go get. In order to get that, you're going to need to transform the way things are working, which is building out a team.” – Ryan Walter   Topics Covered: 02:05 – Ryan's journey into pricing: From MBA analytics to solving 7-Eleven's cigarette pricing crisis in Florida 03:29 – Pricing transformation strategies: Why PE's 5-year timeline perfectly aligns with pricing capability building 07:49 – Pricing as a center of excellence: The evolution from analyst roles to VP-level positions and what's next 11:05 – Private equity hiring differences: Stakeholder dynamics, investment thesis pressure, and the "shorter leash" reality 14:30 – Pricing problems in portfolio companies: When port cos don't see the problem PE firms see and how to bridge that gap 17:37 – Pricing transformation explained: Why it's all-encompassing and requires strategy, finance, data, and leadership skills 20:48 – Transformational roles in organizations: The difference between backfilling and building, and why transformation always wins 23:41 – Hiring pricing professionals for PE: Building pricing advisor roles at the firm level and sharing resources across portcos 26:17 – AI's impact on pricing: Data foundation requirements and immediate use cases like rebate design and negotiation prep 29:13 – AI in pricing strategies: Competitive data matching, SKU comparison, and the 80% solution approach 32:06 – Promoting the pricing field: Building the next generation of talent and educating people into pricing careers   Key Takeaways: "In the private equity space, part of the diligence is we think there's an opportunity of pricing improvement of some dollar amount to go get. In order to get that, you're going to need to transform the way things are working, which is building out a team." – Ryan Walter "The reason I like that word [transformation] is it's all encompassing because it's not really one thing. It's not, oh, we need to get a director of FPA in here. We need to get somebody who understands strategy, who understands finance, who understands data and IT tools, and is a leader that can influence others." – Ryan Walter "If you're going to go for a pricing transformation, you have to dive in with both feet. Halfway doesn't typically work." – Jon Jennings   Resources and People Mentioned: 7-Eleven: https://www.7-eleven.com/   Connect with Jon Jennings & Ryan Walter: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonjennings/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryan-walter3141/   Connect with Mark Stiving: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stiving/ Email: mark@impactpricing.com  

Mark Stiving is a pricing expert and the host of the Impact Pricing podcast, where he explores the intricate relationship between pricing, value, and context. With a wealth of experience in pricing strategies, Mark is passionate about helping companies maximize their revenue through effective pricing techniques. Steven Forth is the co-founder and Managing Partner at Ibbaka, a leading pricing strategy consultancy. With deep expertise in B2B SaaS pricing and value-based pricing models, Steven has been at the forefront of pricing innovation for over two decades. He's passionate about the intersection of pricing strategy, customer value, and emerging technologies like AI agents. In this episode, Steven turns the tables on Mark to explore context-driven pricing – Mark's revolutionary framework that's changing how pricing professionals think about willingness to pay. Together, they dive deep into the four contexts that drive every pricing decision, the three-layer business framework that organizes pricing strategy, and why perfection is the enemy of progress in pricing.   Why you have to check out today's podcast: Discover the concept of context-driven pricing and its significance in today's market. Learn how different contexts, such as environmental and customer factors, influence pricing decisions. Understand the importance of defining the problem to effectively implement pricing strategies.   “Willingness to pay is contextual.” – Mark Stiving   Topics Covered: 01:37 – What motivated Mark to think about Context-driven Pricing? 03:15 – The four categories of context: problem, customer, behavioral, and environmental. 04:52 – How environmental factors influence willingness to pay? 06:01 – The role of competitors in shaping pricing strategies. 08:13 – Understanding the foundational problem and its impact on pricing decisions. 14:01 – The intersection of context-driven pricing and AI. 24:58 – Key takeaways on implementing context-driven pricing effectively.   Key Takeaways: “Pricing is about understanding the context in which a buyer operates.” – Mark Stiving “Defining the problem is crucial to determining willingness to pay.” – Mark Stiving “Perfection is impossible; focus on being better every day.” – Mark Stiving   Resources and People Mentioned: Steven Forth: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stevenforth/ Ibbaka: https://www.ibbaka.com/ Craig Zawada: https://www.linkedin.com/in/craig-zawada-a0a39029/ Pros: https://pros.com/ Stephan Liozu: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephanliozu/ Zilliant: https://zilliant.com/ Gabe Smith: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gabesmith/ PriceFX: https://www.pricefx.com/   Connect with Mark Stiving: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stiving/  Email: mark@impactpricing.com  

In his third appearance on The Soul of Enterprise, pricing expert Mark Stiving, Ph.D., returns to share new insights on maximizing profitability through value-based pricing strategies. As the founder and CEO of Impact Pricing, Mark guides businesses toward understanding and articulating their value, so they can stop leaving money on the table. Join Ron and Ed as they dive deep into Mark's expertise on aligning organizations around value creation, optimizing pricing structures, and tackling the nuances of customer willingness to pay.

Send us a Text Message.Optimizing Your Price Point for Maximum Profitability.Find  out how to strike the perfect balance between value and price to boost your profitability and customer satisfaction.Make sure you're not leaving money on the table! Listen to our conversation with the Chief Pricing Educator of Impact Pricing, Mark Stiving. Get ready to have several Aha moments.Mark has a Ph.D. in pricing. He has been in pricing as a practitioner, educator and advisor for almost 30 years.  He has taught pricing to thousands of people and has advised hundreds of companies while they rethink their pricing.  Mark says, "All businesspeople should understand pricing.  Although they may consider it the last thing they do before launching a product, pricing and value should inform almost all of the decisions that go into creating and communicating about products (or services). "Connect with Mark:www.impactpricing.comMark's Recommended read:Monetizing Innovation: How Smart Companies Design The Product Around The Price by Madhavan Ramanujam

How do you nail the perfect price for your product? Just ask Mark Stiving, Chief Pricing Educator of Impact Pricing, who will share insights on pricing strategies. He'll explain how understanding your business strategy and customer decision-making process can help you value your products and how to find out how much your customer is willing to pay. In this episode you'll hear:(02:05) How figuring out your business strategy will influence your pricing.(03:00) How to find out how much your customer is willing to pay. (04:52) Should you start selling your products or services at a higher price point? (06:05) The benefits of a subscription model and how to build one.(07:50) How understanding the customer decision process can help you set prices.

Today on the show we have Mark Stiving, the founder of Impact Pricing and author of "Selling Value", "Impact Pricing", and "Win Keep Grow".In this episode, Mark shares his experience in the intricacies of pricing and packaging strategies, emphasizing their impact on customer retention and expansion.We then discussed understanding customer value, overcoming internal biases, and the importance of iterative pricing strategies. We wrapped up by exploring actionable insights on leveraging pricing metrics to enhance customer engagement and reduce churn.Mentioned ResourcesImpact PricingSelling Value BookImpact PricingWin Keep GrowChurn FM is brought to you by Vitally, the all-in-one Customer Success Platform and Chargebee, SaaS for effective revenue growth management.

