How we drove more enterprise value with pricing | Christian Nimsky (Vehlo)

Episode 11 January 09, 2024 00:31:35
How we drove more enterprise value with pricing | Christian Nimsky (Vehlo)
Street Pricing with Marcos Rivera
How we drove more enterprise value with pricing | Christian Nimsky (Vehlo)

Jan 09 2024 | 00:31:35

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Show Notes

Ever wondered why some SaaS companies soar with their pricing strategies while others nosedive? Christian Nimsky, SVP of Product at Vehlo, joins us to unravel the enigma. Christian dissects the critical misjudgments that can plague pricing models—think overlooked customer engagement and misinterpreted buying processes. We navigate through his treasure trove of experiences, from past blunders at PADI scuba to the cutting-edge techniques at Vehlo, where the focus is on crafting software and fintech solutions for aftermarket repair shops. The conversation is a masterclass in transforming pricing pitfalls into profitable strategies, with Christian sharing his playbook for avoiding the common traps that ensnare many a SaaS venture. 

 
Vehlo provides automotive software and financial solutions to improve the car owner’s experience. The company’s automotive software, marketing and payment solutions are inspired by their customers’ needs. These solutions are designed to handle their back office, empower their employees and create loyal customers. Vehlo is committed to customer financial success in an unpredictable world. 
 
In this episode: 

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: 

