How the 20 year old startup got their groove back | Steve Hamrell (Call Box)

June 11, 2024 00:29:45
How the 20 year old startup got their groove back | Steve Hamrell (Call Box)
Street Pricing with Marcos Rivera
How the 20 year old startup got their groove back | Steve Hamrell (Call Box)

Jun 11 2024 | 00:29:45

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Show Notes

Ever wonder what it takes to rework the pricing strategy of a seasoned company in the SaaS automotive space? Steve Hamrell from Callbox joins us to shed light on the transformation journey they embarked upon, confronting package inconsistencies and the pressing need for a pricing strategy revamp. Together, we peel back the layers of creating a pricing plan that not only resonates with customer value perception but also keeps the business trajectory on the path to scalability.  

In our candid conversation, we delve into how a strategic pivot in pricing can revolutionize reseller relationships and streamline the sales process. We explore how Callbox's experiences have shaped smarter, data-influenced decisions in product development. This dialogue is an expedition into the heart of SaaS pricing strategies and the incredible value of aligning them with the ever-evolving market demands. 
 

In this episode: 

(0:00:00) - Steve Hamrell provides a detailed overview of the pricing inconsistencies faced by Callbox in the SaaS automotive sector. He suggests the necessity for a comprehensive overhaul of the existing pricing strategy to align with the market standards and customer expectations. 

(0:07:02) - The critical role of senior management in implementing pricing changes– they aid in making strategic, data-driven decisions that significantly impact the profitability and growth of the organization. 

(0:18:22) - Evaluating the impact of pricing adjustments on resellers, how a reset of reseller pricing to align more closely with market rates can potentially improve their profit margins, simpler pricing is presented as an effective way to streamline land and expand strategies, thus enhancing business scalability. 

 (0:25:00) - Know your data and market: Maintaining pricing consistency is instrumental for accurate forecasting and ensuring high levels of customer retention. How Callbox is confronting and resolving pricing inconsistencies to improve their business planning and overall financial performance. 

(0:27:57) -  Favorite jams – Naughty by Nature, Dave Matthews, Snoop and Dre 

Welcome to Street Pricing, the only show where proven SaaS (Software as a Service) leaders share their mindset and mistakes in pricing so we can all stop guessing and start growing. Street Pricing is hosted by Pricing I/O CEO and Pricing Coach, Marcos Rivera, sought after slayer of bad pricing. With 20 years of pricing expertise, he has helped price over 200 SaaS products and coached over 100 SaaS CEOs and counting! From the streets of the Bronx to CEO, Marcos wants to take the guessing out of pricing.   

 

Resources: 

