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Today we take soundbites from 2024 episodes on the topic of Sales and Marketing. This includes topics on 4 Types of Capital, Recessions, Selling Value, and much more. Guests include: Greg Crabtree author of Simple Numbers, George Urvari of Knowledge Tree Consulting, Mike Andes of Augusta Lawn Care and Copilot CRM, Rob Murray of Intrigue Media, Shawn van Dyke author of Profit First for Contractors, and Tom Reber of The Contractor Fight. Sponsors: Knowledge Tree Consulting Cycle CPA
Selling Value to Advertisers Fixated on Price with Sales Training Coach Ryan Dohrn. Ad sales training and media sales training with media sales training coach Ryan Dohrn every month. 360adsales.com/ nichemediaevents.com/ ryandohrn.com/
Selling Value to Advertisers Fixated on Price with Sales Training Coach Ryan Dohrn. More about Ryan online at RyanDohrn.com . Sales training, sales tips, and sales advice in one podcast. If you like Brian Tracy, Grant Cardone, Jeffrey Gitomer, David Hoffeld, Dan Waldschmidt, or Gary Vaynerchuk you will love this podcast too. For more actionable advice and to send in your questions, email ryan@ryandohrn.com. Subscribe and stay tuned for more tips on sales and marketing! 00:28 Understanding Value-Based Selling 01:17 Three-Step Process to Value-Based Selling 02:04 Practical Examples of Value-Based Selling 04:34 Exercise: Identifying Features and Benefits 09:23 Using AI in Sales 13:33 Effective Email Subject Lines 17:27 Conclusion and Final Thoughts
Selling Value to Advertisers Fixated on Price with Sales Training Coach Ryan Dohrn. More about Ryan online at RyanDohrn.com . Sales training, sales tips, and sales advice in one podcast. If you like Brian Tracy, Grant Cardone, Jeffrey Gitomer, David Hoffeld, Dan Waldschmidt, or Gary Vaynerchuk you will love this podcast too. For more actionable advice and to send in your questions, email ryan@ryandohrn.com. Subscribe and stay tuned for more tips on sales and marketing! 00:28 Understanding Value-Based Selling 01:17 Three-Step Process to Value-Based Selling 02:04 Practical Examples of Value-Based Selling 04:34 Exercise: Identifying Features and Benefits 09:23 Using AI in Sales 13:33 Effective Email Subject Lines 17:27 Conclusion and Final Thoughts
Mark Stiving author of Selling Value, How to Win More Deals at Higher Prices. Most know they're supposed to sell value, but don't know how. Mark discusses how buyers discover value and how salespeople can help.
This week, the conversation with Tom Reber, podcast host of The Contractor Fight, focuses on the challenges faced by contractors and the solutions to overcome them. The main themes include the importance of charging what you're worth, the need for consistent recruiting and hiring practices, reframing negative beliefs, and creating a positive company culture. Other topics discussed include the impact of low prices on quality, the value of paying employees well, and the significance of building relationships with your team. We discuss the importance of prioritizing and investing in employees in order to build a successful contracting business. Tom shares his experience navigating the recession in 2008 and how his company came out more profitable by prioritizing the well-being and satisfaction of their employees. He emphasizes the need for contractors to treat their employees with respect and dignity, providing them with flexibility and opportunities for growth. Ryan adds that employees stay with companies because of good bosses who help them achieve their own goals. They discuss the significance of creating a positive employee experience and how it impacts customer satisfaction and business growth.Keywordscontractors, challenges, solutions, pricing, recruiting, hiring, reframing, company culture, quality, employee compensation, relationships, contracting business, recession, employee satisfaction, employee loyalty, leadership, employee experience, customer experience, business growthTakeawaysContractors often struggle because they don't charge what they're worth and lack training in areas like sales and finance.Consistent recruiting and hiring practices are essential for building a strong team.Reframing negative beliefs and focusing on the opportunities available can lead to success.Providing fair compensation and creating a positive company culture are crucial for attracting and retaining top talent.Building relationships with employees and understanding their needs and aspirations is key to their loyalty and commitment. Prioritizing and investing in employees is crucial for building a successful contracting business.A positive employee experience translates into better customer satisfaction and business growth.Strong leadership and intentional culture are essential for creating a thriving work environment.Building a strong personal life and taking care of oneself is key to being a successful leader in business.Sound Bites"I just see a huge lack of consistency with recruiting and you know, they hire when they need people instead of hiring all the time or recruiting all the time and looking to build their team.""It's time for contractors to start living in gated communities and not just working in them."Chapters07:12 Creating a Positive Company Culture15:55 Navigating the Recession: Prioritizing People28:57 The Impact of Leadership on Employee Satisfaction35:35 Selling Value and Growing Your BusinessConnect With Tom:Website: https://thecontractorfight.comLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tomreber/ Support Titans of the Trades: If you found this episode insightful, please subscribe, share, and leave a review for Titans of the Trades. Your support goes a long way in helping us bring more impactful discussions your way.
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.
It's time to take the pressure off and simplify marketing in your business. Somewhere along the way, we overcomplicated marketing and we lost sight of what its true purpose is. Sure, a pretty photo or aesthetically pleasing feed on Instagram still has a place, but without a marketing strategy behind it, you won't be able to convey the value of your work or services, attract aligned clients that you actually want to work with, or know what actions to take to get your brand out there. Let's change all that. Today, you're in for a very special episode as my friend, my client, and marketing extraordinaire, Amy Edwards from Markedly is on the podcast. Amy is the founder of Markedly - a marketing consultancy for designers, architects and creatives. They're all about helping people bring the passion and creativity they have for their work into their marketing. Amy's passionate about helping creatives - and their work - be seen and valued by all who use it. Take a look behind the curtain of marketing as Amy shares her wealth of knowledge on how to get back to the foundations of your marketing, what value-based marketing is, how to nurture your audience in the online space, and how she intertwines life and business. __________ It's time to invest in YOU. Come and join me on Nurture: The Retreat, an intimate retreat for 8 wonderful women in business. It's an opportunity to pause, reflect and connect in a beautiful, serene setting that can only be described as magical ✨ Nurture: The Retreat has launched and your spot is waiting for you! __________ Where you can find and connect with Amy Edwards: Website: themarkedly.com.au Instagram: @marked.ly The Content Curator Program is relaunching this September. Find out more and get your name on the waitlist here. __________ I'd love to connect with you and support you
Today we are joined by author of Profit First for Contractors Shawn Van Dyke to talk about price, value, and systems. Sponsors: Cycle CPA How to Hardscape Headquarters --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/howtohardscape/message
Here are 4 ways to overcome price objections: 1) Compared to what 2) Cost of Inaction 3) Price versus Cost 4) Down selling
