Impact Pricing Podcast

Casey Brown is the President of Boost Pricing, and she has been since 2011. She started her career as a Chemical Engineer at GE, and she’s been in pricing for almost 20 years now. Casey loves whitewater kayaking, and she’s a big Buckeye fan.

In this episode, Casey explains how important it is for sellers to connect with the emotional component of the buyer/s as she shares her knowledge on how to substantially increase your ability to earn higher prices.

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Why you have to check out today’s podcast:

• Learn how crucial the seller’s mindset and beliefs are to the business’ profitability, especially as to whether they’re operating from a place of confidence or fear
• Find out why you should not put the blame on cost increases when doing a price increase
• Understand the power of taking into consideration the emotional component, like selling value through the language, mind, and heart of your customer

“I have yet to find, even in this current economic climate, a company that doesn’t have some pricing opportunity, and I would just ask everyone to keep looking for it. It’s there.”

– Casey Brown

Topics Covered:

01:33 – How Casey got into pricing

04:54 – Mark to Casey: Why don’t I know you? Why have I never seen you before?

07:00 – The biggest problem in sales being the lack of recognition that there’s a problem

09:33 – Is Casey trying to compete with people who are doing sales training and education? Both yes and no

11:33 – An exchange of Mark’s and Casey’s magic formulas in communicating price increases

15:05 – More about blaming costs and cost-plus pricing

18:02 – Teaching salespeople how to properly sell value

20:40 – Convincing Mark that the emotional component is as important in B2B as it is in B2C

29:17 – Casey’s pricing advice

30:08 – Connect with Casey Brown

Key Takeaways: 

“Our entire profession – we are the best kept secret in business. And frankly, if more people understood how impactful pricing is to the profitability and how easy it is to pull that lever, there’d be a lot more of us.” – Casey Brown

“It does not occur to most people that the biggest opportunity to make a huge improvement in your pricing performance very quickly is not necessarily to fix your strategy, but instead to help the team understand the skill set and mindset gaps that your team has.” – Casey Brown

“Connecting with the emotional component of the buyer is not just a consumer phenomenon.” – Casey Brown

People / Resources Mentioned:

• Pricing with Confidence (Reed Holden’s book): https://www.amazon.com/Pricing-Confidence-Leaving-Money-Table/dp/0470197579

Connect with Casey Brown:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/caseybrownboost/
• Email: [email protected]

Connect with Mark Stiving:   

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stiving/
• Email: [email protected]

Full Interview Transcript

(Note: This transcript was created with an AI transcription service. Please forgive any transcription or grammatical errors. We probably sounded better in real life.)

Casey Brown

I have yet to find, even in this current economic climate, a company that doesn’t have some pricing opportunity, and I would just ask everyone to keep looking for it. It’s there.

[Intro]

Mark Stiving

Today’s podcast is sponsored by Jennings Executive Search. I had a great conversation with John Jennings about the skills needed in different pricing roles. He and I think a lot alike. If you’re looking for a new pricing role, or if you’re trying to hire just the right pricing person, I strongly suggest you reach out to Jennings Executive Search. They specialize in placing pricing people. Say that three times fast.

Mark Stiving

Welcome to Impact Pricing, the podcast where we discuss pricing, value, and the leak-proof relationship between them. I’m Mark Stiving and our guest today is Casey Brown, and here are three things you’d want to know about Casey before we start.

She is the President of Boost Pricing, and she has been since 2011. She started her career as a Chemical Engineer at GE; wow. And she’s been in pricing now for almost 20 years. Oh, I now have two favorite things about her – she loves whitewater kayaking, and she’s a big Buckeye fan. Welcome, Casey.

Casey Brown

Thanks so much, Mark. It’s wonderful to be here.

Mark Stiving

Hey, how did you get into pricing?

Casey Brown

Oh, you know, like every pricing person out there – it was my lifelong dream. I was just a little girl, thinking of what I was going to do when I grew up. The Princess didn’t look like a very attainable title, so I thought I’d go for a Pricing Consultant.