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/steven-hamrell-9b45b44/ 

Call Box: https://callbox.com/ 

Marcos Rivera LinkedIn 

Book: Street Pricing 

Email for a consultation  

View Full Transcript

Episode Transcript

[00:00:00] Speaker A: What's next for you guys? [00:00:01] Speaker B: Yeah, I think for us, what it's been is really turning into more of a data driven product and pricing organization. A lot of before I used to joke was a kind of finger in the wind. Where are we going to start? What are we going to charge for this? We're starting more looking, doing competitive analysis and looking at what does it even cost us to build. What's our development investment, what are we talking about for ongoing support costs and trying to be more precise about what is it going to cost us and how we price it. [00:00:27] Speaker C: Yo, Mike check. What's up, everybody? You're listening to the street pricing podcast, the only show where proven SaaS leaders share their mindset and mistakes in pricing so we can all stop guessing and start growing. Enjoy. Subscribe and tell a friend. Now, let's break it down with your host and sought after Slayer of bad pricing, Marcos Rivera. [00:00:49] Speaker A: What's up? And welcome to the Street Pricing podcast. I'm Marcos Rivera, author, founder and pricing coach, and I am stoked about today's guest. He's been in the trenches around pricing in an industry that I think is one of the hardest industries to price. Ladies and gentlemen, today I have Steve Hamrel, director of product management at Callbacks. Steve, welcome. [00:01:09] Speaker B: Awesome. Hey, thanks, Marco. So glad to be here. [00:01:11] Speaker A: No, I'm happy to have you here. People are going to get really a good lesson on how real pricing changes are done. Right. Give me a quick blurb about you. Tell everyone what you do, what you're all about. [00:01:22] Speaker B: I'm the director of product here at CallBox. I've been doing the product thing now for, oh, gosh, about 810 years. First started giving into pricing, man, about ten years ago with Marcus and Marcus in some previous roles and kind of found my way through it and came over to CallBox, and we've been working through the struggles. I was a 20 year old startup trying to right size our pricing and making sure things are going well for our customers. We're an automotive SaaS company, so as Marcos alluded to, automotive is a very, very unique vertical. The SaaS part of it not. But we're super odd and automotive just being such a weird little niche market that we all have to deal with. [00:02:04] Speaker A: I love it. The 20 year old startup, right? [00:02:06] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:02:06] Speaker A: That resonates with a lot of folks out there. Sometimes that journey can get super long, right? Oh, man. And you are my peoples. This is how I learned everybody. This is how I learned how to price. I was in product management. I've been building products my whole career, how to figure out how to price these things. You just keep doing it, keep doing it. And you get pretty good at it after a while. Right? So we're going to have a lot of fun today talking through because you understand value, what it takes to build it, what it takes to go capture it, right? So we're going to walk through this together here. Are you ready to get street with me? [00:02:36] Speaker B: Absolutely. Let's do it. [00:02:37] Speaker A: Okay, man, so let me give you the quick roadmap and roadmap for everybody out there. This show is based on the book street pricing. And so what we're going to do is we're going to start off with rewind. And that's a pricing story. Success or struggle? It is. We want to hear it. It's just got to be real. Okay. And then we want to get to play, which is what's happening now, what's happening today that's working. Let's talk about those things and unpack it with pricing and then fast forward is what's next for you, what's next for the pricey model, for the growth. You want to understand where you guys are looking into the future. How's that sound? [00:03:08] Speaker B: Sounds good. [00:03:09] Speaker A: All right. Fantastic. I am going to ask you one of my favorite questions at the end, so get ready. But let's start off with that story. Steve, take it away, man. Give us a pricing story. [00:03:18] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. So when I joined the organization here, like I said, we're a 20 year old startup and we've got about 8000 customers in a couple different verticals. And I can tell you that not more than 10% of our customers have package consistency across them. We have some customers who are on packages that are custom made because they're one of our large enterprise clients. And hey, that's great. We love those. But we also have packages where customers came on at the same time and because of who their sales rep was or because we had inconsistent discounting or even just because they needed something custom at that exact moment, they have no consistency. So when we're trying to do things like forecast snowball and look at how we can plan for the next three to five years, we really had no idea and I didn't know any of this existed. I came in and was tasked with organizing a product organization that had really suffered through the pandemic and even a little bit beforehand. And I came in and borrowed some tools from previous roles that I had been in and started building out just a financial business case. Hey, how do we build a product, how do we figure out what we're going to charge for it? And as we started going through the exercise of just collecting the data, how many customers do we have? What's our average lead conversion rate? All those things that