This podcast interview focuses on do's & don'ts that matter if you want your Service business to become successful in SaaS. My guest is Slava Libman, CEO of FTD Solutions. Slava is a driven innovator with +25 years of international experience and thought leader in the space of environmental sustainability in industrial facilities. He has a PhD in Environmental Engineering, and has spent his entire career focused on water technology and its impact on the industry. He leads teams in Ultra Pure Water, industrial water treatment, and facilities technology development, thereby challenging conventional thinking to drive progress. In May 2017 he founded FTD Solutions - a Digital Twin platform with embedded expertise to enable new standards of sustainability in industrial facilities Their mission: To redefine the way these industrial facilities approach solving problems and drive sustainability performance. And this triggered me, and hence I invited Slava to my podcast. We explore the seven-year journey of transitioning from a consulting firm to a pioneering B2B SaaS company. Slava shared his big lessons learned on the importance of aligning product development with market needs and the sequencing and focusing of his go-to-market strategy. He elaborates how traction changed when they shifted from a transaction-oriented approach to a value-/outcome based approach. Last but not least he shares how emphasizing mission, principles, and value helped with alignment and keeping the organization lean. Here's one of his quotes When we try to help companies minimize their expenses, they ask the question, 'Okay, so what does your enrollment mean from the expense point of view?' So, our focus is on value creation. We believe that if we can create significant value for our customers, then the question of monetization and expenses will not be a roadblock. And in reality, that's the case. During this interview, you will learn four things: Why he decided to focus the business on the most complex type of customer segment first and how that paid off. Why it's so beneficial to search for unique dynamics at your customers when seeking ways to differentiate your SaaS product. What approach he's using so that everyone in the company lives the company values - every single day. Why he does't deal with weaknesses in his business. For more information about the guest from this week: Slava Libman Website: FTD Solutions Subscribe to the Daily SaaS Reflection Get my free, 1 min daily reflection on shaping a B2B SaaS business no one can ignore. Subscribe here Yes, it's actually daily. And yes, people actually stay subscribed (Just see what peer B2B SaaS CEOs say) My promise: It's short. To the point. Inspiring. And valuable. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Are you leading with the dream outcome, the likelihood of success, the price, or something else? Your customers want something high quality, guaranteed, fast, and easy. Hear the key ideas of Alex Hormozi's value equation from "$100M Offers", a helpful concept any business person or marketer can use regardless of your industry.(0:29) Hormozi's value equation:Dream outcome x likelihood of successdivided bytime delay x perceived effort= value.(1:30) Most brands get the top half of the value equation right.The hard part is the bottom. (Hence "easy top, hard bottom".)(4:24) When you should publish pricingJanuary Top 5: Every Tuesday this month, we're re-airing the top 5 most downloaded episodes of this podcast. Today concludes the mini-series, with this #1 most downloaded episode of the year. This episode originally aired 8/6/2023.My favorite podcast tools:Riverside: record audio or video podcast: emilybinder.com/riversideDescript: edit audio or video like a Word doc. emilybinder.com/descriptPodcast gear list (mic / camera / lighting): wealthvoice.ai/gearThinkersOne Videos: Send a 2-minute video kudos, inspo, or invite (like a Cameo). Order a Zoom drop-in or virtual keynote: emilybinder.com/thinkersonePodcast home: emilybinder.com/podcastBook a coaching session: emilybinder.com/callFollow & connect:My website | Beetle Moment Marketing | LinkedIn | X | Instagram | TikTok | YouTube | Get email updates Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Find Josh Robbins at: https://vaultpromos.com/
Do you know you'll be set on sale success by selling based on value? After confidence, the second most important thing in a sale is value. In this episode of The Agency Blueprint, I explain how to successfully sell based on value with three major strategies. I describe how to take your prospective clients through a third-party selling model, which allow them to see themselves in the position of a previous client. Don't miss this episode to learn how to win the experience game by wrapping up all the information you collect during the sales call and sell to the prospect through a proposal. Key Questions: [01:19] How much time do you spend listening vs. talking on a sales call with a prospect? [05:02] How do you provide valuable advice willingly during a sales conversation? What You'll Discover: [01:19] The importance of active listening when on a call to build trust and a long-lasting relationship. [05:02] How to provide advice to your prospect by showing them how their problem can be solved. [08:33] Third-party selling model – selling to a prospective client through the experience of a previous client. [12:55] How to wrap up all the information you collected and sell through a proposal.
This one is the Joker 2 from the Selling Value card deck. Almost always when we're dealing with B2B customers, B2B business, value can be measured in additional profit. And that's one of the things I love about B2B business and pricing, is because we know our price has to be related to how much additional profit will they make when they use our product, or when they use our product relative to a competitor's product. But it turns out, sometimes, buyers inside our customers don't really care about profit. Imagine that you're selling a piece of medical equipment and you're talking to a doctor in a big hospital. Now the doctor actually doesn't care how much additional profit you're going to make the hospital. There's an administrator someplace who cares a lot about how much additional profit you're going to make the hospital. And so, we still need to understand the profit side of this conversation. But from that doctor's perspective, they couldn't care less about profit. What do they care about? They care about the quality of the care for the patient. They care about efficacy rates. They care about how long the procedure might take. Things that really affect their world and things that matter to them. What we want to be able to do then, is as we go through our value conversations with a doctor, put value in the perspective of what that doctor cares about. So, it's not always profit, a lot of times it is, but we need to understand what each buyer truly cares about and talk about value from that perspective. 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 Joker 1 from the Selling Value card deck. You heard earlier that there are really three types of buyer's value journeys. Those happen to be analytical, relationship, and trust. In the analytical relationship, there's typically a lower level person who's doing a lot of side by side comparison between your product and a competitor's product, and our buyers are by far the most price sensitive in that situation. Or we could go all the way to the trust journey, and that is where they come to us. They ask us, "Hey, what do you do? How do you help us solve our problems?" They never even look at a competitive alternative. And in that situation, they're the least price sensitive. The relationship journey is the one in the middle, where people would come to us and say, "Hey, how do you help us solve our problem?" We guide them. They build a great relationship. They really like us. And then they say, "Yeah, but we have to go look at competitive alternatives." We've built up enough goodwill and probably tweaked their thinking that we have the competitive advantage. And so, they're not going to be as price sensitive as they would be if they were in a relationship journey. But they're still more price sensitive than it was just a trust journey. So, you could think of these three different journeys (the analytical, relationship, and trust) is how our customers go learn about the value of our products. But at the same time, it's how price sensitive are they going to be when it's time to negotiate the price. It's really important that we understand which journey each buyer is on. We hope you enjoyed this example of Pricing Table Topics. What you just heard was done without a script. If you want to get better at speaking about pricing and value, grab a deck of our cards, pick a card, read the saying, and then talk for one to two minutes about what that card says. You'll become a better speaker and expert. If you have any questions or feedback, please email me, mark@impactpricing.com. Now, go make an impact. Connect with Mark Stiving: Email: mark@impactpricing.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stiving/