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. In this episode, Steven delves into the dynamic world of pricing strategies as revealed through the lens of the Professional Pricing Society event. He talks about the latest developments, innovative practices, and thought-provoking discussions emerging from these events of pricing professionals. From uncovering cutting-edge pricing technologies to dissecting evolving pricing trends that offer valuable insights to help you in navigating the ever-changing landscape of pricing strategies especially where AI is concerned.   Why you have to check out today's podcast: Discover what's in store for this year's Professional Pricing Society conferences Find out the significant and engaging topics discussed in the PPS event Look forward to Steven's valuable insights and key points on pricing trends and innovations, particularly in relation to AI   "The other problem or challenge, I think, that one can have with AI-based approaches to pricing is the sort of black box nature. And generative AI, gives something of a path forward for that." - Steven Forth   Topics Covered: 01:46 - Steven highlighting how the Professional Pricing Society [PPS] listens to Impact Pricing podcast 03:29 - Professional Pricing Society's calendar of events this year 04:39 - What's coming up for this year's event: Return of the book store 06:25 - Featured and notable books available at the event 09:54 - Other interesting things coming up for PPS' event 11:28 - Steven's important thoughts on pricing sustainability and some examples on point 15:41 - What differentiates a value model from a sustainability model as far as Ibbaka's concerned 17:26 - What he thinks of these big pricing vendors approach to AI 18:46 - Talking about pricing industry frustration and the black box nature of AI and the shift to generative AI 21:19 - Discussing the application of generative AI in a dynamically configuring software and its implications on the pricing strategies 24:56 - Sharing about the scale and complexity of traditional value model as well as the potential of generative AI to quickly adapt to different pricing and value configurations 28:39 - Watch out for an upcoming webinar on May 23rd  29:08 - What he thinks of people's reception to his presentation at the Professional Pricing Society's conference   Key Takeaways: "Feel good metrics or social responsibility, none of those things are really going to get people to buy and pay for sustainable solutions. It has to be tied to value, and you have to be able to show that your green solution provides more value than the competing solutions." - Steven Forth "I think the secret here, at least from a pricing and modeling approach, is to find those variables that get used across the different models. And by having the same variable used in different models you can pull sustainability together with value together with pricing." - Steven Forth   People/Resources Mentioned: Arnab Sinha Impact Pricing Episode 564: https://impactpricing.com/podcast/564-exploring-game-changing-pricing-dynamics-for-different-industries-with-arnab-sinha/ Game Changer: How Strategic Pricing Shapes Businesses, Markets, and Society by Jean-Manuel Izaret and Arnab Sinha: https://www.amazon.com/Game-Changer-Strategic-Pricing-Business/dp/1394190581 Stephan Liozu Impact Pricing Episode 582: https://impactpricing.com/?s=stephan+liozu Nick Nalepa: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nick-nalepa/ Stop Racing In A Blindfold!: Big Data + Pricing Science Drive Bigger Profits by Jim Vaughn: https://www.amazon.com/Stop-Racing-Blindfold-Pricing-Science/dp/099068380X Michelin: https://www.michelinman.com Hydropoint: https://www.hydropoint.com Vendavo: https://www.vendavo.com Pros: https://pros.com PriceFX: https://www.pricefx.com Totogi: https://www.totogi.com/ Resilience: https://www.bcg.com/publications/2023/resilient-pricing-for-uncertain-world   Connect with Steven Forth: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stevenforth/ Email: steven@ibbaka.com   Connect with Mark Stiving: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stiving/ Email: mark@impactpricing.com  

In this episode of The Faces of Business, we welcome Mark Stiving, Ph.D., the mastermind behind Impact Pricing, to share his insights that can help B2B companies get more revenue for their products and services.   Few voices resonate with the clarity, insight, and expertise of Mark Stiving, the mastermind behind Impact Pricing. With over a quarter-century dedicated to demystifying the complexities of pricing, Mark helps organizations navigate the turbulent waters of market dynamics. His profound understanding of buyer behavior, combined with a unique ability to distill pricing strategies into actionable insights, has cemented his reputation as a sound advisor in the realms of pricing and value maximization.   Check out the Blog post here: How to Raise Prices without Losing Customers   Thanks for taking the time to listen today.   Find Damon Pistulka on LinkedIn talking about life & building businesses you can sell or succeed.    On Twitter as @dpistulka with inspiration and sharing thoughts.    Find out more about Damon when he's not working.  @damonpistulka on Instagram, or Damon Pistulka on Facebook.      More information on building businesses you can sell or succeed and the Exit Your Way method on our website   View our blog page for this episode here.   Email us for more information info@exityourway.com

Guest: Mark Stiving   Guest Bio: Mark Stiving has driven business initiatives worth hundreds of millions of dollars. He is sought after for his superpower of finding invincible profits in every company he works with. He is an award-winning international speaker known for helping audiences find hidden value and more profit, immediately. Mark started and successfully sold three powerful companies in the tech sector. His legendary “Value Acceleration Bootcamp: How to use customer value to price, package, and sell products” helps PE firms and innovative companies master their buyers' purchasing decisions to win more business at higher prices. You have probably heard of Mark's many popular books. He is a prolific and highly rated author of “Impact Pricing: Your Blueprint for Driving Profits”, “Win Keep Grow: How to price and package to accelerate your subscription business”, and “Selling Value: How to Win More Deals at Higher Prices” His forthcoming book is “Invincible Profits: How to Lead a Value Revolution and Dominate Your Market”   Guest Links: impactpricing.com/Salesology mark@impactpricing.com     About Salesology®: Conversations with Sales Leaders Download your free gift, The Salesology® Vault. The vault is packed full of free gifts from sales leaders, sales experts, marketing gurus and revenue generation experts.  Download your free gift, 81 Tools to Grow Your Sales & Your Business Faster, More Easily & More Profitably. Save hours of work tracking down the right prospecting and sales resources and/or digital tools that every business owner and salesperson needs. Watch the demo of the Salesology® Prospecting Method, A Simple, 3-Step Method That, On Average, Increases Qualified Appointments & Sales By 73%. If you are a business owner or sales manager with an underperforming sales team, let's talk. Click here to schedule a time. Please, subscribe to Salesology®: Conversations with Sales Leaders so that you don't miss a single episode, and while you're at it, won't you take a moment to write a short review and rate our show? It would be greatly appreciated! To learn more about our previous guests, listen to past episodes, and get to know your host, go to https://podcast.gosalesology.com/ and connect on LinkedIn and follow us on Facebook and Twitter and check out our website at  http://www.gosalesology.com

The power of value-based pricing in sales…w/ Mark Stiving Ph.D. Listen in as Mark H. and Mark S. dissect why many salespeople struggle to hit their target prices. It's not about the product itself, but the value it represents to customers. Discover the psychological intricacies behind product pricing and how it shapes consumer perception of value. Understand why customers often gravitate towards mid-tier priced items and how sales and marketing teams must convey the value proposition to guide informed purchasing decisions. ❓Key Questions Answered❓   What are some ideas we could use as salespeople to help us understand what that problem is? If I see a price and it's cheap, do I automatically perceive that the value is cheap? If I see a different product with a more expensive price, do I automatically associate more value? Do people use price comparison to figure out what they want to buy?  “I'm going to discount the initial sale and then I'll make it up later.” Does that hold water? If you had one piece of advice, you would tell the companies right now, in terms of maximizing price? ◩ About the Guest ◩ Mark Stiving, Phd. is a pricing expert, speaker, author, and founder of Impact Pricing. Mark holds his Ph.D in Marketing from Univ. of California, Berkeley. His most recent book is Selling Value: How to Win More Deals at Higher Prices. ▣ Invest in a new sales skill today at The Sales Hunter University and watch your 2024 results improve drastically. Click to learn more!  