Vehlo 

Christian Nimsky LinkedIn 

Marcos Rivera LinkedIn 

Email for a consultation  

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Episode Transcript

[00:00:00] Speaker A: Yo, mic 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. [00:00:23] Speaker B: What's up? And welcome to the Street Price podcast, everybody. I'm Marcos Rivera, author, founder and pricing coach. And today's guest is, I think, particularly special. And the reason why he's so special is because he can see pricing changes across the full spectrum, from conception all the way to integration and beyond. And the lessons that he has learned, I think, is going to knock your socks off. Right, so we're going to get into this. Today's guest is Christian Nimsky. He is the senior vice president of product at Velo. Welcome to the show, Christian. [00:00:55] Speaker C: Thanks, Marcus, for having me on. Hi, everybody. [00:00:58] Speaker B: Fantastic to have you with us. I think they have no idea what they're in for and how much they're about to learn from you. Right. So I'm excited. Why don't you just quickly tell them about you and tell them what you do. Yeah. [00:01:08] Speaker C: Hi, everybody. I am Christian Nimsky. I work for a company called Velo. You probably haven't heard of us because we are a private equity portfolio of companies that focus on providing aftermarket repair shops. So that could be your local car dealer. It could be an independent shop, solutions that are software based and fintech based to help them run their business. [00:01:29] Speaker B: Fabulous. Fabulous. So you see the point of view here, right? There's a lot of growth, integration, synergies between different businesses, solving different problems and solutions, and also the background, even before you joined Velo, I'd love to tap into that a little bit later as well. But I want to give you the quick roadmap on how the structure works so we can get into it. Right. This show is based on the book street pricing, right. So we divided it up into three sections. The first one is rewind. So let's go back in time, tell us a quick story about a pricing, a struggle, a success. Let's get into the step by step so that way we can learn on how to gain some confidence. And then we'll go and bring it back to today and go into play, which is what's working now. Let's understand all the key things that are really helping you capture value, and then we'll look forward into the future and fast forward. So let's see what's next. What should we think about changing? Or what do you think is on the horizon for you? And then, after all that, I'd love to get into my most favorite question at the end. Just put this and plant a seed. All right, which is your favorite song or jam growing up? It just says so much about a person, I got to know what it is. We'll put that at the very end. How does that sound? You ready to go? [00:02:37] Speaker C: Sounds perfect. Let's do it. [00:02:38] Speaker B: All right, that's fantastic. Let's jump in with that story. [00:02:41] Speaker C: All right, so, hey, everybody, as I mentioned, I work for a company called Velo right now. But before joining Velo, I worked for a very different company. It's called Patty. And for those of you that might have gone scuba diving in the past, Patty is the world's largest scuba diving training and certification company. But they're also a little bit of a SaaS company. They provide dive shop instructors and the dive shops themselves a software platform to manage their business. Because Patty instructors train over a million students a year. And from a software subscription standpoint, we had 135,000 customers in about 183 countries. And so I was brought in, along with a new CTO and another individual, to help reboot their product development process. And so that's really not what we're going to talk about here, because it was more about how do you deliver stuff on time and all that kind of stuff. But one of the things, out of the 200 to 300 products that we had in our portfolio, there was one new product that was going to be a subscription model. And it was something new that we were trying to add to the portfolio to extend the engagement with that scuba diver, that consumer, beyond that initial certification and training. And for any of you who have had that experience, you know that there's some learning that you do, and then you go through some test dives with an instructor, and then you get certified, and it's sort of a one touch experience. We wanted to grow that touch to be ongoing engagement over time. And so, as part of this new product, we made some mistakes. And I wanted to tell you about these mistakes, because it's always good to learn from those that have gone before you. And so, within Patty, this new product was very important to the CEO and the CFO. It represented a way to extend our revenue model, and, as I mentioned, to drive that engagement. And so they started building it as mistake number one. Right? And we've all learned this. You got to go spend some touch time with customers and understand what they need before you build it. But that aside, I want to talk about how we packaged it and how we attempted to sell it, because I am a big fan of Marcos and everything that he does and the pricing advice and techniques are spot on. What we learned at Patty, though, had to do with understanding how the consumer makes that buy decision and where does it happen. And so we started out with an assumption that, to simplify it, when I got done with my certification, I was going to be so happy with that achievement that I was going to sign up on the spot and that my dive instructor was going to sell me on that. And so we built a very nice, good, better, best kind of packaging structure, and