This one is the 2 of Diamonds from the Selling Value card deck. I'm often asked who should own pricing, and one of the departments that often comes up is finance. And of course, I'm not a huge fan of finance owning pricing. And the biggest reason is finance doesn't truly understand the value of our products. Usually that's going to be someone in product management, product marketing, or even sales, which I'm not a fan of them owning pricing either. However, finance so much wants to be involved with pricing. It's so crucial to their projections. It's so crucial to company growth, which they care a lot about. They really want to be involved with pricing, even though they don't understand value. So, how do we get them involved in pricing? That's pretty simple. Finance has a bunch of quant people. They have access to every piece of data inside the entire company, and they have the desire to make us or help us do better in our pricing. And so, let's figure out what are the KPIs, the key performance indicators, that we really want to track inside our company. And let's ask finance to help track those, keep us on track, make sure that we don't see any anomalies. We know what the trends are. Finance is a fantastic department to help us manage our KPIs. We hope you enjoyed this example of Pricing Table Topics. What you just heard was done without a script. If you want to get better at speaking about pricing and value, grab a deck of our cards, pick a card, read the saying, and then talk for one to two minutes about what that card says. You'll become a better speaker and expert. If you have any questions or feedback, please email me, mark@impactpricing.com. Now, go make an impact. Connect with Mark Stiving: Email: mark@impactpricing.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stiving/
This one is the 2 of Clubs from the Selling Value card deck. Salespeople are going to use every single tool they have available to them. Absolutely, they're going to use value selling if we've taught them how, and they understand, and they're doing a great job. But even if they're using value selling, it's very easy for them to offer discounts. And there's this attitude or belief that offering discounts helps close a deal faster. And maybe it does. Maybe when a customer or a buyer asks you for a discount, it takes longer to say no and explain why. And we could have just said yes and close the deal and we're done. Wouldn't that be great if it worked that way? But here's the key. Every dollar that we discount comes straight off of our profit. We still have to cover all of our costs, and so our margin just got shrunk by more than our revenue did on a percentage basis. So, if we want our salespeople to not rely on price, we have to make it painful for salespeople to offer discounts. How do you do that? Create a compensation plan that as they give bigger discounts, the percentage or the size of their deal goes down faster than the revenue goes down because salespeople are incentivized to close deals as fast as possible. And we want to make sure they're incentivized to close deals quickly at the highest possible price. We hope you enjoyed this example of Pricing Table Topics. What you just heard was done without a script. If you want to get better at speaking about pricing and value, grab a deck of our cards, pick a card, read the saying, and then talk for one to two minutes about what that card says. You'll become a better speaker and expert. If you have any questions or feedback, please email me, mark@impactpricing.com. Now, go make an impact. Connect with Mark Stiving: Email: mark@impactpricing.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stiving/
This one is the 2 of Hearts from the Selling Value card deck. When you get an RFP, you have to decide, are you going to bid or not. Believe it or not, that's actually a decision you get to make. You do not have to respond to every RFP that comes through. And my advice, if you are not involved in the creation of the RFP, or at the very least, if you cannot have conversations with the decision makers or executives of the group who created that RFP, you have a very low chance of winning. And so, the time and energy that you spend replying to the RFP makes you feel like you're doing work, but odds are really good you're not going to win that deal. There's somebody else that has already built a relationship with the client, understands exactly what the client wants, is able to create a response to that RFP that fits them almost perfectly. They've built the rapport so the client's going to give them the benefit of the doubt no matter what. If you're going in blind to an RFP, you're probably not going to win. Let's test that. From here on out, every time you respond to an RFP, just keep track. Did I help write this? Do I know the leaders? Do I get conversations with the executives? And if the answers are no, and you go ahead and bid, see how many of those you actually win. And I will bet you the percentage of those is so low you realize it just isn't worth your time to bid RFPs where you're not already involved. We hope you enjoyed this example of Pricing Table Topics. What you just heard was done without a script. If you want to get better at speaking about pricing and value, grab a deck of our cards, pick a card, read the saying, and then talk for one to two minutes about what that card says. You'll become a better speaker and expert. If you have any questions or feedback, please email me, mark@impactpricing.com. Now, go make an impact. Connect with Mark Stiving: Email: mark@impactpricing.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stiving/
Mark Stiving is my guest today and he is a pricing expert. What does pricing have to do with The Courage of a Leader? It turns out, quite a lot!The secret to effectively pricing your products and services is the same one leaders can use to clearly define and communicate the value of their teams' work.Are you intrigued? I was!About the Guest:Mark Stiving, PhD, MBA, is a widely recognized pricing expert and marketing pro who teaches companies how to boost revenues and realize their true value. With 25+ years' experience in price segmentation, pricing product portfolios and visionary pricing, Mark's analytical skills provide specific direction and quantifiable results. Sought after as a trusted advisor, Mark has consulted, trained and/or coached hundreds of companies including Cisco, Procter and Gamble, Grimes Aerospace, Splunk, and Crowdstrike.Mark uses a creative but pragmatic approach to help large businesses and entrepreneurs untangle confusion about pricing. All businesses can benefit from Mark's value-based pricing strategies to capture their true worth, from start-ups to seasoned enterprises.Mark is an award-winning speaker and the author of Impact Pricing: Your Blueprint for Driving Profits and his latest book Win Keep Grow: How to Price and Package to Accelerate Your Subscription Business The best way to reach Mark is on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/stiving/ or via email mark@impactpricing.com About the Host:Amy L. Riley is an internationally renowned speaker, author and consultant. She has over 2 decades of experience developing leaders at all levels. Her clients include Cisco Systems, Deloitte and Barclays.As a trusted leadership coach and consultant, Amy has worked with hundreds of leaders one-on-one, and thousands more as part of a group, to fully step into their leadership, create amazing teams and achieve extraordinary results. Amy's most popular keynote speeches are:The Courage of a Leader: The Power of a Leadership LegacyThe Courage of a Leader: Create a Competitive Advantage with Sustainable, Results-Producing Cross-System CollaborationThe Courage of a Leader: Accelerate Trust with Your Team, Customers and CommunityThe Courage of a Leader: How to Build a Happy and Successful Hybrid Team Her new book is a #1 international best-seller and is entitled, The Courage of a Leader: How to Inspire, Engage and Get Extraordinary Results.www.courageofaleader.comhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/amyshoopriley/ Resources mentioned in the episodeMade to Stick by Chip Heath and Dan Heath - https://heathbrothers.com/books/made-to-stick/Selling Value, How to Win More Deals at Higher Prices - https://impactpricing.com/books/The Inspire Your Team assessment (the courage assessment): https://courageofaleader.com/inspireyourteam/ Thanks for listening!Thanks so much for listening to The Courage of a Leader podcast! If you got inspired and/or got valuable leadership techniques you can use from this episode and think that others could benefit from listening, please share using the social media buttons on this page.Do you have questions or feedback about this episode? Leave a comment in the section...