This one is the 8 of Clubs from the Impact Pricing card deck.  Ban the word markup. First, can we all agree that cost-plus pricing is not optimal? We really want to do value-based pricing, charge what a customer is willing to pay. Got it, so we're all in agreement.  Now, let's talk about the word markup. Markup is defined as, tell me what my costs are, how much do I need to mark that up in order to get the margins that I want? So a markup is by definition cost-plus. Well, it's cost-times, but it's cost-plus. So when we use the word markup, as a company, we're saying we use cost-plus pricing. Now, it is okay, let's say you're running a distribution organization. You're running a grocery store. You've got hundreds of thousands of products to price. You can't do specific value-based pricing on each one of those products. And so, you have to do something. But don't do just cost-plus. When you say we use a 50 point markup or a 20 point markup, we're implying that goes across the board. What we should be saying is, how much margin do we think we can get from this product category? Because margin starts at, what's the price? And then, how much did we have to pay to acquire the product that we sold? So margin is a great term to use when we're thinking about value-based pricing. Markup almost forces us to use cost-plus pricing.  So my advice, stop using that word. Don't let anybody else use that word. Switch your mental thought process to margin, not markup. We hope you enjoyed this example of Pricing Table Topics. What you just heard was done without a script. 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/  

This one is the 8 of Diamonds from the Impact Pricing card deck.  Customer perceptions always matter. And what's fascinating is every time we touch a customer, we touch a buyer, they form perceptions of our company. They could be positive perceptions. They could be negative perceptions.  And when I say every time, it's not only salespeople making sales calls. It's when they read our marketing messages. It's when they receive our invoices. It's when they call our customer support or customer service line.  Every single touch point we have with a customer either creates value in their mind, or it destroys value in their mind. The question becomes, which are we going to do?  My recommendation is obviously to create more value with every customer touch point. But how do we do that?  We do that by creating a culture of value Inside our company. A customer centric perspective that says, how is it that this decision, how is it that this action, impacts our customers? And can I do it in a way that impacts our customers in a more positive manner instead of just thinking about how do I get them off the phone? Or how do I take care of them quickly so that they go away and stop bothering me while I do my day job?  So value, a culture of value, is all about doing what's best for our customers and making sure every customer touchpoint increases value, not decreases it. We hope you enjoyed this example of Pricing Table Topics. What you just heard was done without a script. 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/  

This one is the 8 of Hearts from the Impact Pricing card deck. Business acumen is a skill that salespeople really need, and product people really should have, to say, "Why is it that a customer would want to buy our product?" In B2B, value is measured in incremental profit. Your customer isn't going to buy anything from you, assuming it's a business customer, unless you are making them more money. Here's the question, how are you making them more money? Somehow, when you can communicate that, when your sales team can communicate that, you have a much better chance at winning the business. And by the way, when you understand it, you have a much better chance at delivering great marketing messages, and building the right products. We really need the skill of business acumen so we can say what is the business of our customers and how is it that we make them more money, because that is where the value is. We hope you enjoyed this example of Pricing Table Topics. What you just heard was done without a script. 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/  

This one is the 8 of Spades from the Impact Pricing card deck.  You've probably heard me use the words 'will I' and 'which one' in the past. 'Will I' are situations where our buyers are choosing to buy our product or not, but they're not choosing whether they buy our product or a competitor's product. When we can find ourselves in a 'will I' situation, we know that our customers are not price sensitive. So, the key here is to know the difference. Are they comparing us to competitors or not? My recommendation is assume they're not. Because if we assume they are, we start talking about who our competitors are and they say, "Oh, you have competitors, let me go look at them." Instead, we talk to them about the value of solving the problem and why our product is going to help them solve that problem and get a huge return. And we never even mentioned that a competitive alternative exists. When the customer says to us, "Oh, we're looking at X, Y, Z company." Then we know that we can shift to talking about how we're better than our competition. What are those features or capabilities that we do that our competition can't match? But up to that point, let's make the assumption there is no competition. In fact, my favorite way to find out the answer, is there competition, is to ask the following question, "If you don't buy this, what will you do?" Notice that that question implies there is no competition. It doesn't say that go look at the competition. So my recommendation, always assume there is no competition. Talk about the value of solving the problems, and then you can shift your sales technique after you realize competition is in the deal. We hope you enjoyed this example of Pricing Table Topics. What you just heard was done without a script. 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/  

This one is the 9 of Clubs from the Impact Pricing card deck.  We often hear the word 'strategic' as in, "Hey, I'm making a decision today so that it grows my business someday in the future." Well, that's exactly what we want to do when we think about the lifetime value of a customer. I'm not so worried about, "Can I get the three year contract signed today?" Many companies do. But when you try to get the three year contract signed right away, you make it harder to win the customer.  But what if you took a one year contract? Or what if you took a one month contract? Or even had a free trial period. And you let people get into your product, and you deliver so much value that they never leave. What we just did was get them into our ecosystem. And then over time we can get them to buy more from us, to stay with us. And that's because we know we're delivering a ton of value.  This is what it means to focus on lifetime value. I'm okay taking a smaller number today because I know that over time this customer is going to grow with me and give me a whole lot more money that I'm trying to capture today. Whereas if we focus on the value of the three year contract, it's oftentimes hard to win that customer today. We hope you enjoyed this example of Pricing Table Topics. What you just heard was done without a script. 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/  

This one is the 9 of Diamonds from the Impact Pricing card deck.  When we think about subscriptions, and I've talked to several companies who are trying to move from more of a transactional business to a subscription business, they think it's 'just pricing'. "Oh, we want to set our price this way." But it turns out it changes so much in your business, not just the way you set pricing. One of my favorite things about the subscription business model is that buyers pay us for a continuous stream of benefits, meaning we're delivering benefits month after month after month. The question in your business is, are you truly delivering benefits month after month after month? In which case, maybe you have a good business for starting a subscription business model. Then we want to think about, not only how are we delivering it, but then, how much value do they get each month? How do we start to capture that? And so, we can certainly price it, but we really need to structure our company around winning these customers.  And then we have to figure out, how do we keep them? How do we minimize churn? And over time, we figure out how to grow these customers. How to get them to upgrade or buy more from us? So, subscription isn't as simple as, 'let's change the way we do pricing'. It really is an entire business model. We hope you enjoyed this example of Pricing Table Topics. What you just heard was done without a script. 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/  

EPISODE SUMMARYUnderstanding the intricacies of pricing and value proposition is crucial to successfully growing a SaaS business. In this new episode of Scale Your SaaS, host and B2B SaaS Sales Coach Matt Wolach sat down with Mark Stiving, the founder of Impact Pricing, who shared his valuable insights on how software leaders can revolutionize their value proposition and dominate the market. Read on to learn more about the pricing mistakes that cost you lost revenue.PODCAST-AT-A-GLANCEPodcast: Scale Your SaaS with Matt WolachEpisode: Episode No. 304, “Pricing Mistakes that Cost You Lost Revenue - with Mark Stiving”Guest: Mark Stiving, Founder at Impact PricingHost: Matt Wolach, a B2B SaaS Sales Coach, Entrepreneur, and InvestorSponsored by: LeadfeederTOP TIPS FROM THIS EPISODEUnlock the Power of ValueIn pricing SaaS products, Stiving emphasized the importance of recognizing the true value a product brings to the customer. He stressed that understanding customer value and harnessing it through effective pricing strategies is the key to generating invincible profits.Identify and Quantify ValueStiving introduced the concept of a "value table," encouraging businesses to identify their most marketable product features. The challenge is to then determine the specific problems these features solve for customers. Through a systematic approach to understanding customer problems, software businesses can quantify the results and ultimately assign a dollar value to the solution.Leverage Customer GrowthStiving highlighted that while many software companies focus extensively on acquiring new customers, the real potential lies in growing existing ones. By adopting a mindset of 'win, keep, grow,' businesses can explore four avenues for customer growth: raising prices, upselling, cross-selling, and usage-based pricing.EPISODE HIGHLIGHTSStrategic Pricing for Sustainable GrowthAddressing the perennial concern of raising prices without causing customer churn, Stiving offered a practical strategy. By incrementally raising prices for the top tier of customers who derive the most value, businesses can carefully monitor the impact on churn. This approach ensures that the value delivered justifies the price increase, creating a win-win situation for both the business and its customers.Build a Value-Based CultureThe key takeaway for software leaders is to cultivate a value-based culture within their organizations. Stiving advocated for a continuous focus on understanding customer needs and integrating this perspective into every decision. By placing the customer at the center of business considerations, companies can foster long-term success.Take ActionFor software leaders seeking to refine their pricing strategies and value propositions, Mark recommends exploring the framework of the valuable features available on Impact Pricing's website. Additionally, leaders can gain further insights by connecting with Stiving through a consultation or discoveryGet even more tips by following Matt elsewhere: Sales Tips LinkedIn Twitter Instagram