we had lifecycle marketers put all the right sort of stuff around it to sell it. All the things that we talk about on this podcast. However, we made a flawed assumption at the outset, which is, a, that that consumer would be open to that value proposition at that time in their experience, and B, that the instructor would want to sell it. And what we found is the instructor was worried that they were going to not complete their certification by confusing the diver. So, Marcus, looks like you have a listening listen. [00:05:48] Speaker B: When you said the word flawed assumption, it just triggered me for a second, because I think a lot of companies out there maybe, and folks listening right now probably have had a very spirited founder, CEO or leader that just wanted to dive right in and push the pace and just build, and we'll figure it out along the way. It's fine. And there are, by the way, there's a lot of articles and advice, I would call it, to say, hey, just move fast, break things, get out there. Just try, just start iterating, just start learning. Now, there's nothing wrong with starting learning and getting the inputs, but I think there is a very big difference between just reckless abandon and going out there and throwing stuff on the wall versus going out there learning, validating some key assumptions, or at least direction, and then taking steps forward in there and learning along the way. Right. And I think some people confuse the two together. Right. So, as I'm listening to you, I've done this myself as a confession of a former product leader, I've done it in my very early days, and the results were not good. Right. Just being real with everybody. Right. So I love that you're calling that out because this sets the stage. Let's keep going. [00:06:56] Speaker C: Here's what happened. So I walked in about halfway through this, right. And so we had to slow the team down, and that created the lesson that I actually want to share with you guys, which is, it created some friction with the CEO and CFO. They wanted execution. They wanted to get this done. And we're kind of like, wait a minute, we don't really understand the fundamental assumptions here about how people are going to buy. And so there is some tension about that. And as you mentioned, marco, sometimes you got to go slow to grow fast. Right. And so we ended up going around and around for a bit, iterating on the value propositions. But what we got to the core, after enough conversation is that we learned that the CEO and CFO had talked to their recent investors because they're private equity backed. Right. To their recent investors about this as a fundamental strategic growth strategy. And so it was really important for them to show progress against that for their investors and to show how it was going to grow their revenue model beyond the incremental growth that the core product portfolio offered. [00:07:59] Speaker B: Right. [00:07:59] Speaker C: And the product teams, for their part, were so busy on trying to prove that this wasn't going to work and that this was a distraction that they weren't asking that question, which is why do you care so much? And the CEO and CFO, I think, for their part, just assumed that everybody kind of knew. And so the lesson that I pulled from this that I wanted to share with all of you, as you start to work through pricing and you get responsibility for doing things at larger and higher consequence scale, is make sure that if you're a leader, that you're transparent on why you're doing something. And if it's to show a strategic progression with your investors, then be transparent about that. Don't hide that. And then if you're a product team or a pricing team that's working on something, ask the hard question. And especially if you think that you want to turn the steering wheel hard left on something that you happen to have walked into when you get involved with something. Because not all of us have the luxury of doing something from scratch, right? [00:08:55] Speaker B: No, we don't. And frankly, you're probably going to get a different series of seniority listening to this, right? And some might be like, yes, I'm in the C suite seat or I'm head of something. I can ask the hard question. And maybe with some experience, they also have the courage and finesse to try to put that out there. Right. There's ways to do that. You don't want to be career limiting in how you do this kind of stuff. Right? But there's also some folks that may be a little bit either mid level or junior thinking well, how do I do that? I just need to shut up and take orders. Right. But I think the way you approach it, I've always seen, and again, I've been junior before, too. Right. The way you manage it is it's okay to ask hard questions, but also come with points of view as well as ways to answer the question. If you just ask the question all by itself and just sit there, I think it makes it a little bit more difficult. It looks like you're being non cooperative, not a team player. It's not about that. It's really about understanding. So that way we can make the right decisions collectively and move forward. So there's a finesse in how to do that. And I'm curious, when people were raising their hands and saying, this isn't going to work, was there something that actually. [00:10:04] Speaker C: Broke through what happened? Yeah, we broke through it a couple of ways. We initially had all the arguments, right? And then those just went where you think they would go. But then we said, you know what, let's just try and make this work in the current form. And we iterated for a bit and didn't really see a lot of movement. Here's what broke through it, and I'll give credit to one of our team members that was more