This one is the 2 of Spades from the Selling Value card deck. You've heard me talk about value conversations before, where value conversations are really the conversation we have with a customer or potential buyer, so they can determine how much additional profit they're going to make when they use your product. And that's awesome when they're only making a 'Will I' decision. Am I going to buy your product or not? Am I going to buy a product in your category or not? But what happens when they say, "Am I going to buy your product or somebody else's product?" Now what we want to do is understand our differentiation because value in that case comes from the price of our competitor's product plus the value of our differentiation. We need to determine the value of our differentiation. Or said better, we need our customers or buyers to determine the value of our differentiation. And that's what a relative value conversation is. We want to see what's our differentiation relative to our competitors, and then go through the exact same steps we would with a normal value conversation to help the buyer determine if you have this problem that this differentiator solves, what's the result you might expect? How much additional value do you think you would get? And now we're putting a dollar value on the differentiation. This is powerful when you're competing. 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 3 of Diamonds from the Selling Value card deck. The question now, as we're doing our prospecting, is to say which prospects will get the most value. We've talked in the last few weeks about finding prospects who realize they have a problem, finding prospects who we know have the problem, finding prospects who prioritize solving the problem. Now what we're saying is, let's find the prospects who get the most value out of solving that problem. When we think about it, if a customer gets a ton of value from solving the problem, they're much more likely to say yes and move forward than somebody who gets a small amount of value from solving the problem. So, one way to think about that, as a pricing expert, I'll give you a quick hint. I work with software companies, I work with hardware companies. And sure, I love working with all of them. And I could work with software companies because there's great flexibility in the way they create their products or stick features into product options, and I love that. But when you think about a hardware company, the margins for hardware companies are so small and they have real hard costs. So, if we could improve their pricing by just a little bit, the percent profitability goes up dramatically. And so I would say, from my perspective, helping hardware companies, they have higher value in solving a pricing problem than a software company does. How does it work in your business? Which of your customers get the most value out of solving the problem that you solve. 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 3 of Clubs from the Selling Value card deck. It really is easier to sell to someone who's already trying to solve a problem or realizes they have a problem and wants to go solve it. As I've mentioned previously, as a pricing expert, I believe that almost every company can use my services. Almost every company will benefit dramatically. And yet for me to go knock on a door of a company and say, "Hey, I'm a pricing expert. Would you like some help with your pricing," probably isn't going to be that fruitful because not many companies say, "Hey, I've got a pricing problem." But as soon as someone says, "Hey, I have a pricing problem." Now, what do they do? They start to look for someone who could possibly solve that problem. Maybe they go to professional pricing society meetings. Maybe they do Google searches on how to find pricing experts. Maybe they look up content and see who the experts are that are writing about it. And then they reach out to me, or to one of my competitors. But the point is, when someone reaches out to me, they've already said to themselves, "Hey, I have a pricing problem. Maybe someone can help me fix it." So, what about your business? If you know you can solve someone's problem, but they don't either know they have the problem or maybe they just know they have it but they haven't prioritized it. It isn't a big enough deal for them to go say, "Hey, I'm going to go fix that problem now." It's probably better if we can find a way to find customers who've already prioritized solving your 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/
FOUR ACTIONABLE TAKEAWAYS Offer them value instead of meetings. Frame your asks in terms of what they will get out of the meeting. If someone is on a competitor, offer insights on where that competitor may fall short. Politely illuminate things that might be a bit “off” in their business. Provide an off-ramp for the prospect by making them explain why they are willing to invest in the next step. “Where does this rank in your priorities? You have to do X, you have to do Y.” PATH TO PRESIDENT'S CLUB SVP Sales & Partnerships @ Owner Director of Revenue and Merchant Success @ Shopfiy VP Sales @ League Inc. Director, Inside Sales @ Vision Critical THE LATEST FROM 30MPC Tactic TV Toolkits & Templates Twitter YouTube Newsletter THINGS YOU CAN STEAL Prospecting: Email Templates Lavender: Sales Email Frameworks ZoomInfo: 5 Plays, 30MPC Style Prospecting: Guides Woodpecker: Email Substance & Deliverability Guide Orum: 5 Cold Call Objection Talk Tracks Owler: 4 Multi-Channel Prospecting Touchpoints Discovery & Demo Clari Copilot: In-App Objection Handling Battlecards Sales Process Clari: How to Sell to the CFO Gong: Master Class Qwilr: Multithreading Power Plays Outreach: 1 Sequence to Create and 5 Templates to Close Accord: Business Case Template Prolifiq: Relationship Mapping Playbook ONE ASK You know we feel a bit awkward asking, but if you made it this far, it would mean the world if you gave us a 5-star review. It will increase your chances of making President's Club by 227%. Okay maybe not, but we'd still really love you for it :)
This one is the 3 of Hearts from the Selling Value card deck. As you're doing your prospecting, you have to decide who you're going to reach out to for the prospecting. And since we know that buyers only buy products to solve problems that they have, what we should be thinking about is, well, where's the community or the marketplace of people that actually have this problem. So, if I were a moving company and I were trying to find companies that were trying to move, then there may be a way to say, "Hey, I want to go to commercial Realtors because I know commercial Realtors are aware of companies who are moving." And so now I can get commercial Realtors to give me potential names or customer possibilities and that's where I might go prospect. So, when you think about what your product is, you want to think about, where are the people who actually have the problem that I solve? As I mentioned last week, I'm lucky in that I think all companies have pricing problems. But notice I only talk to companies. I don't talk to consumers because consumers don't have pricing problems. Why would I ever prospect in a pool of consumers? So, prospect in that pool of buyers who you know have the problem that you can solve. 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 3 of Spades from the Selling Value card deck. Of course, salespeople, marketing people, we have to do prospecting. The question becomes, who do we look for as prospects to move into our sales funnel? Well, now that we know that people really have to solve problems, that's the reason they buy our products. The question now is, do we think it's easier to sell to people who already know they have a problem, or to people that we have to convince they have a problem? You often see advertising like this where people will say, "Hey, come solve this problem." And now what's happening is people are self-selecting and, "Oh, yeah, I've got that problem," so they're trying to find those people. On the other hand, sometimes we have to convince somebody they have a problem. I find it interesting, I used to run a company a long, long time ago, and my cell phone number still is the phone number that I had when I had that company. And I'll get calls from moving companies that the opening line is, "Hey, I heard that Home Director is moving." Well, it turns out I don't run Home Director. Home Director doesn't exist anymore. Home Director's not moving. But that was a way for them to quickly prospect and find out, "Hey, do I have a company and is the company moving?" Because if the answer that's yes, I've got a problem. And if the answer that's no, then they don't have a problem. So they're trying to figure out relatively quickly, am I somebody that they might be able to sell to or not? So think about, when you're prospecting, are you prospecting to people who already know they have a problem? Or are you looking for people and then trying to convince them they have a problem? As a pricing person, I have to tell you, I think every single company has a problem. But it's insane for me to try to go to a company and convince them they have a problem. And it is so much easier for me to work with companies who come to me because they know they have a 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/