Mark Stiving, Founder of Impact Pricing, joins Dustin on this week's episode to deep dive into the art of pricing. They start by exploring the concept of value and how it can be understood and communicated to customers, delve into the challenges of pricing in different scenarios, and also discuss the importance of communicating pricing on the website. The conversation covers topics like price increases, providing value in non-software subscriptions, and selling solutions instead of platforms. The key takeaway is the significance of understanding and delivering value to customers in order to set effective pricing strategies. If you have any questions or thoughts, you can reach out to Mark through LinkedIn. Also, check out Impact Pricing's website to learn more about their work.

This one is the 9 of Hearts from the Impact Pricing card deck. I found it fascinating when I studied subscriptions coming from a more traditional or transactional type of business where people would buy something from you, and then you have to get them to buy again. In a subscription, people buy something from you and then they pay you month after month, or year after year. And in that business model, there are several things that are unique. But one of them is that you suddenly have to focus on how do we keep a customer? We always have to win customers, but how do we keep that customer? And we've heard the word churn, and we know the churn is bad, and companies focus on how do I minimize churn. And there's also a third revenue bucket and that's called grow. Once I have a customer who's paying me and getting value for my product, how do I get them to pay me more money next year than they paid me this year? And we can typically do that with things like raising prices, or getting them to upgrade, or using more of our product. There are several of these techniques.  What's interesting though is that the tactics that we use inside our company to win customers is different than what we need to keep customers. And different again than what we need to grow customers. We suddenly have complicated our business model because we really and truly do need to manage all three of those revenue buckets separately. We hope you enjoyed this example of Pricing Table Topics. What you just heard was done without a script. 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/

This one is the 9 of Spades from the Impact Pricing card deck.  There are two major rules in pricing that are hugely valuable to your organization. The first one is value-based pricing, which simply means charge what your customers are willing to pay. The second one is to adopt price segmentation.  Think about this for just a second. No two buyers actually are willing to pay the same price. Which means every buyer has a different willingness to pay. If we really want to adopt value-based pricing, at its best, then what we're doing is trying to figure out, how do we get individual people to pay us what they're willing to pay?  Of course, this is impossible to do perfectly, but it's not impossible to say, hey, this type of person, this type of customer, gets more value from our product. They're willing to pay more because they get more value. We see this all the time.  For example, it could be that when we sell to Asia, they're more price sensitive so they end up with a better price. And when we sell in the US or Europe, we end up charging higher prices. This is price segmentation and that's where the value is. There are several ways to do price segmentation. Those include understanding the characteristics of your customer. What information can you collect at the time of the transaction? And then, are there behaviors or hurdles you could put in their way so that those who are price sensitive are willing to jump that hurdle in order to get a better price?  So, my advice, think very hard about, how do you do price segmentation? How can you charge different customers different amounts based on their willingness to pay? We hope you enjoyed this example of Pricing Table Topics. What you just heard was done without a script. 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/  

This one is the 10 of Clubs from the Impact Pricing card deck. Face it, when you talk to a customer, what you really want to ask them is, "how much would you pay for them?" The problem is they won't answer that question. First, they probably don't know the answer to that question. But more importantly, in the back of their mind, they're thinking, Hey, I can't tell them the truth because if I tell them it's really valuable to me, they'll end up charging me a higher price. So, I'm going to come up with a number much lower. I'm going to game the system, or play a negotiation game without them even knowing I'm playing. Of course, that hurts us because we're trying to gather real information, how much would they pay? One question I found that works relatively well, I wouldn't call it scientific, but it's a great way to get just a perception of people's pricing. And that is, "how much do you think other people like you would pay for this?" It takes enough indirection in the question that they tend not to think about gaming the system. And instead they think, "Oh, well, that person over there is probably like me, so therefore they would probably pay this much." When you ask that question, what the buyer's thinking in their mind is, how much would I really pay, and that's how much I think other people would really pay. We hope you enjoyed this example of Pricing Table Topics. What you just heard was done without a script. 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/  

This one is the 10 of Diamonds from the Impact Pricing card deck.  Different buyers value our products differently, hence, what that should mean to us is we get to do price segmentation, we could be charging different prices. But from a sales perspective, once we've got a price set and we need to go out and do prospecting and find which customers we want to go sell to, guess which ones are the easiest ones to win? The ones where they perceive the most value from our product.  If somebody is going to use our product and make a million dollars, they care a lot more than someone who's going to use our product and make $10. Can we articulate where's the value of our product, who's going to get the value, and then find those people who really get a ton of value and focus on them. That's where we should be doing our prospecting. That's where we should be doing our marketing. And if we have a list of prospects to go deal with, those are the ones we should be spending our sales effort and energy on. We hope you enjoyed this example of Pricing Table Topics. What you just heard was done without a script. 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/  

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This one is the 10 of Hearts from the Impact Pricing card deck. Besides the alliteration of that meme, the two concepts are crucial. Pricing is possibly the most powerful marketing mix variable you have access to. You must have seen the reports that say, hey, if you could increase price by 1%, that likely increases your profitability by 10% for most companies or an average company. Well, the only reason somebody is ever going to buy something from you is because they perceive that there's more value to them than it costs them in your price. And so, that means we need to be focused on what's the value to the customer. We need to know, how are they perceiving that value? What is the value that they're willing to exchange or they're thinking about as they exchange their hard earned money to buy your product? When we think about these two concepts, then pricing and value, they go really hand in hand, very closely related. I know many companies ignore pricing, that you set it and forget it, and they need to think about that more. But even more companies are clueless about value. How is it that your customers perceive value? You really should be spending more time, more energy, thinking about both of those concepts, pricing and value. And they go really, really well together. We hope you enjoyed this example of Pricing Table Topics. What you just heard was done without a script, obviously. 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/  

This one is the 10 of Spades from the Impact Pricing card deck. When we think about what a buyer's decision process is, think about the two decisions they have to make, 'will I' and 'which one'. And it's really important for us to understand which of those decisions were pricing for. The 'will I' decision simply asks, the buyers asking the question, should I buy something in this product category? That's a budgetary decision. They're really saying, is this problem valuable enough for me to spend money to go solve? When we're thinking about pricing and someone's only making that 'will I' decision, we need to be thinking about, what's the value of solving the problem?  The other decision the buyer might be making is the 'which one' decision. 'Which one' is, okay, I've decided I want to solve this problem. Now, am I going to buy your product or a competitor's product? How am I going to go solve this problem? They're deciding which one. And here, the pricing decision you have to make is what's the price of your product relative to the price of the competitive products. Relative to the price of the alternatives. And of course you must take into account the value of your advantages compared to your competitors.  So, as you're thinking about your pricing decisions, think really hard what's the decision our buyers are making. Are they deciding 'will I'? Will I buy something in this product category? Or are they deciding 'which one'? Which product will I buy? We hope you enjoyed this example of Pricing Table Topics. What you just heard was done without a script. 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/  