you need to know to be a successful business. It quickly came to light that not only was that information stuff we had never gone out and found as an organization, but when we started looking at pricing and I said, well, what can we charge for this? No one's had an idea because they had never done it. Their methodology in the past had been, hey, throw it all into our packages, and if it's really good, we might take it out of our lower packages and just put it in our elite or our platinum level packages. But the idea of that upswing momentum and driving upgrade and driving more revenue through stickiness was just something that really hadn't ever been done. And as we peel back the layers and started to look at it, I realized, man, this is an organization that really needs a whole pricing exercise. We need to go through this and understand where's our value coming from, what do our customers feel our value is, and where can we drive more value out of that, and where can we leverage our customers experience and insights into who we are as a company to help set a pricing that makes sense across the board? [00:05:41] Speaker A: Man, I feel like you're talking to so many SaaS startup founders right now, and maybe not even the 20 year old ones, maybe the two year old ones, right? But thinking about what you just said with that inconsistency, right, that only 10% had the same, like 90%, lots of custom going on, inconsistency makes it more tempting to do guesswork. And guesswork is what kills a lot of your ability to capture value. And so this is that connecting of the dots. If these guys are seeing, you know, if you're a startup founder and you're seeing a lot of inconsistency, that's just going to make solving the pricing problem even harder, right? And so I got to know how you fought through this, man, because this is not easy for folks to fight through. [00:06:17] Speaker B: No, it really isn't. And it's something we're still working our way through. And, you know, that I think that goes into the 20 year old piece of our company. You know, we have customers who've been with us for those 20 years or a large portion of those years. So converting them from an old legacy package or pricing system to what we've now kind of landed on is really a huge work in progress. But we started back at the beginning, which is we went out and hired a firm and said, hey, come in and help us. We don't know what we don't know. I know I always tell Marcos, I know about a 10th of what I really should to do pricing, but I know enough to know when there's a problem, and I know enough to call someone who's an expert in this. And we did. And that happened to be pricing IO and Marcos company. And I said, hey, guys, I need help. I need someone to come in and help us walk through this from the beginning, and not just for me, but bring in our CFO, bring in all of the exec team on our side, and let's really start to figure out, where are we, where is our value, what are we doing with our products, what's our costs, where are we? And how can we start to figure out how we build, packaging and pricing that models not only our value, but also keeps our margins high? [00:07:30] Speaker A: I think a couple of things. You got a friend joining in, right. One thing I want to say, though, is that there is a very powerful thing about what you just said, which is bringing the senior management team along for the ride, okay? Which means that you can't just do it in a solo black box all by yourself and expect to be super successful, especially in the company with long history behind it. And so from there, it's really, how do you make sure that the CFO, the CRO, the product folks, everybody is on the same page with the pricing change? Because if they're. If somebody's off on their own island thinking something different, it's going to make it ultra hard to be successful at it. [00:08:08] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. And that was one of the things from the. From the early onset that we kind of agreed on as an organization was that I can't do it, and it can't just be me and the CFO and, or me and the CFO and the CRO. We needed everyone from our CTO to our head of HR, our executive vp of marketing, our vps of sales, our directors, bringing all those folks in, some of those folks are the ones who are in the trenches. I don't know what my directors of sales see every day when they're out talking to their customers, but I know what the end result is, and I can tell you, hey, did they land a deal? Did they not land a deal? How did that look at the end of the month? But they can tell me what they're running into. What are the objections they're running into in sales and how that. How I can use pricing to drive how they're experiencing the sales process out in the field. [00:08:56] Speaker A: Those are all key inputs to understand. Some folks aren't even asking those questions. But what I'm interested in is, now that you're getting the answers, and the answers probably aren't what you want to hear, but you have to hear it, right? Yeah. Now you need to get senior management to say, okay, let's solve this thing. Let's not just throw a band aid on it. Let's solve this thing. How did you get them over the hump? Because it's, you know, it's not something that you just snap your fingers and solve tomorrow. It takes effort. It takes data. It takes time. How did you get them to say yes? [00:09:24] Speaker B: Yeah, the first thing was we aligned on a goal, so we knew what our annual revenue has been. We've been fairly flat over the last three years, partly due to Covid. I'm sure everyone's experienced that market wide. But also, just as a business, we've kind of seen ourselves be flat. And we said, we need to grow. We