Here is a FAQ Video on the Courses: https://youtu.be/0F7imrzjXWs Here is a deep dive into which course is best for you: https://youtu.be/JM_jgS8M-iU https://www.b2bRevenue.com - Get Your Free E-Book on How Companies make Decisions. FAQ: 1 YEAR ACCESS, PAY MONTHLY OR ANNUALLY NOT A SUBSCRIPTION OFFICE HOURS EVERY OTHER WEEK VIA ZOOM. 1 HOUR GROUP Q&A. UNLIMITED 1-ON-1'S ARE FREE AS LONG AS THEY CAN BE SHARED IN THE COURSE. 1-ON-1 ARE FULL ACCESS ON DAY ONE - NOTHING IS GATED OR TIME RELEASED. ALL CONTENT IS VIDEO BASED AND SELF PACED I RECOMMEND TAKE COURSE ONCE WITHOUT NOTES OR APPLYING IT SO YOU UNDERSTAND THE BIG PICTURE FIRST. THEN TAKE AND APPLY IT STEP BY STEP. YOU START WHEN YOU WANT AND GO AS FAST OR SLOW AS NEEDED. Email me additional questions: briangburns@me.com — SAMPLE EMAIL TO EXPENSE THE COURSE MGR, I have been listening to the brutal truth about sales podcast for X months and it speaks to the issues we face. They currently offer a course that includes video instruction, group Q&A and One-on-One coaching. I'm committed to my own personal development and would like your help in expensing the course. It would pay for itself if I closed only one new deal of $X value. Please let me know by Friday if I can move forward with this 1 year course. Thanks, ME Here are some student interviews from the courses: ———————————————————————————————————— Audible 30 day Free Trial: http://www.audibletrial.com/BrutalTruth Listen to The Sales Questions PodCast: https://itun.es/i67d3Ry Listen to The B2B Revenue Leadership Show: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/b2b-revenue-leadership-show/id1174976428?mt=2 Twitter: @briangburns LinkedIn: Brian G. Burns Facebook: Brian Burns YouTube: Brian Burns SALES PODCAS
The Brutal Truth about B2B Sales & Selling - The show focuses on Hacking the Sales Process
Here is a FAQ Video on the Courses: https://youtu.be/0F7imrzjXWs Here is a deep dive into which course is best for you: https://youtu.be/JM_jgS8M-iU https://www.b2bRevenue.com - Get Your Free E-Book on How Companies make Decisions. FAQ: 1 YEAR ACCESS, PAY MONTHLY OR ANNUALLY NOT A SUBSCRIPTION OFFICE HOURS EVERY OTHER WEEK VIA ZOOM. 1 HOUR GROUP Q&A. UNLIMITED 1-ON-1'S ARE FREE AS LONG AS THEY CAN BE SHARED IN THE COURSE. 1-ON-1 ARE FULL ACCESS ON DAY ONE - NOTHING IS GATED OR TIME RELEASED. ALL CONTENT IS VIDEO BASED AND SELF PACED I RECOMMEND TAKE COURSE ONCE WITHOUT NOTES OR APPLYING IT SO YOU UNDERSTAND THE BIG PICTURE FIRST. THEN TAKE AND APPLY IT STEP BY STEP. YOU START WHEN YOU WANT AND GO AS FAST OR SLOW AS NEEDED. Email me additional questions: briangburns@me.com — SAMPLE EMAIL TO EXPENSE THE COURSE MGR, I have been listening to the brutal truth about sales podcast for X months and it speaks to the issues we face. They currently offer a course that includes video instruction, group Q&A and One-on-One coaching. I'm committed to my own personal development and would like your help in expensing the course. It would pay for itself if I closed only one new deal of $X value. Please let me know by Friday if I can move forward with this 1 year course. Thanks, ME Here are some student interviews from the courses: ———————————————————————————————————— Audible 30 day Free Trial: http://www.audibletrial.com/BrutalTruth Listen to The Sales Questions PodCast: https://itun.es/i67d3Ry Listen to The B2B Revenue Leadership Show: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/b2b-revenue-leadership-show/id1174976428?mt=2 Twitter: @briangburns LinkedIn: Brian G. Burns Facebook: Brian Burns YouTube: Brian Burns SALES PODCAS
This one is the 4 of Diamonds from the Selling Value card deck. Wow, walk away from a negotiation, ouch! We're essentially saying, "No, we're not going to negotiate anymore. Take the deal that we've given you or not. Totally up to you." And what happens when we do this? First off, we're at risk of losing the deal, and that's painful. Especially, if you're in sales and you're paid to get revenue. You've got to meet a quota, your commission comes from that. But it turns out, from a company perspective, oftentimes that's a really smart thing to do. First off, maybe it's the wrong customer for you. Maybe they need a deep, deep discount because they really don't get the value from your product that they should be getting. Or maybe that they're just negotiating and if you walk away, they come back and say, "Okay, we'll take it." And so, now you've made the sale. Or, what if you even lose the deal? But because you lost that deal, word gets out, especially to channel partners, other salespeople, we're not willing to accept a deal below this specific price. And now everybody's working harder to sell value and make sure that we get the prices that we actually deserve. This is hard. But if you end up losing deals because you walk away, my recommendation is track the profitability of the deals if you would've won them at this lower price and compare that to the profitability of the deals you win because you didn't lower the price. And even if you win more deals with lower prices, you probably make less margin and less profit. 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/
Here is a FAQ Video on the Courses: https://youtu.be/0F7imrzjXWs Here is a deep dive into which course is best for you: https://youtu.be/JM_jgS8M-iU https://www.b2bRevenue.com - Get Your Free E-Book on How Companies make Decisions. FAQ: 1 YEAR ACCESS, PAY MONTHLY OR ANNUALLY NOT A SUBSCRIPTION OFFICE HOURS EVERY OTHER WEEK VIA ZOOM. 1 HOUR GROUP Q&A. UNLIMITED 1-ON-1'S ARE FREE AS LONG AS THEY CAN BE SHARED IN THE COURSE. 1-ON-1 ARE FULL ACCESS ON DAY ONE - NOTHING IS GATED OR TIME RELEASED. ALL CONTENT IS VIDEO BASED AND SELF PACED I RECOMMEND TAKE COURSE ONCE WITHOUT NOTES OR APPLYING IT SO YOU UNDERSTAND THE BIG PICTURE FIRST. THEN TAKE AND APPLY IT STEP BY STEP. YOU START WHEN YOU WANT AND GO AS FAST OR SLOW AS NEEDED. Email me additional questions: briangburns@me.com — SAMPLE EMAIL TO EXPENSE THE COURSE MGR, I have been listening to the brutal truth about sales podcast for X months and it speaks to the issues we face. They currently offer a course that includes video instruction, group Q&A and One-on-One coaching. I'm committed to my own personal development and would like your help in expensing the course. It would pay for itself if I closed only one new deal of $X value. Please let me know by Friday if I can move forward with this 1 year course. Thanks, ME Here are some student interviews from the courses: ———————————————————————————————————— Audible 30 day Free Trial: http://www.audibletrial.com/BrutalTruth Listen to The Sales Questions PodCast: https://itun.es/i67d3Ry Listen to The B2B Revenue Leadership Show: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/b2b-revenue-leadership-show/id1174976428?mt=2 Twitter: @briangburns LinkedIn: Brian G. Burns Facebook: Brian Burns YouTube: Brian Burns SALES PODCAS
This one is the 4 of Clubs from the Selling Value card deck. It turns out that procurement people often lie to us. And it's their job, not necessarily to lie, but it's their job to get a better price. And what often happens is they'll say to you, "Hey, you're up against these other two or three competitors. In this situation, you have to lower your price if you expect to win this deal." And it turns out oftentimes that's not true. Oftentimes, you're not up against two or three different competitors. Back many, many years ago when I was in sales, I recall procurement people actually saying, "You're up against this other competitor." And it turns out the competitive product they were looking at wasn't even similar to the product that I was offering. And so, it was obvious to me that they were just lying. And in fact, I experienced this extremely clearly when I was on the buying situation. I was part of a committee and we'd chosen a software application that we wanted to purchase. And I was in the meeting when procurement said to the company that we were going to buy from, "You're up against these other two competitors, you better sharpen your pencil." And I knew for a fact that wasn't a true statement. So, please be careful and the way you know is, go back to the committee. Find out if the committee selected you or selected you as one of several different possible alternatives. 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 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 4 of Hearts from the Selling Value card deck. This concept of asking for something anytime we're going to give a discount, we simply refer to it as gives and gets. We don't give anything without getting something. And so, what should we be getting when we're giving something? Well, surely we could get almost anything. What we really want to do is get the things that protect the profit of the company. And what are those things? If you think about all of the different items that you might be able to claw back from a customer. For example, it might be who pays for delivery. It might be how long the delivery takes. It might be when we schedule it. There's many, many different things we might be able to claw back. What we want to do is, think about how much does it cost us to deliver that thing to the customer so that if we claw it back, if we take that back from our customer, we're actually saving us costs on our side. Now, a couple quick thoughts. You know that, first off, I'm a pricing person, but in truth, we're thinking about how do we get the best margin for the company. And secondly, you've heard me say over and over again that costs don't matter to pricing, but costs do matter to profit. And if we're talking about a one-on-one situation and we have to give up some kind of discount, then let's try to get something in exchange that lowers our costs. We hope you enjoyed this example of Pricing Table Topics. What you just heard was done without a script. If you want to get better