This one is the Jack of Clubs from the Impact Pricing card deck.  There's almost never a good reason to lower prices. We've seen that a 1% price increase can lead to a 10% improvement in profitability. Well, the opposite is true too. A 1% price decrease could lead to a 10% decrease in profitability. And that's painful.   As a general rule, I would never ever lead a price decrease. I'm not lowering my prices. And the only thing that would ever prompt me to, is if my competitors lowered their price first and I had to keep up with them. I had to match whatever price decrease they put out because they were taking too much of my share. But even if my competitors lowered their price, I wouldn't do an across the board price decrease. Instead, I would look at where is it that my competitors are taking my business. And can I do a price decrease just on that piece of business? Let's start thinking about price segmentation and market segmentation, understanding where that competitor is powerful, is available, and only lower prices in those places where we have to in order to keep our market share. But a great rule is just never lower your prices, unless you have to. 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 playing cards, pick a card, read the saying, talk for one to two minutes about what that card says. You'll become a better speaker and expert. Oh, and you can play games with these cards. 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/

This one is the Jack of Diamonds from the Impact Pricing card deck. It's true. If you're winning them all, you're not charging enough. First, you have to believe that every buyer is different. Every buyer has a different willingness to pay. If every time you go bid on someone and you know that they have a different willingness to pay, and yet you always win, that means that most of your buyers, if not all of your buyers, were willing to pay you more. In fact, it's probably a fair assumption that every time you win a deal, you left money on the table. The buyer was probably willing to pay you a little bit more, or a lot more, than what the price was you finally settled on.  What that says to me is that if we never ever lose, we're nowhere near that price point that says, Hey, we're losing the right number.  So, once again, if you were to raise your price by 1% that has a 10% impact on profitability, potentially, and probably zero impact on sales because you're winning everything already. And even if you lost a couple deals, you're not going to lose 10% of your deals. And so, that's a really smart thing for you to be doing if you're after more profit, which I hope you are.  And so, look at your win ratios. Are you winning every deal you go after? And if you are, raise prices. 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 playing 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. And, you can play games. 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/  

This one is the Jack of Hearts from the Impact Pricing card deck.  If you have the ability to raise your prices and you can still sell the same or just slightly fewer products, you are almost guaranteed to make much more profit. There are many studies out there that show a 1% increase in pricing can yield a 10% improvement in profitability. Now, how does that make sense? It makes sense because if you assume for a second that you have 10% gross margin on your product. So, I'm going to throw some numbers at you here. Assume that it costs, you're going to sell something for $100. It costs you $90 to make it. So, you have 10% gross margin  and you're making $10 in profit on that product, or on that sale. If you can raise your price 1%, so we go from a 100 to 101, we just raised our profit from 10 to 11. And that's because raising price has zero impact on our costs. Every dollar we make from the price increase goes directly to the bottom line. So, if we went from 100 to 101, we increased price by 1%. We took our profit from 10 to 11. We increased our profit by 10%. Obviously, that 10% number has everything to do with what's the gross margin of your product at the moment, and that's how you could determine. But price increases go straight to the bottom line without impacting or being affected by our costs. And so, therefore, it's often the single most profitable, most powerful, marketing mix variable any company has. 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. And, you can play games. 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/  

This one is the Jack of Spades from the Impact Pricing card deck. Many companies use cost-plus pricing and that's understandable because it's easy. It guarantees they're going to make a profit for every sale they make. I get it. When we shift to value-based pricing, we start thinking about what's a buyer willing to pay us. And now, think about what a buyer is willing to pay and that value that they place on our product actually has nothing to do with the cost of us manufacturing it.  In fact, if you're used to buying something, whatever it happens to be. Let's say you're buying your favorite shirt and you buy five of these shirts every single year, and you just love it. And one year the cost of materials goes up. And the manufacturer says, okay, we're going to double our price because our costs went up. You don't really care that the costs went up. What you care about is, do I still want to pay that much? Or do I want to pay twice as much to get the shirt that I really like or not? So you're not thinking, what's the cost?  Now, oftentimes companies use costs to justify price increases. And we do that because our customers often think price is related to costs and it makes them feel a little bit better. It makes it feel like we're not just trying to raise prices and gouge them. But in truth, the value they get, the decision they're making, am I going to buy this product or not, has nothing to do with your costs. And everything to do with how they perceive the value of your product. 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 playing 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, mark@impactpricing.com. Now, go make an impact.   Connect with Mark Stiving: Email: mark@impactpricing.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stiving/  

This one is the Queen of Clubs from the Impact Pricing card deck. Value-based pricing is truly a goal or an attitude, but it's never finished because we can't be perfect. We can't read a customer's mind. I define value-based pricing as charge what a customer is willing to pay, but if you can't read a customer's mind, you don't know what that customer is willing to pay. And in fact, all customers are different. And so, we constantly tweak and test new techniques. We add new price segmentations. We think about different market segments. We test our pricing and price increases with certain customers. So, we're never done with our value-based pricing.  We always want to be thinking about how is it that our customers are getting value from our products? How might they be using it differently? What was the value of the feature capability we just added to them? Value-based pricing is an ongoing process so I truly think of it as an attitude or a goal. 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 playing 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. Oh, and you can play card games. 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/

This one is the Queen of Diamonds from the Impact Pricing card deck.  We often talk about how we want products that are different from our competitors. And if we think about what we want to build, we want to build products that are better, that are somehow differentiated. And when we do that, we've truly built value for our customers because our products are better than our competitor's products. However, sometimes our customers don't know that our products are better. And if they don't know our products are better and they've never used our product before, then we're not going to get paid more because our products are better. And so, that's a customer's perception. We need to make sure that our customers perceive our products to be better. In the ideal world, we build products that are better. We communicate that ideal differentiation to our customers. And our customers then choose to buy our product because they've perceived that value.   Now, it's possible that we can communicate value that may not be true, or we could communicate value that may not be differentiated.  One of my favorite papers I read when I was a doctoral student was titled something like, Meaningful Differentiation from Irrelevant Attributes.   The example they like to use was Folgers Mountain Grown Coffee. I mean, it turns out all coffee is grown in mountains, so Folgers isn't differentiated with that. But the fact that they tout it, the fact that they talk about it and communicate it, almost makes it feel like they're differentiated. So, you could think of that as perceived value, even if it isn't real value.   So, our job really should be, let's create products that are better than our competitors and let's communicate that to our customers. 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 playing 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. And, you can play card games. 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/

In this replay episode, join our host, Rowan Noronha, as he discusses how to price with confidence with Jason Oakley (Founder, Productive PMM), Mark Stiving (Founder, Impact Pricing), and Kyle Poyar (Operating Partner, OpenView).Your pricing structure is your top profit lever. It can boost profits much more than increasing sales or cutting costs can. But most companies leave money on the table because they don't charge the right price.Why is pricing underdeveloped in most companies? And how can companies do better?In this episode, pricing gurus Mark and Kyle explain which function should own pricing (cough, product marketing) and how to choose the right pricing strategy.

