Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: I think AI will definitely change pricing, but what it's not going to change is having those tailored, bespoke conversations with current customers as you increase pricing.
[00:00:10] Speaker B: 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.
[00:00:33] Speaker C: What's up? And welcome to the Street Pricing podcast. I'm Marcos Rivera, founder, entrepreneur and pricing coach. Now, today I am excited for this guest. Cause he's one of the good guys. And when I say one of the good guys, I mean he shares what he's reading. He shares the best practices and sales, best tips and tricks, and I just think we need more guys like him out there. So joining us today is John Reinberg. He is the founder and principal of Aligned advisory Group. John, welcome to the show.
[00:01:02] Speaker A: Marcos, thanks for having me, man. Pumped to be here.
[00:01:05] Speaker C: I'm pumped to have you here because the thing is pricing and sales, there is no, I think, tighter relationship when these two things are in sync. That's when the magic happens with a lot of companies. Right? So just real quick, tell everybody a little bit more about you and what you.
[00:01:20] Speaker A: Yeah, happy to. Yeah. So my background has been predominantly in b, two B SaaS technology sales. So better part of, I guess, 16 years now, the last three or four roles as vp of sales. And so about 60 days ago, I went off fully on my own and I'm leveraging all of my experiences and the unique challenges that I've overcome, many of which were self induced to help early stage founders and CROs with their go to market strategy. So I launched a line advisory group and have a handful of clients continually build that client roster. But it's been really great. So focusing on early stage folks, the.
[00:02:02] Speaker C: Entrepreneurial spirit, man, it speaks directly to me, I'll tell you that. Big ups to you. It is not for everyone and it's not for the faint of heart. So big ups to you, man, and big support. I wanted to spend some time and break down that immense pricing genius you have back there because it's pricing and sales kind of combined together. Believe it or not, when I think about pricing, I feel like sales is my number one customer. That's one of the key things I think about. And we're going to break down today. So quick roadmap for everybody. Are you ready to get street with me.
[00:02:35] Speaker A: Absolutely, man.
[00:02:37] Speaker C: Everybody listen. We're going to do this based on the book. All right, so the first section is going to be rewind. We're going to talk about a pricing story, a struggle. Let's get a little bit behind the scenes of what really happened, and let's put that sales lens on here. Let's make it more around what happened with sales when the pricing change happened. Then we're going to bring this to play. What's happening today. We're also going to unpack a little bit more about sales and pricing and that relationship, and then we're going to do fast forward, which is what's next and how that relationship might change. So with all that laid out, man, if you're ready to give us a good pricing story and how it impacted sales, John, the floor is yours. Take it away.
[00:03:14] Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. So, obviously, a shout out to Marcos and his team at pricing IO, because you guys were super helpful a few roles ago. We hired you, brought you on to help us with our pricing strategy. And so it was a really interesting dynamic. So we basically had enterprise level pricing, but our ICP was SMB. And so if you can look back to back, way back when, I think we had a pricing page with five different prices, and there wasn't necessarily, like, an algorithm of, like, what was all included and also the justification of percentage increase from tier to tier. We also were kind of struggling internally whether we wanted a freemium model or not, and we found that we were experiencing a lower win rate when we had increased prices. And so, yeah, that was kind of the current state prior to kind of bringing you guys on and helping us with some of the sale, the psychology to pricing.
[00:04:14] Speaker C: And I think it's super interesting, though, because there's a lot of companies in SaaS really are, especially in their earlier stages, maybe are wondering, like, who are we really talking to here? Right, right. And then when you're super clear on that audience, then it helps kind of craft. Okay. What kind of experience do we want to give to that audience? And the truth is, the dirty secret behind pricing is that you're actually pricing the experience, not the product, right. In the end. And so if you're really able to dial that in, then it makes pricing a little bit easier for you to solve now. So we have a couple different things going on here. We got freemium. Yes. No. We got the Icpenna packaging fit, maybe not quite there, and then noticing that, hey, prices are going up and sales are going down. Ouch. That's like the big thing. Most folks fear I'm going to do this in reverse order because that last one really, I think, pops in. A lot of folks mind that, man, if I raise prices, I'm going to lose deals. And sometimes that's true and sometimes it's not. So tell me a little bit more about how you were unpacking a little bit. The man why are we losing deals when we raise prices? What was going on?