want to grow our company. Our. Our board of directors is telling us, hey, you guys need to grow your revenue. You're not bad. You're making money. We happy. We're happy, but we need more. And so we first agreed that that was what we wanted to do and that we weren't happy with certain things. And so where we struggled was maybe more around some of the large clients and how we can right size those packages. But we all started with, what can we agree on? We can agree that we had some resellers, for example, who were so undercharging for our services, we were paying people to be our customers, and that's not good. So we sat down, and when we started from the places of what do we agree on? Then we said, okay, now we can use that as a common place to start from and look at the pricing model. And that was kind of the big key when we started looking at just the simple data of, hey, we know this reseller. This is one of our great resellers. They sell a ton of contracts, but every contract they sell, we're taking a loss. And having a portfolio is great, but a portfolio that doesn't make you money is really no good. [00:10:42] Speaker A: Yeah, because you're only digging yourself deeper the longer you go without fixing the problem. Right. I think that's. Maybe. That's where I think a lot of folks here in the SaaS community can take away from is that if you can paint the picture, there's a problem. You also have to paint the additional picture that that problem is going to get worse if you don't solve it. And so while they lift, you know, may take some time and effort, it will take even more time and effort later. Cause guess what? You gotta undo every deal you do right now. Until you fix this problem, you're gonna have to undo. And then maybe adding that time and getting worse element will help a lot of folks kind of realize they need to address this. [00:11:19] Speaker B: Yeah, and unfortunately, in most businesses, especially in our vertical, we know that our breakout, if you were to look at a bell curve, the majority of our customers are in those lower banded prices. They are not buying our super premium products. I wish they did. It make my life so much easier. I probably wouldn't have even had a pricing problem. But when the majority of our business is coming from the lower end of our pricing bands, we know that that's the first place we're going to have the most problems. My large enterprise customers, they're on custom packages. If I'm going to do something with them, it's going to take me six months and five executive meetings and whatever, and I may not even change their pricing very much because they're bringing me hundreds of hundred or 200 customers or stores at one time. It's those smaller ones where the real value is. And that's where we had to solve. And that was kind of where we all agreed as a leadership team, hey, this is the problem. We don't care about our super enterprise customers because to work with them, that's a whole process that we've been doing for years, and we actually are pretty good at that. Where we struggle is on this lower end packaging. And that was where we said, hey, let's focus on how do we drive revenue and how do we drive value more in those customers and make them stickier with our business while also driving our revenue. [00:12:39] Speaker A: See, so you had to stare the monster right in the eye, right, which is in that base down there. Large pool, price sensitive, surly, like, just really, really tough base to go in and change things around. Probably some of them been around for a while too. And so shaking that up, I could see the fear of like, oh, my God, we're gonna have a, you know, tidal wave of attrition happen after this, or our reputation is going to be shot or whatever it is. There's probably lots of fear. I need to know, what did you end up doing? How did you, how did you fight through that. And how did you get to the other side to get that packaging the right way? [00:13:13] Speaker B: Yeah, well, we're kind of in the middle of it. So we did spend the time. We made the packages. We came out with a pricing plan. In fact, we have a three phase pricing plan. We are still finishing our phase one of our pricing, and that is going first, starting with our resellers. Thats our low hanging fruit. Who can we go to and say, look, you just cant charge 199 for our product. Youve got to be charging a better price? Weve started there. And thats where were at right now getting all of our resellers on board. They were given notices. They had time to finish out contracts that they had out in the field so that they could honor pricing they had made. And so now were right sizing those. The next part is our phase two, which is starting here pretty soon, which is going to be going after those folks who are direct billing with us. But on some of those lower end packages where there is going to be a downgrade in services because of what theyre paying. So we had to break it up even more than just what we had. Were looking at folks who are going to get more value for dollar 20 more or maybe even the same prices are paying now. But then there are folks who are on, who are paying so little, we're going to have to downgrade them. And those are going to be individual conversations we've got to go have with every customer. A lot of those are going to have to be in person and just explain to them, look, you can pay us a little more money, get, get what you're getting and have a great time, or you can pay the lower dollar amount, but there's going to be less product for you to use. And we're just getting ready to start that, making our plans on it now. And hopefully we'll get to phase three here, maybe this year, if not early next year, I'm sure, which is going