This one is the Queen of Hearts from the Impact Pricing card deck.  Value-based pricing has many different meanings. Different people use it differently. Oftentimes, it's used to say, what's the value of each individual feature that's different between your product and your competitors, and add that to your competitors price. And by the way, that's a great way to think about value and value-based pricing.  But the easiest definition I've heard of for value-based pricing is, charge what your customers are willing to pay.  And I love this definition because sure, it takes into account the fact that we sometimes have competitors. And we want to know what's the value of our differentiation relative to our competitors' products. Absolutely, these are crucial things for us to know. But we also get to discover, what happens if they're not considering competition at the time?  Or, what happens if it's raining and we want to sell an umbrella? So, these differences in time, differences in use cases, these things all have impact in how our customers value our products.  And likewise, how much they would be willing to pay for our solutions to their problems.  So, I love this concept or this idea that says, look, we all want to charge based on how much value our customers are getting. That would be value-based pricing.  But the way to think about it is, how much is a customer willing to pay because that's how much they value your product. 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 playing 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. By the way, you can also play card games. 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/  

This one is the Queen of Spades from the Impact Pricing card deck. We really should be competing on value, not on price. We often think we're in a price war with our competition. We think our competitors are competing on price because we watch them give deep discounts to customers when we're in negotiations and we're wondering, why are they competing on price? But if you think about it, we responded with deep discounts on our products, and they look at us and they say, why are they competing on price?  What we really need to do is hold our price, try to maintain that price at a nice high level, and instead explain why our product is worth so much more money than our competitors. If our competitors are going to lower their price, it's probably because their product isn't as valuable as our product. We need to learn what does value truly mean to our customers and help them understand how much value they're going to get.  When we learn to create, communicate, value better, we'll be able to capture more of it in the way we price and the deals we close. 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 playing cards, pick a card, read the saying, and talk for one to two minutes about what that card says. You'll become a better speaker and expert. By the way, you can also play card games. 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/

This one is the King of Clubs from the Impact Pricing card deck.  Sadly, too many companies still use cost-plus pricing. We take the cost of manufacturing or creating something, we add a margin, and there's our price. It's easy. We know we're making margin, but are we maximizing our profit? Maybe we're pricing so high that we miss out on some customers, or maybe we're pricing so low that we're missing out on what some customers would be willing to pay us. Think about it this way. Imagine that it costs you $10 to build something, all in. Whatever costs you want to consider, great. And you have a buyer out there that's willing to pay you $100 for it. What's the profit-maximizing price that you could charge? Well, it's a hundred dollars. If you charge 99, you left a dollar on the table. If you charge a hundred and one, that buyer's not going to buy. And so, a hundred dollars is the best you could possibly do with that buyer.  But what if instead of costing you ten dollars, what if it cost you twenty-five dollars to make it? Same buyer. What price would be the profit maximizing price? Well, obviously it's still a hundred dollars. Mind you, we make less money because our costs are higher. But the best we can do price-wise is the $100 because that's what our customer is willing to pay.  When we think about pricing this way, we're not saying costs don't matter to business. What we are saying is costs don't really matter to us setting our price. Yes, we want to make sure our prices are above our costs. We want to make sure we're making money. So, think of it as a limit. But it isn't the thing that drives our price levels. 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/  

This one is the King of Diamonds from the Impact Pricing card deck.  We know that customers trade money for value. They're buying value, but what kind of value? There's lots of ways to break value up, but in this meme we want to talk about the difference between perceived value and real value. Let's imagine there is this true measurable amount of value. For example, maybe I'm selling a gold coin and that gold coin actually has a value that I could look up online and say, what's the value of this coin? Got it.  But when I'm selling a service or I'm selling a product, I can't just go look up online and say, what's the value of this? Especially to me, because I don't know how I'm going to use it. I don't know how it's going to create more profits. And so, what I'm willing to pay is based completely around how much value do I think I might be getting from that product. Now here's a great example. Imagine that you're selling a coffee cup. So what's the value of a coffee cup to somebody, right? Maybe it depends upon what the design is on the front, or who really wants it, or what the lid looks like. I mean, there's lots of different factors that might define what someone's willing to pay. And so, they say, yeah, I'd pay 10$ for that coffee mug.  But what if there was a gold coin at the bottom of the coffee mug when they bought it, and that gold coin is worth 1, 000$. They just bought 1, 000$ gold coin for 10$ because their perception was, hey, it's a coffee mug. They didn't perceive the value of the gold coin at the bottom. They're not buying the true value, they're only buying the value they know about.  How do we use this information? Well, it means to us that we have to be marketing and selling the true value of our product. Because if we're not communicating our value well to our buyers, they're not using it as they make decisions on should they buy our product or not, and how much would they be willing to pay for it. 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/

This one is the King of Hearts from the Impact Pricing card deck.  We often think about, what is value? And we think of value-based pricing, it's what's a customer or buyer willing to pay. And so, their willingness to pay has everything to do with how they perceive the value of our product. So, what is that value?  Well, it turns out nobody actually wants to buy your product. What they really want to buy are solutions to their problems. And so, how do we think about that? If we want to think about value, let's start by thinking about what's the problem, or problems, our buyers are really facing.  When we deeply understand that and we can articulate that back to the buyer, oftentimes, they can't articulate it, we build great relationships. We resonate with them. And then we can start talking, hey, if you solve this problem, what kind of results might you expect?  And when they can articulate those results and we put them in numerical format, some kind of quantity, then we can usually use business acumen in a B2B space to say, great, here's how much additional profit that would generate for you. Or even better than that, ask them, how much additional profit do we think that would generate for you? And maybe we hold their hand while they do the math.  But regardless, the point of this whole meme is that value always comes back to, my buyer has a problem, they want to solve the problem, and what's the result they're trying to achieve when they solve this problem. 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/  

This one is the King of Spades from the Impact Pricing card deck.  Of course there's no such thing as a commodity. Well, many salespeople, many business people think they're selling a commodity. And what that really means is that they just have to charge the same price that everybody else charges. But is that really true? In my view of the world, if you're charging the exact same price, that means you're not adding any value. Why would I buy from you versus somebody else? And in truth, there are ways that you can add value to almost anything.  For example, if you were to go to two different vendors of gold coins online today, you'll find they're not identical prices. But isn't gold a commodity? Well, maybe it's approximately the same price, but there's a difference in price based on the service level of the vendor. Based on something that they're giving above and beyond. Maybe it's free shipping. Maybe it's storage. Maybe it's the niceness of the salespeople.  Regardless of what it is, there's something there that says, Hey, I get to charge a little bit more than my competition because my product, my service, something is better. And what we need to do, even if we're selling a true commodity, something that is physically identical to somebody else's, we can differentiate it through other means. So, we should always be focused on the fact that we are not selling a commodity.  In fact, my view of the world is, if you're claiming that you sell a commodity, then we don't need you as a salesperson. And we don't need you as a product manager. Because pretty much everybody has the same thing, why would we need you to help us? So, accept that fact and drive hard, what's different? Where's your differentiation? What can you do that's better so that you can charge a higher 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/

GTM Disrupted host Mike Smart grabs a few minutes with Mark Stiving, Ph.D., and Chief Pricing Educator of Impact Pricing. They do a dive deep into the world of B2B SaaS pricing and sales strategies. Mark shares insights on the evolving dynamics of pricing in the SaaS industry and how market segmentation, product packaging, and pricing metrics play a pivotal role. Mark sheds light on key concepts of his latest book “Selling Value: How to Win More Deals at Higher Prices.” This episode gives valuable takeaways including: 1. Segmentation power in pricing strategy 2. How to price with precision 3. SaaS companies that price with success Mike and Mark discuss how to price strategically to address growth and retention challenges in B2B SaaS companies. Mark's Bio Mark is an educator at heart and a pricing expert by education and experience. He helps companies win more business at higher prices by delivering programs to help executives and employees create, communicate, and capture more value. For 30 years, Mark has led, coached, and taught businesses to extract more of the value they create. He has driven company-wide pricing initiatives worth hundreds of millions of dollars in incremental profit and started and sold three companies. Mark writes about pricing and value. In his most recent book: Selling Value: How to Win More Deals at Higher Prices, Mark takes his years of pricing expertise and applies it to sales with some surprising insights. To learn more about Mark to go https://www.linkedin.com/in/stiving/ Or email Mark: mark@impactpricing.com.