[00:05:22] Speaker A: Yeah, and I think it's something that you and I talked about when we immediately, when we initially had our consult, but I think we thought that we'd get a great lift in revenue in our ARR by increasing pricing, but it was void of value. So I think it's really important to educating your current customer base. Right. Your client roster of, hey, we're upgrading pricing well in advance, like significant notice, and here's why, here are the things we're building, here's the roadmap that's coming, here's the value it's going to bring to you. But we had done that void of the value. So not having value and a price increase married together was a real struggle. And I think, honestly, the best way for us to find out and the best way to inform our strategy was our current customers, our friendlies, asking them for feedback, asking them, what are your thoughts? Doing a survey, those are things we hadn't thought about. But when we use the survey methodology of here's what we're doing, here's what we're trying to achieve, what are your thoughts? We got that feedback and then we're able to kind of like, extrapolate that and roll it out as a strategy.
[00:06:32] Speaker C: I love it, man. I love it. You use the friendlies to fight the fear. That's exactly what you did.
That's fantastic. And one thing I worry about, though, is, you know, it's not an easy thing to, like, sit in front of a customer or even somebody who is about to pay more or somebody who knew your old price, because sometimes customers go to your website a couple times or talk to you a few times and then they come back and they go, whoa, wait a minute. You're charging me more now for the same thing? Charging me more for the same thing is. Is one of the suckiest feelings as a buyer. Like, why would I pay more for the same thing? It just feels, it just feels wrong. It feels like I'm being taken advantage. And the word track on why this is costing more money is so important to change that perception. Cause that's where they're going, that's the first thing they're thinking is you are greedy and trying to take more money for me. So maybe think about maybe in some of your sales, like ninja tricks as well. Cause when you said void of value, that's gonna put you in a really tough spot to have that conversation. But if you had the friendly feedback and the value and okay, what are folks really paying for and why they would pay this much? That is what arms the conversation. So what are some of those sales ninja tricks when you're looking a customer in the eye and trying to explain why they gotta pay more?
[00:07:51] Speaker A: Well, I think first of all, you have to determine, are there a certain cohort of those early customers, those legacy customers that you want a grandfather in to reward them for being the test case, the guinea pigs that came on board first when you didn't have all the value. So maybe having a separate pricing plan for them. So I think that's something to consider strategically as an organization. Two, I think it's important to have transparency with product roadmap because, yeah, when you think of, oh, it's the same platform, but I'm having to pay more. Well, it's not the same platform. If you can see what's coming in roadmap, here's the why behind each feature that we're pushing, here's the value to your organization. Here's why you should care in your role. So it's not only at a corporate level, communicating through marketing messaging to your existing customers, but also at a sales level. You obviously, hopefully have robust notes about the client, what their drivers goals, anchors are, what positive business outcomes they're looking to achieve. And then you're educating the reps to have those conversations on an individual basis on specifically why it matters to them and the value they're getting. Not in a generic sense, because even if a lot of companies are similar, no one wants to feel like this is just an on block decision. And, oh, I got the generic email from marketing. You want to ensure that boots on the ground, the sales reps are having those conversations. Customer success are well armed to have those conversations. So it's tailored to the individual and to the champion that you're having conversations with.
[00:09:26] Speaker C: I think that makes a ton of sense. I think folks forget that because I think they'll try to come up with something like a high level generic word track and it just doesn't resonate, man. And you even said right here, like, why you should care in your role. I mean, you're getting deep into that person and that's where the connection comes in for sure.
[00:09:43] Speaker A: Like, why should I care what's in it for me? How does this impact me? If you can answer those questions, you're in a way better spot and there's going to be less pushback. But if you just elevate prices and they're like, hey, it's the same product, like, what are we doing here? That can be.
[00:09:58] Speaker C: Exactly.
And here's true story. Here's a word track that when they were raising prices, this is a while ago, their word track was, we looked at the market and we feel like this is a fair adjustment of our price.