at speaking about pricing and value, grab a deck of our cards, pick a card, read the saying, then talk for one to two minutes about what that card says. You'll become a better speaker and expert. If you have any questions or feedback, please email me, 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 4 of Spades from the Selling Value card deck. Every time a salesperson gets in front of a procurement officer, a purchasing agent, however they're called, the purchasing agent will act price sensitive. Their job is to get a better price for their company. And so, they will always tell you that your price is too high, they need a discount. And you have to decide as a salesperson, do you want to give it to them? And here's the trick, does the purchasing agent actually have any power or authority to influence the decision process? If you're selling a commodity, and they could go to three, or four, or 10 different sources to get essentially the exact same thing, and those are all approved sources for the manufacturing capability, procurement has a lot of power. You need to do a great job at making sure procurement stays happy and figure out what it really takes to close that deal. On the other hand, if you're selling a piece of capital equipment and you've had a long sales cycle selling to a relatively large committee of people who've been debating, what's the best solution for us? And then they take that to procurement so the purchasing can go buy it. It turns out, procurement has almost no power. They'll pretend to have a lot of power, but they really don't. The decision was made by the committee. And so, we don't have to give big discounts to procurement in situations like that. Here's the problem, it takes guts. So, do you have the guts? 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 5 of Diamonds from the Selling Value card deck. We typically give our salespeople some level of discount authority. And the reason we do that is, let's say they walked in, and they asked the factory, or headquarters, 'Hey, could I have a 5% discount?' And we always say yes to that. Then all we've done is slowed down the sales process. Instead, we give them some level of discount authority. Knowing that, you know, if you come in for 5% or less, I'm going to give it to you anyway. So, you just have permission to go give 5% or less. The problem, of course, is that salespeople typically give the max that they're allowed to give. There's all these different levers that they could pull. They could sell value, and they can discount price. And discounting price is one of those levers that they're going to pull because it's easy. See how easy it is for me to discount the 5% and it doesn't hit my commission that much. So, it's okay for me to give that 5% discount. What we want to do as a company is sit back and say, what are the right levels of discount authority? What should I let my salesperson discount to? What should I let my sales managers discount to, my sales directors discount to? There are different levels, and we want them to be incented to discount as little as possible. We hope you enjoyed this example of Pricing Table Topics. What you just heard was done without a script. If you want to get better at speaking about pricing and value, grab a deck of our cards, pick a card, read the saying, then talk for one to two minutes about what that card says. You'll become a better speaker and expert. If you have any questions or feedback, please email me, 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 5 of Clubs from the Selling Value card deck. Most salespeople are paid on commission, and typically that commission is a percentage of the revenue. So, 2% of the revenue, 5% of the revenue, somewhere in that ballpark. The problem is, that incremental revenue, if I want to grow my revenue by 1%, the salesperson is only going to get 2%, or their commission rate, of the 1%. And it's a really, really tiny number. However, for the company, that 1% could be a really big number especially if your overall margins are relatively small, because that incremental 1% of revenue is a hundred percent profit. But we don't incentivize our salespeople to get that next 1% very much. Ideally, what we would do is, we would create a sales incentive structure so that covering costs, maybe they don't make anything, but anything from cost to list price, the amount of commission, the amount of incentive payment they get goes up for the higher the price they get. I, typically, like to have a target price. I also have a list price and a floor price. And I'll set three different commission rates. Anybody who can sell at list gets a really high commission rate. Anybody who sells at Target or above gets a mid-level commission rate. Anybody who sells above the floor and below the target, it's a really low commission rate. But the key is, we want to give our salespeople incentives to negotiate for that last 1%. 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 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 5 of Hearts from the Selling Value card deck. It's true, customers hate price increases. Heck, I get an annual price increase from Intuit for my QuickBooks, and I hate it. But there's nothing I can do about it. I just have to sit around and stew about the fact that I really despise that Intuit raises my price every year. However, when we blame costs, then people hate us a little bit less. So, we know as pricing people, as salespeople, we know that our prices really have nothing to do with our costs. But our customers don't really know that, and our customers believe the cost drive pricing. So therefore, if we're going to raise prices, the only real reason customers accept is that our costs went up. Imagine if Intuit sent me that email every year, and instead of it said, 'Hey, we're raising your price by $8, $10,' whatever it happens to be. Instead they say, 'Hey, our costs have gone up this year. We need to pass that on. We're going to increase your price by $10.' sure, I still dislike it. But I dislike it a little less. It's like they have a reason other than, 'Hey, I want you to pay more so that I can make more money.' So, think about blaming costs when you increase 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 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 5 of Spades from the Selling Value card deck. A value table consists of four columns: the solution, the problem, the result, and the value, typically in dollars. And when we do this, we think of creating the information, or the data in each cell for a typical customer. But we would never walk into a customer and say, 'You should expect to make a million dollars by buying this product.' Or we would never walk into a customer and say, 'We would expect you to have 3% more productivity if you buy our product.' Instead, when we think through all of the columns in a value table, and where additional profit comes from, and where additional productivity or reduced turnover, or whatever other effects we're going to have for our customers, then all we've done is say, 'This is a possible scenario.' But if we understand what those are, then when we go in and start having conversations with our buyers, and we say, 'What problems are you trying to solve?' Or, 'What results might you be looking for?' We already know how to take those problems, turn them into results. Those results turn them into profit dollars to the customer. So, I think of a value table more as a roadmap, as a conversation starter. As a way to say, 'Here's where I think the dialogue may be going.' But it certainly isn't the sales pitch we walk in with. We hope you enjoyed this example of Pricing Table Topics. What you just heard was done without a script. If you want to get better at speaking about pricing and value, grab a deck of our cards, pick a card, read the saying, then talk for one to two minutes about what that card says. You'll become a better speaker and expert. If you have any questions or feedback, please email me, 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 6 of Diamonds from the Selling Value card deck. If you are having value conversations, you're focusing on, what's the problem the client's trying to solve? What's the result they might expect to achieve? And if that result is quantifiable and we're selling to a company, then almost certainly you can turn that quantifiable results into incremental profit to that company. But in order to do that, we have to understand the business of our customers. I remember a long, long time ago when I was in sales, we were selling automatic test equipment and we had a device that was more accurate. But in order for the test equipment that was more accurate to have value to the client, we had to show, how does this more accurate tester generate more profit? Well, the answer was, in order for a semiconductor manufacturer to ensure that a part was of a specific speed, they had to take in the accuracy of the test equipment. And so, if a test equipment was less accurate, they would build a bigger guardrail. And if a test equipment was more accurate, they could have a smaller guardrail, which meant more parts would pass the test. And those more parts passing tests were sold at higher prices, meaning they made more profit. The point is, if we don't understand the business of our customers and we don't understand how they're going to make additional profit, then it's really hard for us to help our clients say, here's why this capability generates more profit for you. And when we're able to do that, then clients are much more likely and willing to buy from us. 