to be, you know, going after more of those customers where there's bigger price fluctuation and bigger feature fluctuation and really going after and having those conversations. [00:14:58] Speaker A: Yeah. And so you're tackling it by levels of risk and by the different options. Right. Which I think for a lot of folks listening, getting a good idea of the different groupings of customers that you have, the different scenarios, if you will, and then maybe adding a theme to all of those and then going after it in those different chunks, phases or steps or whatever you want to call it. It's really a hard thing to, you know, just to bite off in one shot. You know, my grandmother always used to say, you know, you can't eat an elephant. You have to take it one bite at a time. [00:15:28] Speaker B: Right, exactly. [00:15:28] Speaker A: And it sounds better in Spanish, by the way, not in English. But the idea here, you know, grandma and her sayings. Right? Yeah, but the idea here is that you have to break this problem down. You have to break this problem down into smaller chunks and then attack it over time. You gotta be patient. Cause it doesn't happen overnight. But if you're able to break it down into these smaller pieces, 612, you know, sometimes even 18 months, depending on how big that base is, you'll get to the other side. Excellent. [00:15:55] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. And that's exactly what we're seeing. Now. What we thought, you know, would be a really quick, you know, pricing exercise. And then a sweep of our customers is going to probably be 18 or 24 months, but the end result will be way better when we get there. [00:16:10] Speaker A: Guaranteed guarantee. If you stay disciplined and you keep walking through, giving them the right trade offs, you will be better on the other end. Absolutely. So now, now that we've talked about that huge lift and obstacle to get over, to even address this, you addressed it. Now you're attacking the migration in three phases, and all that's moving along, you're kind of in the middle of it. We now want to move over now to the play and understand where right now, since you're in the middle of that today with the migration but with new customers coming in, are you seeing something that's working really well today in the pricing? [00:16:42] Speaker B: Yeah. What we've actually seen is when we went through and did some repackaging, the features that we were just including really are driving a little bit of an upsell on our pricing. And now the upsell is not significant. We're not overcharging on these add ons for folks who are coming into the product, but what we're seeing is that folks are willing to pay it a little bit extra. Or sometimes they're saying, hey, no, I don't want that. But they're still signing, they're still getting value. And we're cutting our cost of goods somewhat on all of these packages. So we're saving money, we're increasing margin. Sometimes we're getting a little more money out of it. And at the end of the day, we're starting to bring people in now on more consistent packaging and pricing. So at least there is a clear delineation of when did we start doing it the quote unquote right way, and where do we say, okay, these folks are just part of our regular pricing process, and we'll hit them with a sweep in two or three years if we need to, or whatever, and who do we still have to, right size. But we've now actually drawn a line. We can see where those contracts are, and we're seeing our increased revenue come and we're seeing margin down in many cases. [00:17:49] Speaker A: Interesting, interesting. And by the way, the word sweeps, or the terminology sweeps is reminding me, taking me back to my private equity days. Right. The private equity folks always like to say sweeps. Those are things for those listening are like escalators, price increases, things like that. You know, your old fashioned 5% or CPI plus three or whatever those things are. It helps you really impactful, especially when you have a large base and it's, if you get good at it, I mean, you can see a pretty meaningful bump in your bottom line pretty consistently if you do that. [00:18:17] Speaker B: Right. [00:18:18] Speaker A: So that makes a ton of sense here. Now, is there an area today in the pricey model that you're like, oh, I'm so glad we did that. And I know the margin accretive. I know that the something in the land, sales reps love it. Like, what is it? [00:18:30] Speaker B: It's a little bit of both. It's a little bit in the land, but it really has to do more with our resellers. Our resellers are huge, are huge pricing negotiators for us, really. And we used to struggle very hard because our resellers were selling at such a discounted rate, even their retail, and forget their wholesale rates for a second, just what they were expressing retail to customers was so low that the ask for those folks to move to a little bit higher package for more features was a three, three to 500% price increase. Now, since we've reset those reseller pricings to be more consistent with what we think market is, now that ask is much smaller, where, I mean, it's still an increase, but it's less than 100% increase. So we're more like, I think it's like 60, 65% increase. It's still significant, but that's a very different conversation from a 500% price increase. And it's allowing us to have the ability to do land and expand and the ability to go in and upsell customers who previously we would never have even thought of because they were paying so little. [00:19:34] Speaker A: Yeah, Steve, Steve, I want to dig into that a second there because that is the nightmare that I think most SaaS founders or most operators think about is changing