Just put yourself in that customer's shoes for a second there. It's just like, what's this nebulous market and fair? And there's so much out there that is not directly tied to that human. I go back to the humans buying from other humans to that human buying the software from you. It makes it really tough to see why. And that's what triggers usually, okay, maybe look at other options here. Let me pick out the phone the next time somebody calls me up and wants to do a demo. So I think that connection is key. Prices piece was all really around filling the value void, making sure that you had that value story for reframing and then aligning it super specifically to that buyer, to that audience. But I want to go back to the freemium thing you said a minute ago, because I think a lot of companies also struggle with what type of lead generation works for us if it's a free trial or freemium or something, or something else. And so I wanted to know when you guys were thinking, hey, should we do freemium? What were some of the reasons that you and the management team were bringing that up? And then we'll break that down for a second. Yeah.
[00:11:20] Speaker A: So our initial thought was, obviously internally we felt that there was a ton of value that we brought, and also we didn't have a low touch, tech touch approach because it was very hands on initially because it was an early stage company. So we really wanted to have a paid pilot versus freemium. We felt like they would have skin in the game. They're kicking the tires with purpose. We're going to prove outcomes. We're going to have success criteria throughout this engagement. But we didn't really have an option. It was a very heavy lift, a very time intensive process, and we didn't have a way in which just to get folks in the door kicking the tires in the platform. And I think part of that was technology and absence of the infrastructure to support that. There wasn't like, you know, a way in which they could just sign up on the website. It's not like you're spinning up a free Dropbox account. You log in and it provisions your storage. It's a lot more handholding. So we felt like the freemium option wouldn't be best for us relative to the handholding and initial setup implementation that would be needed.
[00:12:25] Speaker C: Got it. Got it.
[00:12:26] Speaker A: So you really had a handhold platform. Does that make sense?
[00:12:30] Speaker C: It makes total sense, and I think about it this way. Like, if. If your team needs to touch the dials, you got to go with the free trial. Like, you can't do. You can't do, like, configuration and heavy implementation support and consulting with a freemium product, or if it takes a lot of work to get to the end, usually if you're trying to address a lot of different nuances and use cases or just try to, again, dial it in again. When you have a bunch of dials, you go with trials. My point of that is if you're not a quick snap of the finger, two click, get in, and start getting value, freemium is really tough to pull off, and generally speaking, and that, to me, is not just a strategic decision. There's also product implications that physically can't do it, right?
[00:13:20] Speaker A: Oh, absolutely. And I felt like we had a very robust enterprise grade software, but we had an SMB that could be five people or less, many of which were sole proprietors. And it's just a lot to navigate. And without it being, like, self led, like, tutorials that pop up and kind of, like, nurture them through the process, it was a very much a hands on approach, manual approach, which was a challenge.
[00:13:46] Speaker C: So, yeah, and that's. I would always say, look, if you're trying to go to freemium and you think that's the way to go to capture, maybe there's like a long tail in the tam and you're like, do you want to go after it? And once they taste the product and it gets sticky and they like it, you got to put a lot of time, money, effort to really make it super, super lean and easy to get into the product. And that sometimes is not an overnight thing. Could take six months, could take twelve. Who knows? So that was the big shift was like, all right, look, now we're not going to do freemium. We're going to go the child path because of the configuration and the touch. And that, to me, is a big strategic decision because now you're able to allow folks, to taste the value in a way that does not ruin your unit economics, which is the big key here.
Excellent. So how did it work out with the trials?
[00:14:35] Speaker A: It went well. I mean, we got, again, it was more of an SMB cohort. We had some success there. We got a lot of good feedback in that process. We ended up converting quite a few of those trials, which was good for us. But ultimately we felt like that guided kind of paid pilot was the path forward until we could support it from an infrastructure perspective, product wise.
[00:14:58] Speaker C: Okay, the guided paid pilot. Now, see, now you're getting into enterprise world a little bit more, right? Which they definitely are risk averse and want to kind of try before they're by, typically speaking, they're putting some money behind this. They got career reputations behind this. Right. All those big things. Let me. You brought this up, and because you did, I'm going to poke at it a little bit. All right, guided trials and paid trials. Right? So how did you end up charging for the guided paid trial? What did you figure out? And it's a good way to charge them for fee for that because I know companies who actually get really nervous about charging for pilots. They have no idea what to charge. How'd you guys figure that out?