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, and 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 6 of Clubs from the Selling Value card deck. First, let's talk about an analytical journey. These are those people who, once they realize they have a problem that they might want to go solve, they spend a bunch of time doing their own research, probably on the internet, figuring out what are the different options, where they might buy it, what are the price points? These are the most price sensitive buyers we can deal with. And yet, if we get an opportunity to talk to them as a salesperson would talk to a potential client, we could be sitting there saying, Hey, here's why our product is better than our competitor's product. But my recommendation would be to make sure we have the value conversation about the inherent value of solving the problem. If we have that conversation, it may be that the buyer didn't realize that there were a lot of other opportunities or a lot of other places where there's value if they buy a product like this. The person might begin to trust the salesperson more and say, Hey, this person's really looking out for my best interest. The buyer is more likely to buy because we're showing them more and more value. So, for a lot of different reasons, it makes sense for us to make sure that we're going back to, let's call it "first principles". We're going back to help our buyers understand what's the value of solving the problem. And in the meantime, we also need to talk about how we are differentiated and possibly better than competitive alternatives. 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 6 of Hearts from the Selling Value card deck. I work with clients frequently about creating these value tables. And what we essentially do is we identify, what are the best features in the product? What problem does that feature solve for the client? What's a quantifiable result that client may expect? And then, what's the amount of profit that client may be able to get when they achieve that result? In a way, you could think of this as an ROI calculator. But the problem is, you can't go in with an ROI calculator and tell a buyer, 'Hey, you're going to go make this much money if you buy my product.' They don't believe you. In fact, if you use the document and everything that we put on there, it's probably not accurate for every single customer. In fact, it's probably not accurate for any customer. So, our recommendation is always, when you've created the value table, think of it as a thought process, this is where the value could be. And now we go talk to a buyer. And we understand, do you have this problem? 'Oh, yeah.' What kind of result do you think you might expect? 'Oh, let's see if we can figure out the profit to your company if you achieve that result.' We use this as a map, as a document to help us understand where we're going, but we don't use the document to say these are the facts for any given client. So, we want to use the information, not the details of the document. We hope you enjoyed this example of Pricing Table Topics. What you just heard was done without a script. If you want to get better at speaking about pricing and value, grab a deck of our cards, pick a card, read the saying, then talk for one to two minutes about what that card says. You'll become a better speaker and expert. If you have any questions or feedback, please email me, 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 6 of Spades from the Selling Value card deck. Make it simple for buyers to decide. One of my favorite sayings is, “A confused buyer won't buy.” If you think about it, we're all afraid to make mistakes. We don't want to make mistakes. And the more difficult we make the decision, the more likely somebody thinks, a buyer thinks, they might make a mistake. We want to make the decision really simple, really clear, really obvious, so that our buyers don't think they're making a mistake. There are two techniques that are really common in simplifying this decision process. One is Good-Better-Best. If you have a complex price list, a complex set of options, buyers get confused. They really don't want to make that decision. They don't want to make a mistake. But if you can simplify the decision into a good-better-best offering, it's so much easier for buyers to make that decision, and they're so much more likely to make it. Another place we often see the simple decision for buyers is called The Decoy Effect. This is a psychological aspect in pricing. But a decoy effect is essentially good-better-best, but it's where you make the better price and the best price really, really close to each other. And so, buyers look at that and it's easy to make a decision between best and better because it's a slight, or maybe even no price increase, and they get a lot more. And so, yeah, I can choose best over better. And once they know they can make an easy decision, they feel like they're not going to make a mistake. So the rule here, make it simple for buyers to decide. We hope you enjoyed this example of Pricing Table Topics. What you just heard was done without a script. If you want to get better at speaking about pricing and value, grab a deck of our cards, pick a card, read the saying, and then talk for one to two minutes about what that card says. You'll become a better speaker and expert. If you have any questions or feedback, please email me, 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 7 of Diamonds from the Selling Value card deck. So, when you talk to your buyers about value, they do shift the way they think from spending on an expense toward investing. Because typically when you or anyone is shopping for something, we're thinking, how much do I have to pay and what are the features that I'm going to get? And we stop thinking about the value of what it is that we're buying. And if we have the opportunity to help our buyers understand, hey, when you go solve this problem, what's the value of solving that problem? So maybe, yeah, you're going to pay me a lot of money, but think about all the money you're going to make in additional profit because of the fact that you bought an implemented and used my product. And if we can get them focused on the value, they become a little bit less price sensitive and they trust us and like us even more. So, my recommendation is, talk about value way more than we talk about features and price. We hope you enjoyed this example of Pricing Table Topics. What you just heard was done without a script. If you want to get better at speaking about pricing and value, grab a deck of our cards, pick a card, read the saying, then talk for one to two minutes about what that card says. You'll become a better speaker and expert. If you have any questions or feedback, please email me, 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 7 of Clubs from the Selling Value card deck. Anytime you're in a sales situation, we think to ourselves, Hey, we need to be selling against our competition. We need to point out why we're better than our competitors. Yeah, and maybe we do. I'm not going to say we don't need to do that. However, if we take the time to help the buyer understand, what's the underlying problem they're truly trying to solve? What's the value of solving that problem? And how it is that we help them solve that problem? It builds trust. They start to know that we understand their situation, we understand their problem. They believe that we'll be better at solving it simply because we've expressed the fact that we understood it. Oh, and when we help them build the business case, they are grateful because they need this information to help sell up inside their organization anyway. Because no one's going to buy something unless they know that it's going to help them make more money. And so, we need to help our buyers create that business case. So, it really is imperative that even if you know you're going to have competition, take the time to help your buyers understand the value of solving the problem. Not just focusing on why we're better. We hope you enjoyed this example of Pricing Table Topics. What you just heard was done without a script. If you want to get better at speaking about pricing and value, grab a deck of our cards, pick a card, read the saying, and then talk for one to two minutes about what that card says. You'll become a better speaker and expert. If you have any questions or feedback, please email me, 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 7 of Hearts from the Selling Value card deck. It is true, value propositions really are awesome. Marketing teams, companies, sit around to try to figure out, what's the value proposition of this product? And it turns out that we can often come up with something that's pretty good, pretty general. It essentially is the solution to a problem that most people have, and we think of that as the value proposition. But the thing is, the value proposition isn't specific enough. Anytime you go to an individual customer, or an individual buyer, they've got different problems. Maybe our value proposition caught their attention, got them to come talk to us. But in the end, we need to understand, what are the specific problems that that buyer has? What's the result that that buyer's looking to achieve? And then help them figure out, what's the business case for that? How much value, or additional profit, will they make because they're solving those specific problems? So, I love value propositions. They're just not magic words that are enough to get people to buy. 