This one is the Ace of Clubs from the Impact Pricing card deck.  Nobody cares about your product. Let's use an example. Let's pretend that you're in the marketplace for a new car, and you're thinking to yourself, Hey, I could go buy a Tesla or some other electric car, or I could buy a more traditional gas powered car.  And so, are you really focused on what are the features of the electricity, of the batteries? Are you really focused on, Hey, if I buy electric then I have electric. You actually don't care.  Here's what you might care about. You might care about the fact that electric cars, especially Teslas, have amazing acceleration. They come off the line super quickly. You may care about the fact that you're not burning fossil fuels and you're not polluting your city. These are things that you value.  But you know what you don't care about? You don't care about the fact that it's electricity or if it's gas. You care about the things it does for you. How it impacts your life, how it impacts your world, how it impacts your self perception. These are all things you value. And so, when we're selling a car, are we going to sell, Hey, this is an electric car. Or are we going to sell, Hey, this is really fast. Or, Hey, this really helps the environment, and don't you want to be environmentally conscious.  In the end, buyers buy value. They really don't care about your product. 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 Impact Pricing playing 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/  

This one is the Ace of Diamonds from the Impact Pricing card deck.  Value-based pricing truly is a never ending journey. Think about what it means. It means we're going to charge what a customer is willing to pay. But you can't read your customer's mind. You have no idea exactly how much someone's willing to pay you. And so we can make decisions inside our company to get us closer and closer to that number. We can do experiments. We can do interviews. We can, by the way, sell more value, communicate value better, increase that willingness to pay. And so everything we do should be focused on how much is that customer willing to pay. But because we can't read their mind, we can't be perfect. And if we can't be perfect, that means we can always get better. My recommendation is don't pretend that we have value-based pricing done. Consider value-based pricing as an attitude, it's the goal. It's the journey that we're on to get better and better at capturing more of the value we deliver to our customers. 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 Impact Pricing 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/

This one is the Ace of Hearts from the Impact Pricing card deck.  It is true, the single most profitable pricing decision any company can make is to adopt value-based pricing. Now value-based pricing is hard to do, but it has a really simple meaning. It means charge what your customers are willing to pay.  If you had the ability to read your customer's mind and you knew exactly the most that they would pay for your product, then you could charge that and you'd win the deal. And you couldn't have won it at a higher price. And if you charged a lower price, then you left money on the table. So that's absolutely the optimal approach.  Of course, if our salespeople do a better job at communicating value, then we could increase how much our customers are willing to pay. So this isn't the whole deal, but understand the concept is, we want to be able to charge what our customers are willing to pay. And to do that, it's really an attitude inside our company.  We should be thinking instead of, hey, we charge based on our costs and we charge based on our time. We charge based on the fact that prices or costs went up. All of these things can impact how much a customer is willing to pay, but the single thing that should be driving our pricing decisions is thinking really hard about the willingness to pay of our buyers. 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/

How much is my product worth - and what is my customer willing to pay? Every entrepreneur asks these questions at some point in their small business journey. Mark Stiving, Chief Pricing Educator of Impact Pricing, joins Andrea with insights on:(2:00) How to think about pricing your product or service.(02:58) How to figure out how much your customer is willing to pay.(04:46) Should you start pricing your products at a higher price?(06:04) How to grow a subscription model and why it's beneficial.(07:51) How to remain competitive while still growing.(09:21) What are valuables and how can they help your business grow?—Click HERE to leave us a message!By submitting your voicemail, you're granting us permission to use the recording in episodes of This is Small Business. Please note, voicemails will not receive direct responses. For help with other questions to Amazon unrelated to this show, you can reach out to Amazon's customer service team at amazon.com/contact-us.

This one is the Ace of Spades from the Impact Pricing card deck.  First, companies really do exist to create value for customers.  Think about what you do as a business. Everything you do is to get a customer to pay you money. And the only reason a customer would ever pay you money is if you are delivering more value to them than they're receiving. And so, our entire company needs to be focused on how do we create more value for customers? How do we deliver more value? How do we communicate the value?  But we spend all this time creating, communicating value, pricing is the one thing that we do that captures the value that we're able to create and communicate. So, when a buyer chooses to buy our product, they pay the price that we're asking, and that happens to be the transaction value. That's how we capture the value of what we deliver to our customers. 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/

“Pricing fences are the implementation methodology around how we do price segmentation,” Mark Stiving   In this episode of Pragmatic Product Chat, host Rebecca Kalogeris and pricing expert Mark Stiving, founder of Impact Pricing, explore the multifaceted concept of pricing fences. Together, they delve into the importance, practical application, and nuances of pricing fences.   Key Takeaways: Understand the role of pricing fences in implementing price segmentation Learn how pricing fences can be applied in different scenarios Discover the underlying principles, various methodologies, and real-world applications Take Your Pricing Skills to the Next Level with Pragmatic's Pricing Course Ready to dive deeper into pricing strategies? Pragmatic's Pricing Course (PRICE) offers hands-on lessons in value-based pricing, subscription models, market differentiation, and more. In just 7.5 hours, you'll gain the skills to align pricing with your corporate strategy, optimize revenue, and outpace the competition. Don't miss this opportunity to learn from the experts.  Learn more and enroll today!

"Your customers are looking at your product and asking for discounts. The key is to demonstrate the value of your product so that they understand the price is justified."  - Mark Stiving, Chief Pricing Officer for Impact Pricing In this episode of the Pragmatic Live, host Rebecca Kalogeris, Vice President of Product at Pragmatic Institute, interviews Mark Stiving, Ph.D., Chief Pricing Officer for Impact Pricing, who shares six ways to raise product prices effectively.  They discuss pricing strategies such as focusing on products that are add-ons, using market segmentation to adjust prices, and creating a new product version by taking away some features and charging a lower price. These strategies can help companies increase revenue without causing too much disruption or risking losing customers. The conversation contains valuable insights and practical tips to help professionals elevate their products, company, and career. Tune in to this episode to learn more about effective pricing strategies and take your product management skills to the next level. Do you want to learn how to be more market-driven? Enroll in Foundations You'll learn how to understand the market and its problems, use that knowledge to build and sell products people want to buy, and master the Pragmatic Framework to bring successful products to market. Learn More