[00:15:39] Speaker A: So we kind of pulled the price out of thin air, to be honest. But we found that fifteen hundred dollars a month for a 30 or a three month pilot was the perfect amount where we wouldn't get a ton of pushback. They could immediately approve. It wasn't a big deal. And if we lost, hey, at least we got paid something then ended up not converting in the end. And so we felt that that was a sweet spot. We tried 5000 a month and immediately got a ton of feedback from market. That's probably not it. And then 500, it was like, oh, yeah, let's just do that. So 1500 felt like a good, happy medium. There was even pushback with 3000 a month. So it was just kind of like battle testing in market. Yeah, we just kind of vacillated between the different amounts and landed at 1500.
[00:16:24] Speaker C: Team, I want to take a quick pause here to ask you for a huge favor that'll mean a lot to me. Please review and share the show. Share it with your team, your friends, your peers. Not only will it help them stop the guesswork in pricing, but it'll also help you and increase the chances that you'll take action and change for yourself. All right, much love. Now back to the show. Now here's the funny thing, is value based pricing, right? When you're trying to price a pilot and say you're thinking about value based pricing because that's the right thing to do. Right. But what value are you trying to capture and value for who? Value for you to win or value for the customer during the pilot? Right. This is a tricky one that most folks don't think about is who's really getting the benefit of the pilot at the end of the day. Right. They're getting some assurances, but there's something that you want, and there's a whole reason that you even put any effort into this pilot is to get them to say yes and to win the customer. Right. At the end of the day, it's almost an extended trial or just a more hands on type of trial, which ends up building trust and consensus so you can end up closing the deal. Right. That's kind of why we do these things. And I'm going to ask you this. The percentage of conversion from your paid to trials to customers, was it pretty high?
[00:17:40] Speaker A: Pretty high, yeah. I want to say like over 70%. Wow, that's like 3 hours versus the trial. The pilot was probably like, or, sorry, the, the free trial. Like 30% or less.
[00:17:52] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:17:52] Speaker A: So it's more than double. Pretty high, I mean, but definitely doubled.
[00:17:55] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah. And so the value you're actually trying to capture is your own, believe it or not. So when it comes to pricing pilots for everybody listening, like, how the hell do I price pilots? You're not trying to make a ton of money off the pilot fee, all right? You're just trying to cover your butt, making sure that, you know, the effort that you put in there. If they do end up not converting, oftentimes, you know, you can cover some of that and keep on moving and move on from there. But there's another reason you're doing it, and that's trying to give them some skin in the game to actually pay attention to this pilot. Make sure that you're treating it like a first class citizen so you can increase that conversion rate. So the number one value is increasing that conversion rate. And that dollar amount that you pick needs to be super low friction enough to get in the door and approve it and not create a bunch of hoopla and freaking committees, but high enough so they respect it and are able to then see the pilot through. You have your goals, you have your measures you're trying to hit and so on. Now things can get a little wacky because sometimes pilot, they ask for extensions, sometimes they delay their decision and all.
[00:18:57] Speaker A: That stuff and all that stuff.
[00:18:59] Speaker C: Exactly. Scope creep on the pilot, then it's like, you got to hold the line on some of those key things. Right, because they're also. They're also trying you out, too. Not just the product. They're also testing you.
[00:19:08] Speaker A: And I think our customer retention, like, was way higher when it was a paid pilot because we were validating. What is your success criteria? What is the project charter? What are we going to achieve? What are we not going to achieve? In this engagement, we had regular touch points, understanding technical requirements. We're building good relationships with stakeholders through that process. So it was a trial for both parties, but ultimately, we're proving a ton of value to make us more sticky. And the formal multi year agreement versus the trials where it's like, kind of hands off, low touch, and then they kind of fizzled out when they came on board. Even with good onboarding, there's something about that, like, focused 90 day engagement where it's paid skin in the game, or we're getting a ton of good KPI's throughout that process and alignment. And then pushing forward from there, we found we got a lot more multi year deals versus the trials that converted the freemium model.