pricing and then having to stare at customer in the face and say, oops, yeah, we're going to have to adjust you and it's going to be like a 500% increase to your prices. Right. And then that customer, you know, throwing a, you know, banana cream pie in their face or whatever. [00:19:55] Speaker B: Right. [00:19:55] Speaker A: It's not going to, it's not going to happen. But here's the thing. Those are sometimes the reality of having a model that is not the right model for too long or the bad habit sitting too long. Right. And my question for you here, because the resellers come up a couple times, and I think resellers is just a part of growing, of selling of channels, of things like that, of diversity around it. Can you tell everyone, like, if you had to step back and think, hmm, man, I wish we would have done that when we set up our reseller channels or when we set up our reseller program. What are the biggest, like takeaways or wins? [00:20:28] Speaker B: Like, yeah, I think the challenge or what we should, what we could have done better, one would have been a more regular pricing assessment on our resellers. When we started with these resellers, the packaging they were selling was probably close to market, but we for a long time had some limitations in our contracts that, hey, we couldn't go after these guys for lifting their pricing unless it was contract renewal time, which was every two, three, four years. We did rewrite that contract previous to me joining the company, but just by not very much, we rewrote that to say, hey, we can raise your prices, we just have to give you, I think it was 60 or 90 days notice. So if you're working with a reseller, having the ability to lift those prices to meet market and doing it with a reasonable notice and not waiting for a contract renewal to come up, which could be multi year, is super important and also just starting off in a better position. The one thing that I think we made maybe a wrong choice on, and this was 20 plus years ago, was offering different packaging to our resellers than what we sold direct. And at the time we thought it was a great strategy because we were offering a less featured product at a lower price to our resellers, hoping people would come in and we'd have the ability to do land and expand. But what we found was that three 5800% price increase prevented us, and instead we were better served in what we're doing now, which is offering the exact same product we sell at the exact same price through our reseller. The only difference is that we allow a little bit of discounting to happen because our resellers have their own discounting policy. So there's a little bit, and they have a little bit of play between their wholesale and retail rate, but asking them to sell way closer to what our retail is, so now people don't see that difference. And making sure, making that happen, those two things are what we should have done 20 years ago. We just did them a lot more recently. So we're still in the recovery stage, if I would call it anything. [00:22:28] Speaker A: Got it, man. So that's, I think, for everybody here listening, right? Tempting to go into another part of the tab or another market with a maybe different product, lighter product, whatever it is. I think the channel conflict or the jump to getting them up was a big, big realization, like, oh, crap, we probably should have done this. But also, I'm thinking about it even further downstream where your poor customer support or tech support person is like, okay, so what version of this thing you have? You have this? Do you have that? Kind of makes it a little bit tricky on that side as well. So having that consistency and then those controls, I think, are some of the key things that. That would make it easier to pull off a reseller channel or at least get started on the right foot. [00:23:06] Speaker B: Yep, absolutely. [00:23:08] Speaker A: Good. Big lessons for everybody here, man. All right, well, let's take this fast forward for a second here. So, here you are today. I know you still got to do your phase three and keep on pushing that. That ball or that boulder, but I want to know, like, what do you think is next when you think about where you're going and how you're thinking about capturing that value in the pricing because you're in the product piece, you know what you're building. I know, I know you know what the value is coming down the road. So what's next for you guys? [00:23:31] Speaker B: Yeah, I think for us, what it's been is really turning into more of a data driven product and pricing organization. A lot of before I used to joke was a kind of finger in the wind. Where are we going to start? What are we going to charge for this? Uh, were starting more looking. You're doing competitive analysis and looking at what does it even cost us to build? Whats our development investment? What are we talking about for ongoing support costs and trying to be more precise about what is it going to cost us and how we price it. We also, we play in a couple different verticals. As I mentioned, automotive is the bulk of our business. But we are in a couple other verticals and figuring out how we can take some of these other products into other verticals that are more price sensitive with a better pricing strategy. One of our verticals had absolutely no package pricing. It was very wild west. They had a word document that was kind of a rough guide they were using. It was pretty bad. They now are selling real packages. I just met with them the other day. We're adding some features to them. We talked about what that pricing is. We modeled it out, and they actually feel like they can hit the goal. Now we can go back and present to the board, hey, this is what we're