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 7 of Spades from the Selling Value card deck. It is true that when a buyer's asking for help justifying a purchase, this is the ultimate opportunity to influence that sale. Let's take a step back for just a minute and think about what a customer is going through. And if you ever have the opportunity to help a buyer understand their underlying problems, what's the value of solving those problems, you've become a trusted advisor. You've become someone that this company, this person, looks to for real information so they can make smart decisions. Now, this is a very different decision process than, how is your product better than somebody else's product? Instead, they've brought you in to help create the business case. What a great position. And if we go to the table that I have in the Selling Value book, you'll find that this is the beginning of the trust or the relationship journey. Where they say to you, would you please help me answer, is this a good place for me to spend my money? Is this a good place for my budget? And if we can help them with that, not only have we helped them solve a problem they're trying to solve, but we've built that trust and credibility in their eyes that no competitor could ever catch up to. So absolutely, this is the biggest opportunity you have to influence that sale. 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 8 of Diamonds from the Selling Value card deck. Let's say that you are in a marketplace where people almost always decide between your product and competitor's products. Gee, could I think of some? How about an automobile, right? You happen to be the Audi dealer and somebody is, somebody just crashed their car and we think they're going to walk into our Audi dealership. In our mind we're thinking, Hey, they're not only looking at us, but they're also looking at BMW or Mercedes or Lexus or Porsche, right? There's lots of different places where they might be go looking at my competitive alternatives. And so as a salesperson, I might be thinking, Ohh, I've got to sell against all of these other problems, or all of these other competitive alternatives. On the other hand, it is very possible that somebody walks into our showroom and isn't going to consider a competitive alternative. They walk into our showroom because somebody told them that we are the best product, we're the best dealership, and they should go buy a product from us. And they're not even going to go look at somebody else. Or maybe they walked into our showroom because they've owned three Audis in the past. They're an Audi loyalist. And they're going to come in and buy another Audi from us because that's what they drive. That's who they identify as. There are lots of reasons why people might choose to just buy your product. What we want to do is think about, what are those different situations? What are those different mindsets where people might just be looking at our product and not a competitive alternative? And the reason this is so important is because when we can recognize those reasons, we don't have to give big discounts. People are going to buy from us because we solve their problem, not because we're cheaper than a competitor. We hope you enjoyed this example of Pricing Table Topics. What you just heard was done without a script. If you want to get better at speaking about pricing and value, grab a deck of our cards, pick a card, read the saying, then talk for one to two minutes about what that card says. You'll become a better speaker and expert. If you have any questions or feedback, please email me, mark@impactpricing.com. Now, go make an impact. Connect with Mark Stiving: Email: mark@impactpricing.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stiving/
Are you tired of trying to sell your web design services to potential clients, only to be met with hesitation and skepticism? It can be difficult to convince someone to invest a large sum of money in your services when they don't really know you yet. But what if there was a better way? Full show notes: https://trailblazer.fm/selling-value-not-just-websites/
This one is the 8 of Clubs from the Selling Value card deck. Okay. You're wondering to yourself, do buyers ever not consider competitive alternatives? And the answer is, absolutely yes! Some easy consumer examples. When you buy popcorn at the movie theater, you couldn't buy popcorn anywhere else. Therefore, you didn't consider a competitive alternative. You just said, am I going to buy popcorn here or not? And that's why they get away with charging really high prices for popcorn. What about last gas for 75 miles, when you're in the middle of nowhere and you only have an eighth of a tank of gas left? Are you going to buy gas at that gas station that's four times the price? Heck, yes you are! And that's because they know you didn't consider a competitive alternative. There wasn't one to consider at the time. Our job as salespeople should be to try to find different customers and recognize whether they're going to be looking at, or talking to, competitive alternatives. For example, if someone was referred to you, they're probably not going to go talk to a competitive alternative. They might, but they might not. So let's treat them as though they won't. What if someone's buying an add-on to a current product they have that you've sold to them? They're probably only buying it from you. What if they're using your subscriptions and are they going to buy the upgraded package or are they even going to pay you this month for the subscription that they bought a few months ago? In each one of those decisions, they're just deciding, am I going to buy from you? But they're not saying, should I switch? Should I look at competitive alternatives? There are lots of situations, and product types, where buyers don't look at competitive alternatives. We should be focusing on finding those buyers and making sure we're not discounting, or if we have the opportunity, consider raising the price a little bit. I can almost guarantee you they won't make a different decision. We hope you enjoyed this example of Pricing Table Topics. What you just heard was done without a script. If you want to get better at speaking about pricing and value, grab a deck of our cards, pick a card, read the saying, then talk for one to two minutes about what that card says. You'll become a better speaker and expert. If you have any questions or feedback, please email me, mark@impactpricing.com. Now, go make an impact. Connect with Mark Stiving: Email: mark@impactpricing.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stiving/
Johnny Cheng is the Senior Director of Pricing and Packaging at ClickUp. He was the Senior Director of Pricing and Packaging at Coupa Software, and has years of experience in Product Marketing through various companies. In this episode, Johnny shares his knowledge and experience on product marketing and product management as he educates us on the benefits of solution pricing, especially as to how a lens test helps on creating packages. Why you have to checkout today's podcast: Find out what crucial perspective companies miss when pricing sits in finance Learn about the benefits of having solution pricing, as well as to how you can sell value instead of features Discover a packaging system that incredibly works, both for the customers and the company “Go do the lens test. Even if your packaging is already set, I would go back and do that exercise. I feel like if you do it across different teams, you'll be very surprised at what you see.” – Johnny Cheng Topics Covered: 01:05 – How Johnny got into pricing 01:50 – Comparing the role of product management with product marketing 05:46 – Does pricing ever exist without packaging or are the two just so tightly connected? 08:33 – Johnny as a strong believer of having solution pricing 12:18 – Johnny vs. Mark on good, better, best 15:16 – The system Johnny uses to decide which features goes in which package 20:58 – Tips and tools that can help you sell value instead of features 26:56 – Salespeople discounting too much because they don't sell the value of the product 28:47 – Johnny's pricing advice 30:05 – Connect with Johnny Key Takeaways: “I'm seeing more and more in product marketing just exactly to your point. It's more customer driven, it's more go-to market driven, it's more value driven. And so, if you sit in product management, every feature you release is the best feature ever, right? But product marketing really understands the value and how to apply to certain customers, what the use cases are, what the different profiles are and how you monetize that, and I feel like you kind of lose that lens sitting in the product management side.” – Johnny Cheng “Once you have kind of that product marketing angle, that's where the magic happens, right? Because that feature could be worth $1 to this one segment and $10 to this other segment. You would never know unless you actually go find out what their pain points are, find out what their needs are.” – Johnny Cheng People / Resources Mentioned: ClickUp: https://clickup.com/ Marketo: https://business.adobe.com/products/marketo/adobe-marketo.html Gainsight: https://www.gainsight.com/ Coupa: https://www.coupa.com/ Selling Value: https://selling-value.com/ Zoom: https://zoom.us/ Connect with Johnny Cheng: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jdcheng/ Email: jcheng@clickup.com Connect with Mark Stiving: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stiving/ Email: mailto:mark@impactpricing.com
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