[00:20:06] Speaker C: And there you have it. Right. I think when you look at it that way again, it makes it even more clear who the benefit is, who's the beneficiary is, and the goal, and some tricks and tips around pilots, as well, is not just coming up with a price point that covers your cost to implement the pilot, the entire pilot duration. Add a little bit of margin. Some people multiply by 0.5 or two or whatever it is to get some of that, whatever that approval threshold is. Some companies, it's ten k. It's 25k. It's whatever. You just make sure that you're below that. Usually, the midpoint between that cost plus and that approval threshold is where the sweet spot is for the pilot. So there everybody goes, right. Real quick. The second thing is you could do tricks like, hey, if you do sign up for a year, wonderful. Let's convert you. Let's go. If you want to sign up for two or three, I'll take that pilot fee, and I'll credit your contract. And it was basically free, right?
[00:20:58] Speaker A: Yeah.
90 day pilot towards their ARR or acv year one.
[00:21:04] Speaker C: And there you go. And that's a win. And that's a win, because then at renewal, that shows the pilot credits, and you can come on back up. Right. So, those are the kind of key things there. I love it, man. I think this. I didn't expect it to go down, this pilot, this pilot section, but it's super valuable stuff, man. So and so with all those key pieces here, I wanted to take us out of the rewind and come back to play because we are already touching on a couple of topics on sales and pricing and that blend of the two and where the magic happens, like I said in the beginning. So I want to ask you a question about these days. What do you see as complete pricing do's and don'ts when it comes to enabling sales, making it easy for sales to win, removing friction from the sales process. What are some things around pricing?
[00:21:55] Speaker A: We can unpack that pricing page. Just transparent pricing right on the website, especially for SAS. That's definitely a hard requirement. I think having a good better best option makes a ton of sense. Being thoughtful and scientific between the percentage increase per tier. There's a lot of psychology in that. I learned a lot of that from our engagement. Just getting the consulting that was helpful and then having a mechanism for them to kick the tires. Now, it doesn't have to be freemium, but they should be able to sign up for a paid pilot easily and removes the friction from that process. All very, very important, but I think the transparency, like what 90% of the research is done before they show up to the demo. People don't want to wait to see pricing. It's part of the biggest decision point that they're going to make in terms of criteria to proceed forward. And so I think it's really important to have that transparent pricing up front. I am cool with enterprise talk to sales. I will say that because some of that can be more bespoke based on requirements and based on what you're selling. But I think all those factors are important to consider. For sure.
[00:23:01] Speaker C: I'm going to push you a little bit on that one because let me play devil's advocate and go the other way. Right. Which is. Wait a minute. What do you mean transparency? I want. Let me just do my discovery. Let me talk, let me see what their budget is and let me go and get as much of that budget as I can possibly can. Why are you going to give away the numbers upfront, man? And your rebuttal to that? I have one, by the way. What your rebuttal to that is? What?
[00:23:26] Speaker A: My rebuttal to that is you're still going to have a tailored strategy and recommendation in a consultative fashion of what that plan should be, but they should still have access to the plan to educate themselves and they may not even take a call if they think, oh, they're going to drag this thing out, we're never going to get pricing. It's not even on their website. So it could be a blocker from them even taking a meeting. And the last thing people want is that frustration of not getting to pricing. And at the end of the day, there's a ton of other add ons. There could be like an API call or services where you can make up that revenue based on the unique requirements that that business has. But I don't think it's going to be a deal breaker by putting it on the website.
[00:24:08] Speaker C: Nice. And so you're touching on another big one, which is the transparency lets them do the research. So when you do end up having a conversation with sales, it's a more more educated, almost more qualified type of lead. And then you're not wasting your time on where you're completely hiding the pricing. And they're expecting to pay five k. And like, man, our products start at think we're wasting our time.
[00:24:34] Speaker A: And those plans, I think that's really important because they're like, hey, this doesn't make any sense. And now you're spending half the call explaining what's included in each tier and just not talking about what is the best path forward in terms of our feature functionality, what you need and packaging that solution.