junior, just learning to be a product person. And what he did is he went out to these dive shops where we were trying to pilot this program, and he actually sat with them and watched them try and pitch this. And of course, in between dive sessions, you got to hear what the instructors and the dive shop owners really thought about this. And that's where it became clear, which is you're interfering with my ability to complete my core service that I deliver to that consumer. You're getting in the way, and I don't want you getting in the way. I want you to be what you are, and I want you to let me be what I am. And that was an aha moment for us. We thought that moment in the consumer's mind because we were really thinking about that consumer, that that was the magical and most prone to buy moment. But we forgot that the person that had to facilitate that had a different set of needs and wants than the consumer did at the time. And so when we realized that, we were able to take a step back and say, wait a minute, we need to think about a whole different way to get this in front of the consumer. And we adopted a little bit more of a digital strategy where after you got certified, we knew that you got certified because we send you a card, and so we can send you things electronically or we can reach out in some way to engage you. And then from there, obviously we had to take a pause. And the growth wasn't as hockey stick as we originally had hoped, but over time, the team, because I still keep in touch with them, they've been iterating on it constantly since that time. Little bit here, a little bit there, and now it's actually growing at a decent clip. So it was not the initial like, if I were to try and draw a curve, it wasn't the initial straight up, it was more of a slow climb. But now they're growing that pretty nicely. And it's because they paused to ask that question from that junior product person saying, wait, I'm just going to go stand with customers and watch this purchase try and happen and see what I can pull from that. [00:12:27] Speaker B: I think that's a huge lesson for everyone to take away, if you think about it, right, the CEO has a very strong or loud voice. Even the board also has an even louder voice, but no voice is louder than the customers. Right. Not to be all preachy about this thing, but if you really sit down and say, all right, well, you're the one that we're trying to serve here, and understanding them and their motives and dynamics and hearing it from them in a validated way, then that could guide your decision making, because that pivot seemed to be more around. Let's not just completely blow up this whole strategy. It was more like, let's change how we do it or how we approach it to make it more effective. Right. And it was that, okay, let's kind of angle this a little bit differently, which made all the difference, by the way. And sometimes that little angle here and there in a new product or new initiative or new channel makes all the difference. And so listening, adjusting, having some patience leads you to a much better path than a little bit of over gusto to get in there and try to make it work. Right. It usually doesn't work out that way in most cases. Right. So I think that's a fantastic lesson. You went through a number of things on alignment. You went through a number of things about talking to customer. You also in thinking through how to correct that behavior and come back and come strong and actually get results a lot in there. But I'm thinking through this scuba sass that we just stepped through. Right. What is the one takeaway that you want folks to have? [00:13:50] Speaker C: Well, I think there's two. And one of them I mentioned, which is if you're that leader. Make sure your teams understand the why. And if there is a certain outcome that you're trying to demonstrate to investors or to your leaders, make sure that you're transparent about that so the teams can navigate it. And then if you are that more junior team member or team track three in Marcos's book. Marcos, I'm glad you threw that in there, which is what generates enterprise value. And how is that calculated? And how do people think about the different ratios that we look at for SaaS companies or even just something more broad, which is, do you have strategic diversification of revenue lines? Which is what Patty's leadership, we were all trying to work towards that. And so understanding that is really critical. And understanding how your CEO is going to have to go talk to the board is really critical, regardless of what your level is. And so those are my big takeaways. [00:14:45] Speaker B: And. [00:14:45] Speaker C: Yes, absolutely, Marco, spend time with your customers and watch the purchase happen. We did a lot of that at other companies that I've worked at. And it is always so illuminating because the customer is not. They don't have an agenda. I'm not going to say they're always right. They don't have an agenda. They behave as they will, and it's irrefutable to watch that behavior. [00:15:04] Speaker B: Exactly. And I think that's a big key here that I want to also underscore. Right. I mean, I put that chapter in track three because really, there's more to it than just making the customer happy. And that's one thing that I want to maybe peel back a little bit. And you know what? Call it controversial, call it whatever, but I don't think that your purpose in life, in existence as a company, is to make the customer always happy. I think the idea is to satisfy their needs, serve them well, give them the value that they want and willing to pay for and grow your enterprise value. And so sometimes the motives may not be just, hey, the customer wants this. They said it's going to make them