going to do. This is how we're going to grow this other vertical. And this is why we're investing basically three quarters of work this year into that vertical to help grow. So it helps tell that story. It helps drive our roadmap a lot more because we know what the ROI is supposed to be. I know if I'm going to invest three or four quarters worth of work into building products for that vertical, that I'm expecting to get back 50% to 70% ROI and setting realistic sales goals that our team can meet, but also giving them the features to do it. [00:25:11] Speaker A: Exactly. And that's where that beautiful alignment comes in. With what you're building, the value you build and the value you capture starts to really come together here. And so you're doing it on purpose, which is like music to my ears. But I got to ask you, you learned a lot, man. You learned a lot going through all those different phases and even in the past as well. So I got to ask you, like the one, the one takeaway for anybody listening here and what you learned on your pricing journey, what's the one big lesson you want them to take away? [00:25:36] Speaker B: It's really two one, know your data, get your data. Don't guess. It's got to be real. You've got to know your data and you've got to know your market. I think the second thing is, don't be afraid. I think we fought pretty hard at first that we were afraid, kind of like Marcos alluded to. We were afraid of attrition. We were afraid of customers having all these problems with us changing pricing, not even raising, just changing in general, changing their packaging. What if we left with the same price? And I think the key is don't be afraid as much as we think people are going to be price sensitive and leave us because we changed the pricing. The real thing is, if you're showing them value and you're bringing them a product they need. The likelihood of them churning off is pretty low. The ones that are, the ones that were going to leave you anyways for the next shiny nickel that came through, and the ones who know your value are going to stick with you through the pricing. So not being afraid and being willing to go out and have those tough conversations is going to be the key. [00:26:36] Speaker A: I love that. I love that. And there is a little bit of a relationship with what you just said. The more you know your data in market, maybe the less afraid you are. The less you know about your data in market, maybe the more afraid you are. Right? I'm thinking about it that way, too, man. Fantastic lessons all around. Steve, man, this. I just got to thank you for coming in and dropping some good knowledge bombs here for our SaaS community, man. That was awesome. But I do. I do have one more question. Question for you. [00:26:58] Speaker B: All right, sure. [00:26:59] Speaker A: Now, you said, know your data. I want to know Steve, a little bit, man. Let's. Let's understand you a little better, and I'm going to ask you, what is your favorite song or favorite jam growing up? What would that be if you had to pick one? [00:27:11] Speaker B: Ooh, man, you're putting me on the spot. I'm also going to show my age here very, very significantly. There's two. One is hip hop. Hooray by naughty by nature. [00:27:22] Speaker A: Oh, snap. [00:27:24] Speaker B: That is very, very, very reminiscent of late elementary school, early middle school days in my world. And the other one is going to be really anything Dave Matthews. I've been a huge Dave Matthews fan, so kind of two ends of the spectrum, I was going to say. Those two really kind of define that nineties hip hop era. It's really hard to go wrong with anything in that hood. I spent a lot of time listening to here in southern California, some of the large hip hop stations back in the early nineties, and it was a very different world. I can remember buying Doctor Dre's original album, the chronic at the warehouse, which does not even exist anymore, or waiting in line at the warehouse to buy concert tickets. So, yeah, there's definitely a big part of it there. Snoop Dogg's original album. That was. Yeah, gin and juice, man. [00:28:22] Speaker A: You're singing me, man. And by the way, you're not alone. I was also standing outside of a Sam goody or warehouse or one of those other stores that don't exist anymore to get tickets. So, no, I'm a little bit older than people think, but anyway. But thank you. Thank you for sharing that, man. I appreciate it. And definitely your product. You understand pricing and now you like hip hop? Oh, come on, man. Now we have to do tacos? Now we gotta do tacos? Next time you're in San Diego, right? [00:28:48] Speaker B: Absolutely. [00:28:49] Speaker A: Cool, man. Well, listen, thank you again. And would you, I know you're still going through phase three. Would you be willing to come back again in the future and tell us, just give us an update on what happened? [00:28:57] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. Love to come back and share some more, and hopefully we'll have some good stories to tell. [00:29:02] Speaker A: Beautiful, beautiful. Ladies and gentlemen, that's Steve Hamrell. And for everybody listening here, please take these lessons forward. All right, do something next Monday. Learn something and apply it so that way you can continue to monetize your value. And remember, stop guessing and start growing. Until next time, thank you and much. [00:29:22] Speaker C: Love for listening to the street pricing podcast with Marcos Rivera. We hope you enjoyed this episode. And don't forget to like and subscribe. If you want to learn more about capturing value, pick up a copy of street pricing on Amazon. Until next time. It.

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