[00:24:51] Speaker C: I got you, man. I got you. I'm going to get nerdy on you for a quick second here because there's something that I talk about which is called the price value exchange or the equation. In their mind, this is where I'm paying this much, I'm getting this much. And it feels good, it feels unfair, it feels. Whatever the transparency on the pricing page, people say, hey, are you publishing your prices? You're not really just publishing your prices, you're publishing that price value exchange. And that's the key. I want folks to kind of maybe zoom out a little bit. It's not just about publishing the price, it's also, it's the full message. Because if you just put a number up there without really describing the value or getting behind what they're going to get from it, that's a big mistake. Right. But what companies have been doing is they'll describe the value but not put the price point on there. That's been status quo for such a long time. And I think where companies are now moving more towards is, hey, maybe we should give them an indicator of what they're going to pay. So they'll either, some plans will have a price point. Sometimes they'll do the as low as this price or starting from that price, sometimes they'll arrange, right, here's what you'll typically pay. And you know what? For those that are just so bespoke that it's so hard to put a number, they'll even say, hey look, your price depends on number of users and number of API calls. At least now they know, okay, if I have a lot of that, I'm going to pay more and if I have a little bit, I'm going to pay less.
So even those kind of are steps towards transparency. But let's flip it around. Let's say, what are some of the things that you just can't stand? John, that was just like, oh, this is so gonna handcuff sales when it comes to pricing, to packaging, like what are some changes or types of maybe I would say models that you think just aren't that good for sales, man. Just hurt them.
[00:26:34] Speaker A: Yeah, I think I was a part of an organization that just rolled out like, hey, we're just doing a blanket. 40% of ACV is the services. And it was a very simple SaaS startup in terms of like onboarding implementation. It wasn't even configuration, it was just basically clicking go live and we were charging them 40% of the ARR of year one. That felt like a really challenging conversation to have with prospects and it definitely hurt us in sales and they wanted to hold to that price. So I think that was an interesting approach. It'd be one thing if you increased your services, knowing you would discount it, but not having those levers, I mean, that seems like a bit of a challenge.
[00:27:20] Speaker C: Yeah, this is, that sounds like something that came from finance or somewhere, but.
[00:27:23] Speaker A: Yeah, exactly.
[00:27:26] Speaker C: I started in finance. So much love to them, but sometimes they get mathematical on you, right? They're like, hey, just a percentage of this on top of that. And there you go. It's easy to stick into a spreadsheet at the end of the day, right?
[00:27:36] Speaker A: And clearly you want to discount services. Overdose recurring revenue, and I get that, but you know.
[00:27:43] Speaker C: I mean, when it comes to multiples, we all know that predictable, recurring streams of revenue tend to get a little more value than the one times and the others, right? But 40% of ACB as a standard of charging for implementation, right? So here's the thing, it's really hard for a sales rep. How'd you come up with 40%? A sales rep is going to sit there and try their darndest to try to explain in a way, and here's what you get with the dedicated account.
[00:28:09] Speaker A: Manager, the account manager that has 50 other clients. Perfect.
[00:28:14] Speaker C: That's right. Yes. Dedicated or assigned, whichever you want to call it. But it's really puts a lot of pressure on the sales rep to try to explain it away and balance that price value equation in the mind. Remember I talked about that a minute ago. So where I find, just so you know, professional services is a part of the package when it comes to the pricing model and how you monetize. And I do think that there are tendencies for sales to throw it in for free. Why? Because they want to give them a little something, land a deal, etcetera. But if you charge for services, you get back to that thing I talked about with the paid pilots, you get a little skin of the game. You make sure that the services are not margin dilutive, that you can invest and have outstanding kick ass services to really get them to value all those key things. But make no mistake, and I didn't in the SaaS business to make a ton of money off of services. So you want to make sure that it's priced appropriately. 40% of ACV is actually a little on the high side. That's usually for more complex, complex implementations.
If I had to reveal some of the studies that I've done, I've surveyed a lot of companies and talked about professional services. And as a percentage of ARR typically comes back to anywhere between ten and 25%.
[00:29:32] Speaker A: Yeah, it's usually 20% a lot, but yeah, ten to 20% for sure.
[00:29:37] Speaker C: Ten to 20%. Some like to use like take two months of your ARR and that's kind of, it floats in that same little area.
[00:29:44] Speaker A: Right.
[00:29:45] Speaker C: But that's usually where I see it range. And that's oftentimes you can get by with that. But if you're able to then break down your services to be super clear on what they get at the end of each one. And so, like, frankly, some of the stuff that's just basic setup and get up, maybe you do include it right at the end of the day. Right. Just keep it easy with the more complex hands on configuration or, I don't know, data migration or trying to get some, some like proprietary system that they built and trying to integrate with that and all that. That be something you can charge for separate, and that's okay. And people expect.