happy in our last interview. Let's build it. It's much bigger than that. And I think if you look at track three in the book and you also just talk to your CEO, ask a little bit more about where we're going directionally, what's happening. There could be other reasons for investing and making certain bets that are beyond just singular, making the customer happy, so to speak. I put quotes around it because there's a lot of definitions there, but just beautiful lesson all around, I think helps folks pause, take a step back, and I want to now bring it to the present. Okay, so that was the past. Let's bring it here to play. What are some pricing and packaging techniques or just methods that you're using now to capture value that are working really well? [00:16:25] Speaker C: Absolutely. So today I'm at Velo. As I mentioned, we're the automotive repair software company, and what we want to be is our customers favorite. And there are a lot of different companies competing in this landscape. There are other entities similar to VLO that are buying up smaller ones and integrating them. And so we have acquired, just to set the stage, we have acquired 16 companies in about three years. We're a relatively young company. We have grown from zero to over 600 employees. We have customer portfolio of approximately 25,000 customers. And it is a really exciting and chaotic time. And so as we have brought these products into our portfolio, one of the things that we look at very quickly is how are you selling, and how are you pricing and packaging your product? And there is a lot of catch up, in particular for small entrepreneurs that have grown their product organically. They've sold a lot based on relationship, and they felt reluctant or bad about raising their prices. Right. So we've done, over the past year, a number of price increases to catch up, which is not unexpected, especially in a private equity backed environment that's going to happen. But here's what's really been working well, Marcos, is we initially, with the first few teams, spent a lot of time really going deep, and you helped us do that. Then over time, we've done a couple of things to kind of templatize it. And our product teams are now getting into a rhythm, which is really what I love to see. And it's one of the things that I will give patty credit for doing really well is on an annual basis, or sometimes even more than annual, they take a look at the market. They have built really effective customer feedback loops that constantly run, and we track competitors constantly. We have a couple of mechanisms to do that, and we adjust prices. And what is exciting about that is obviously, you get MRR and ARR growth and EBITDA growth and all those numbers that private equity people love to think about. But the other thing is, as part of that rhythm, we have gotten really good at putting content out. That helps tell the story of what we're working on, how we're adding value. So if you're a customer, you don't just get a pain letter. Like, I know there's a lot of science about how you do a good pain letter, right? But the challenge with a pain letter is that is your one shot to try and tell that story. And if you're a software that is sold by a salesperson, you actually got to not only make the end buyer confident that this is still a good thing and that there's value behind what they're paying. You've got to have your salesperson and your account manager also feel confident. You don't want them to be on the other end of a customer that calls up after getting a pain letter saying, I know we got these private equity bosses and we got to do that. No, you want them to say, absolutely. You know, what we've done for you the last few years, we've added these features over the last few months, is what I meant to say. We've invested in support and training. We've integrated with three or four other solutions that we know you use today. And then it's not a new story in a pain letter, it's a recap. And so the teams have really engaged on Facebook communities for the products that they've built. They've gone on LinkedIn, they've hosted webinars, they've got even shark tank competitions now. They've got all sorts of fun stuff that they do on a constant basis. And just watching this engine churn is exciting. And we have had, of all the things that we've done, some have been pretty dramatic increases in the catch up. Our churn has been sub 3%. So it is extremely effective to have a content drum beat. And a lot of companies, I think, forget that, especially if it's not part of what they normally do. [00:20:12] Speaker B: First of all, the rhythm piece makes tons of sense. That I think is quickly overlooked, especially when folks try to do some pricing and they say, okay, yeah, we did it. Don't touch it, it's good. Let's not revisit it again for a while. But building a rhythm, a cadence, no. This is how we build and capture value, right? We do this. We do this. Everything you do up to conception and validation and getting it on the roadmap and building it, pricing, it also becomes part of that motion. And so having that rhythm makes a lot of sense, also makes pricing just a ton easier over time. But I would love to get everyone here listening to go back and think, how do I start pain letters. How do I do a pain letter? Right? Give everybody the maybe quick, like one, two, three. If they don't do it, I'm brand new. I've never sent one out before. How do I do one go, for it. Just give us the baby steps. [00:20:59] Speaker C: Well, and you'll probably find things that I'm missing or correcting that I'm not thinking of. But just off the top of my head, it's really important just to set the stage, which is to say, hey, here we know that you've been a customer of