Mark Stiving is the Founder and Chief Pricing Educator at Impact Pricing LLC, as well as the host of the podcast Impact Pricing and author of the book Selling Value. Today, Mark talks about what value is and how it relates to both buyers and sellers. He digs into how sellers must be keen in determining if a buyer is in a will I or which one buying decision. He defines the different types of values such as inherent value, relative value, and economic value, and says that understanding each is important to sell better from your buyer's perspective. Mark also shares the 4 value-based characteristics that buyers and sellers should look for and the concept that buyers trade off price for value. HIGHLIGHT QUOTES Defining inherent and economic value for a business - Mark: "Inherent value is what's the value of solving the problem? If you're gonna go buy something, I don't care what it is, as a consumer, as a business, if you're gonna go buy something, the reason that you're buying it is that you believe it has more value than the price you have to pay for it."  "If we go back to economic value, as a company, I'm only gonna buy something for a hundred thousand if it makes me at least a hundred thousand more in profit, preferably about a million more in profit, but it better be at least a hundred thousand or I'm not gonna spend that." Relative value shows what you can do that your competitor cannot - Mark: "What is the value of my product relative to my competitor's product? What are the things I do differently? What are the problems that I can solve that they can't solve? What's the dollar, the economic value of the problems I can solve that they can't solve?" The difference between WILL I and WHICH ONE decision - Mark: "Typically, when a buyer buys something, we make two different purchase decisions. The first decision we make is, will I buy something in this category? Am I gonna buy a new car? Yes. No. Well, if the answer's no, great. I'm not shopping. As soon as I say yes, then I switch to, well, which one am I gonna go buy?"  "And now I'm shopping BMW, Porsche, Lexus, you know, whatever the brands are that I might consider and the styles inside there. So I'm now making a which one decision. When people are making a which one decision, they're very price sensitive. When people are making the will I decision, price isn't driving that decision. Something else is." Find out more about Mark in the links below: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stiving/ Website: https://impactpricing.com/ Email: mark@impactpricing.com Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/impact-pricing/id1449435549 More on Andy: Connect on LinkedIn Get Andy's new book "Sell Without Selling Out" on Amazon Learn more at AndyPaul.com Sponsored by: Revenue.io | Unlock exponential growth with an AI-powered RevOps platform | Revenue.io Scratchpad | The fastest way to update Salesforce, take sales notes, and stay on top of to-dos | Scratchpad.com Blueboard | World's leading experiential rewards & recognition platform | Blueboard.com Explore the Revenue.io Podcast Universe: Sales Enablement Podcast Selling with Purpose Podcast RevOps Podcast

Mark Stiving is a widely recognized pricing expert and marketing pro who teaches companies how to boost revenues and realize their true value. He is the host of the Impact Pricing podcast, helping people win more business at higher prices through value, and has authored three books which all revolve around pricing. Ron Baker is the Founder of VeraSage Institute, dedicated to helping professional knowledge firms bury the billable hour and trash timesheets. He has published seven books around the topics of business and pricing, and also is a radio talk-show host for The Soul of Enterprise. In this episode, Ron engages in a pricing metric discussion with Mark as they share their insights on cost-plus, hourly pricing, and subscriptions.   Why you have to check out today's podcast: Deep dive into discussions about different pricing metrics, focusing on cost-plus, hourly, and subscriptions Find out why putting time in your service and charging by the hour isn't an ideal way to charge clients Understand why providing value is better than charging hourly or using cost-plus pricing   “There's always going to be people and businesses that use cost-plus and other inferior methods like hourly. They're going to be out there, but they're just not where my focus is. My focus is on the other end, trying to help people price and create more value so they can capture more value. I'm not interested in working for people that want to price in an inferior manner, because I think that means they're not providing enough value to you.” – Ron Baker   Topics Covered: 01:17 – Mark's five top reasons/times when cost-plus pricing makes sense 04:36 – Reacting to Mark's five reasons / doing value-based pricing along with cost-plus pricing 08:13 – Pricing in micro and macro level businesses: cost-plus vs value-based 11:37 – Why Ron refuses to pay by hourly billing + how auto mechanics price their work 16:24 – Talking about Ron and Colin's difference in perspectives 18:04 – How Mark charges clients ‘hourly' and what Ron has to say about it 23:04 – Discussion around subscription + today's topic in general: pricing metric 27:25 – Mark's tax guy + why hourly billing isn't ideal for Ron 31:17 – On announcing a price increase: Do something nice for your customers   Key Takeaways: “If I could categorize everything I just said, I'd categorize it in two categories. One is sometimes, customers demand it – so that would be Apple and government, and sometimes, it's just more efficient as a business to do cost plus than it is to do value-based pricing.” – Mark Stiving “In the world of cost plus and efficiencies, one could make the argument. I'm not saying this is true by any means, but one could make the argument. If I was in a very low margin, highly competitive business, it might be less expensive and more efficient to just do cost plus than to spend time trying to figure out what each customer's willing to pay me.” – Mark Stiving “One of my favorite sayings is customers hate price increases, but they'll hate it a little bit less if you blame increasing costs.” – Mark Stiving “The billable hour is what I'm crusading against, but on a larger perspective, the billable hour is cost-plus pricing.” – Ron Baker “At a macro level, there's no way that costs justify price or determine price. Can't be. Otherwise, no business would ever go bankrupt.” – Ron Baker “If somebody really did abuse you, then why would you ever work with that person?” – Ron Baker   People / Resources Mentioned: The Soul of Enterprise:https://www.thesoulofenterprise.com/ Colin Jasper:https://www.linkedin.com/in/colin-jasper-7a401213/ Win Keep Grow:https://www.amazon.com/Win-Keep-Grow-Accelerate-Subscription/dp/1631954784 Time's Up:https://www.amazon.com/Times-Up-Subscription-Business-Professional/dp/1119893526 Marco Bertini:https://marcobertini.com/ The Ends Game:https://marcobertini.com/book/   Connect with Ron Baker: LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/ronbaker1/   Connect with Mark Stiving:    LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/stiving/ Email: mark@impactpricing.com  

Many CPAs struggle with pricing. Some have moved to flat rate or subscription pricing, and some still bill by the hour. For CPAs who are used to getting compensated for time and effort, it can be difficult to learn how to see value and to learn how to price accordingly. But if they don't make the transition, they risk underpricing themselves in perpetuity and having to keep working long hours to make up for unearned revenue.  To talk with me about this problem is my guest, Mark Stiving.  Mark is a pricing educator and advisor, the host of the Impact Pricing podcast and the owner of Impact Pricing, where he teaches clients how to win, keep, and grow customers to drive higher revenue. In Mark's most recent book, Selling Value, he shares his expertise to help companies win more business at higher prices.  Highlights: — “Salespeople need to know how people value products.”  — “Our buyers buy products because they want to solve problems.” — “The salesperson's job is to help the buyer understand the true amount of value they're going to get from the product.” — “Buyers who don't believe that you understand their problems won't listen to your solutions.” — “If we truly believe that we're going to deliver more value, we should make sure they understand the value before we give them the price.”   ***Want one piece of business strategy delivered daily to your inbox?*** Subscribe here: https://www.geraldinecarter.com/subscribe-main-list Connect with MARK: Website: https://impactpricing.com/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stiving/ Email: mark@impactpricing.com Episode mentions: 125 Value and Segmented Pricing for CPAs with Pricing Expert Mark Stiving, PhD https://www.businessstrategyforcpas.com/125 153 A Formula for Quantifying Value with Mark Stiving, PhD https://www.businessstrategyforcpas.com/153 172 Subscription Pricing Strategies with Mark Stiving, PhD https://businessstrategyforcpas.com/172 Mark's book: Selling Value: How to Win More Deals at Higher Prices  https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B09Y8V7FWX/