So that's another one there. So it sounds like math. Math. Pricing is really tough on sales. Everybody listening here? Yeah, I think those are two big ones, man. So let's move fast. Forward. Now, let's go into the future. So everyone's talking about AI is going to change pricing and it's going to be all algorithmic and things like that, thinking about where pricing is going. The more information that we have, the more transparency that's out there. How do you think pricing and sales, how's that relationship going to change over time? What are you going to see?
[00:30:52] Speaker A: I mean, I think with AI obviously setting an algorithm of the perfect pricing model and obviously feeding it good data, I think AI will definitely change pricing. But what it's not going to change is having those tailored, bespoke conversations with current customers. As you increase pricing, as you increase pricing across the board for all the different tiers, you're going to want someone to have a conversation, and like we talked about earlier, talk to them about why it's important to you, the value you're providing. Here's what we're doing, here's why we're doing it, here's the roadmap. We want to hear your feedback on this and here's why we're increasing your pricing. So I think that there's always going to be a human element because people don't want to feel like there's just a generic lump view of, hey, this is what we're doing across the board, you have no say in it. I think it's really important, especially with your top 20% of your customer base, to have those conversations with champions and explain that one off, because the brand erosion can be detrimental to the organization if you just do it in a generic way. But I do think obviously AI is changing everything, so certainly that'll play a huge factor in pricing.
[00:32:02] Speaker C: Oh, huge. I mean, the amount of information it can consume, the amount, the patterns it can detect, all the key things AI can absolutely lift. But you're right, it still can't sit in front of another human being and explain to them why the price increase, why it matters to you, why that price value equation is still in balance in that mind.
[00:32:23] Speaker A: But it's just street pricing and have all your principles and then make informed decisions upon that.
[00:32:29] Speaker C: Yeah, you know what? It's. There's a whole nother topic I can take offline there. Right. But you can train AI to do whatever you want. It's true. But it's still. That a, in front of the eye means artificial. It is still not real. And when it comes to real conversations with real people, you still need, you still need a good sales rep that's trained and ready to go to do that stuff. Man. So I fully, fully agree with you all the way there, man. Thank you so much for taking it down the sales lens with us today because again, it's super important for pricing and sales to really jive and make that make from what I look at as a tool, which is the pricing model, as effective as possible to win at the end of the day, man. So a big one for you is high five for all the things you're doing with sending out best practices, what to read, what not to read, what to do around sales. Keep doing that, man. And also just big ups for you, for my SaaS community and dropping lots of knowledge, would you be willing to come back one day and tell us a little more of your latest thinking on sales and pricing?
[00:33:33] Speaker A: Man, I would love to anytime.
[00:33:35] Speaker C: Fantastic, man. But I'm not going to let you go until you answer my favorite question of all, which is give me that favorite jam. Growing up, what was the song that you could always listen to over and over again growing up?
[00:33:47] Speaker A: I would definitely say midnight marauders by tribe called Quest.
[00:33:51] Speaker C: Ooh, I did not see that coming in the Bronco.
[00:33:56] Speaker A: The 1990 white Ford Bronco in high school with a box with 212s in it. Yeah, that was a good chance.
[00:34:04] Speaker C: He said two hundred twelve s. I think there's half the people listening. Don't know what that is, right. But that is, that is the jam to put on 212s in a wide call. You know, it just rolls slow, right. Put it up. I love it, man. I love it. Tribe called Quest, man. I'm Rodis. That was. I think you might be the first tribe one so far, which I love.
[00:34:25] Speaker A: Here we go.
[00:34:26] Speaker C: But listen, man, again, thank you and major high five. Love to see you again. This was super valuable for all of us and team, that was John Rydberg. He is a sales guru, sales genius. Please look him up, follow him and he will always give you the best thinking and best materials. And for everything you learned today, make sure that you apply it on Monday. Get 1% better. Make that progress towards the goal. All right? And remember, stop guessing and start growing.
[00:34:57] Speaker B: Until next time, thank you and much love for listening to the street pricing podcast with Marcos Rivera. We hope you enjoyed this episode and 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.