ours since however long. It's good to have that data. And we have delivered value. And as part of delivering value, we are moving your cost from x to y, essentially. And here's what it's going to mean to you in the future. Here's how and when you're going to see that show up. And here's who you can talk to if you have questions about this or here's how you can reach out and engage with us. Unlike some software companies, because our customer base at Velo is relatively limited. It's 25,000 across all the products. But within each product, it might be single digit thousands. We really emphasize a personal touch. So, Marcos, if we're raising your price from $200 to $250 a month or whatever it is, we want you to feel comfortable reaching out to us. We want you to be able to talk to us. We will talk you through it. We will give you predictive trust on why this is happening and what's going to happen next and when the next one is going to potentially come. So you don't necessarily put all that in a pain letter, but the pain letter needs to tell from. And you're just getting Chris Nimsky's point of view, right. Needs to tell a story that talks about value when it's going to happen, so they're not surprised. And then the other thing that we have done with these letters, which I highly recommend, is people need to hear a few things a few times to retain them. So you don't want to over drum beat it, but you don't want to just sneak something in an invoice and then light the match, right? You want to engage them like you respect them, right? You're not trying to hide from this. You just say, look, we've done a lot. We've grown, and we want to continue investing in that growth, Marcos. And here's what we're going to do to do that. And part of that is you're going to see your cost go up a little bit. And we're really excited to keep working with you. And if you have any questions, call our group over here, insert phone number or email, and we will work with you. [00:22:58] Speaker B: That was fantastic. That was fantastic. So the fact here is that you're hitting on a number of keynotes. I'm going to summarize it here because I love talking about this exact thing, and I work with a lot of clients on it, too, which is when you're a customer and you're in the software, no matter what SaaS software you're using scuba SaaS or something else, you're worried about yourself, right? I mean, let's face it, right? They got their own problems, they got their own customers and things they got to do and so on. So they really don't think about the value as much. They feel it, they want it, they need it, but they don't really think about it. So this pain letter comes into play. Some other call it value story or value alignment. And there's all these names out there. I like pain letter because they're honestly just paying to solve their pain at the end of the day, right? I love the sandwich approach for you guys, listening to exactly what Christian just said, right? Here's all the great value we've delivered over time. And don't be lazy about it. Get a couple of data points, like actually show how many users they had, how many channels, how many things they downloaded, whatever it is, get a little data, put it together, let that really resonate with them and remind them all the features you did. Don't worry about all those silly little bugs you fix and all that stuff, like real meaningful things that you've changed in the product and around the product, too. Maybe you've expanded your support tiers, maybe you've added this or that, whatever it is. And you also look in the future, say, hey, we're really excited about these things coming down the pike. So maybe there's a big release you got coming out or you're extending something. Maybe it's really high ranking on the enhancement list, put it in there. And so you want to be able to cover both of those ends, right? So get a little data, talk about the great things that you've put out there and what you're excited about in the short term future. And then you put that in, you kind of reset the value in their minds. And that way, if you're going to capture some more of it, puts you in a much better position because no one really wants to just sit here and say, I'm just paying more for the same damn thing. It just feels rotten and it's so much noise and ruins the brand and ruins your opportunity to upsell and cross sell later. There's a lot of things that could fall down, put in the effort, put in the pain to make a pain letter, I guess, is what I'm saying. Right. Wonderful lesson there. Let's go to the last section. Fast forward into the future. There are things that are working, but I'm sure there's something on the horizon. What are you thinking of changing in the future and why? [00:25:12] Speaker C: Absolutely. Well, one of the things, as I mentioned, we want to be our customers favorite. And as part of that, this slice of the world, the automotive repair business, is actually really interesting because it's digitizing. And so they're going through this process of figuring out, oh, wait a minute, I need a CRM like thing. I need to have financial solutions. I need to offer my customers ways to finance large repair. And historically, like many segments where this shift to digital has happened, a lot of startups creep up, right. And from the shop operator standpoint, I've got to have this tool over here, I've got to have this tool over here. And we call it swivel sharing. They're going between tool to tool to tool. [00:25:53] Speaker B: That's a good one. [00:25:54] Speaker C: Part of what we're doing is we're saying no, we're going to bring these solutions together and we're going to integrate them more deeply. And there's two reasons for that. One is to make the customer's life easier. They should have one thing that they can go to to get all their business needs done. But the other thing is it gives us more flexibility in packaging and pricing. And so we want to ascend from basic level, which is, hey, we're doing these things to individual products to the next brown belt level, if you will, to say no, we're going to start introducing different configurations and packages because we realize that not all customers are the same. And we want to give the ability for customers to grow with us instead of growing out of product a and then going over to product b. And so there's this concept that I'm sure you guys have talked about on this podcast before with the idea of package laddering and all this kind of stuff. And so we want to get there. And what we've done over the last couple of years while we've been doing these basic increases is really focused on the quality of our sales and transaction data. Because to do good package design, you need to know what did I upsell? Who was it to? Did it work? How long did they stick? Did they downgrade later? And that kind of visibility, I would say if there are any founders on this podcast listening today, it's easy to be sloppy on that front. We talked about at the beginning of the call, we've acquired 16 companies. Part of what I do at Villo is m and a integration. And so I've seen a lot of companies come in and in many cases, their transaction data from their sales data is essentially messy, or they've got way too many skus because one sales guy wanted to sell a particular way, so he invented his own skus. And then trying to see the signal versus the noise in that, if you're trying to do pricing, design is really hard. So rather than try and get too fancy, if you're a founder or CEO, make sure that your team has a good rhythm and that they're disciplined about how they record this stuff, because, a, it comes up in diligence if you ever want a strategic exit, and we look for quality of earnings. But two, it's important for you to be able to optimize pricing later. And as investors come in to buy a company, one of the things that they often look for is what are some quick wins that we could have to generate additional value to extend the growth trajectory of this investment even further. And pricing is very often one of those first things they look at. And so set your stage. You don't have to solve and optimize for all your pricing. You should be focused on product to market fit. But set the stage for the next stage of growth, whether it's internally or through an external investor to go optimize how you're selling and taking that to market, which means make sure your data is clean. [00:28:37] Speaker B: Make sure your data is clean at the end of the day. But it makes a lot of sense, mainly because it's going to inform those next steps. And I always find that most companies that we deal with, not all of them, but most of them have a data problem. And that data problem makes understanding value, who's getting it, what's happening? Very murky. And when that's really murky, it gets really hard to monetize right. From all that. So I love that lesson here at the end, so on, I think about all three. Rewind and then play and then fast forward, right? It's really understanding that why getting behind that, getting those assumptions challenged, asking hard questions to really just having rhythm and stroke the pain a little bit, right. Write that pain letter and get the compensation you deserve. And then of course, data and discipline leads to dollars at the end of the day, right. If you're able to do that, then pricing monetizing so much damn easier at the end of the day. So I really appreciate all the knowledge you're dropping today. I think these lessons are going to really hit home for a lot of folks. But I do have my favorite question coming up. Favorite of all times, right. Is what is your song, man, that favorite jam growing up, what is it? Hip hop for bonus points doesn't have to be what is it? Tell us and tell us why. [00:29:45] Speaker C: Well, this is where I start to age myself out a little bit, Marco. So for hip hop, I've got to go back to the I'm also going to be extremely honest and not make myself out to be a hip hop aficionado. So I am one of those surface guys that there are great songs as far as I'm concerned, like Beastie Boys, Brass Monkey, or going back to Cali by LL Cool J, especially living in California here. Still listen to that sometimes. But if I had to go ninety s, I got to introduce you guys to the Tempe music circuit, which is where I went to school in Tempe, Arizona. I went to a little nightclub that no longer exists called Chewy's and there for week after week, I got to listen to the gin Blossoms play. So everything early stage gin blossoms I'm a huge fan of. Still listen to today. If I had to pick a single song, it would be their parody of a country song because I also like country music called Cheatin and I encourage anybody to go listen to that one because it is a great parody of a country song. [00:30:43] Speaker B: Cheating by the Jim Blossoms listening up in chewies all night long, probably with a drink in hand, I'm guessing, at that stage, right? That's good fun, man. I'd love it. That's a first for us too. I'd love the ultra niche of that, right? And I think that for you, man, it suits you super well. And I want to thank you for jumping in and just sharing all the great knowledge. And team, thank you so much for tuning in. Hopefully these were lessons you can take back. And remember, stop guessing and start growing. Until next, thank you and much love. [00:31:17] Speaker A: 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.

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