I mean, obviously, this is a joke. The reality is, I think about children choosing careers, and I only knew of about 10 or 15 or 20 different careers even existed. No pricing consultant was coming to my career day. So, I was good at math and science, and advice for a lot of young people that are good at math and science is the same advice I got and the advice I took, which is “be an engineer”.  So I went to engineering school and started my career as an engineer at General Electric, and liked being an engineer. I liked the data and the spreadsheets, and Excel is my jam. But I’m an extrovert; I have what some people call a big personality, so it wasn’t really a great long term fit just being stuffed in the lab and ended up finding my way into Six Sigma. I was one of GE’s early black belts, and it was a rotational program there. So completely by coincidence, really, I ended up doing a six-month rotation in the pricing group and just kind of fell in love with the discipline as the intersection of art and science, people and process, data and psychology.

Mark Stiving

Nice. And so, is that what you love about pricing? The fact that it is numerical, but it’s really not.

Casey Brown

That’s right. Yeah, I think it is the most interesting, exciting, mysterious, sexy discipline in business. And I say that because, on paper, anybody who’s ever read an econ textbook or something knows the idea of a demand curve – at higher, you sell less, you price it lower, you sell more; but the real world is so much more nuanced than that, and there’s so many other factors at play. And one of the most important factors in my experience is the mindset and beliefs of the seller, and whether they’re operating from a place of confidence or fear. What I see a lot is that mostly, pricing decisions are made not to lose business rather than pricing to win. And so, when you consider how impactful our own beliefs, our own mindset, our own fears, attitudes, habits impact what we’re earning in price, it’s definitely a mathematical or numerical exercise, but it’s equally an exercise of I don’t know, bluffing and poker.

Mark Stiving

Yeah, I think that’s spot on. I assume you’ve read Reed Holden’s book, Pricing with Confidence. Is that true?

Casey Brown

Yeah, it’s sitting right over here on my shelf. It’s the third one up from the bottom of my stack.

Mark Stiving

Oh, you can only point at books if you point at mine in that stack.

Casey Brown

It’s in here.

Mark Stiving

That’s okay.

Casey Brown

It’s in here, too. A little light reading for my weekends; I pull out a pricing book and open it up to a chapter. Even if I’ve already read it, I just kind of like to prove them.

Mark Stiving

Nice. I want to come back to what you just brought up, but before I do that, I really want to ask a different question.

Casey Brown

Yeah?

Mark Stiving

Why don’t I know you? So, first off, you live in Columbus, where I used to live in Columbus.

Casey Brown

Yes.

Mark Stiving

You whitewater kayak, you’re a Buckeye fan, you’re a pricing person, you’ve been in pricing, running a pricing business since 2011.

Casey Brown

Yes.

Mark Stiving

And it’s got to be just the last three or four months I started seeing you posting on LinkedIn.

Casey Brown

Yeah.

Mark Stiving

And you post amazing content.

Casey Brown

Thank you.

Mark Stiving

I love the pictures you post, and the stuff that you post is really good so I try hard to comment on it and make good thoughts. Why have I never seen you before?

Casey Brown

Well, that’s a great question, and I’m not sure I know all the answers to that. I think that there are a couple of contributing factors. One is – and I’m sure you can relate to this as somebody who is also a student of pricing – it’s not an area that a lot of people go looking for help. Everyone knows about the idea of sales training, sales leadership, hiring for culture and fit, how to be more profitable through better cost and procurement. Very few folks go Google ‘pricing consultant’. Either they don’t know they have a pricing problem or they recognize they have a pricing problem but they’re doing the best they can in the face of the sort of invisible hand of economics; they’re doing the best they can in the face of competitors and customers. And so, I think, our entire profession – we are the best kept secret in business. And frankly, if more people understood how impactful pricing is to the profitability and how easy it is to pull that lever, there’d be a lot more of us.

So, some of this is just, I think, a reflection of the blue ocean nature of the pricing space, which I guess as a businesswoman, I’m not complaining about that. But also, I think it’s more specific to me and our firm. I think it’s a little bit about how we’ve kind of gone about building our business and doing business development. It’s a lot of speaking, but we haven’t been as, for example, a lot of Vistage and a lot of trade associations and conferences and so forth, but not a very intentional social media strategy, which we’ve made a recent change on. And you, noticing that, tells me that’s working. So, that’s great to hear.

Mark Stiving

It could; I’m glad you know. I live on LinkedIn; it’s the place that I just thrive. I love to talk to people there and hear what’s going on, so I was thrilled to run into you and learn more about you.

So, it sounds to me from the things that I’ve read and the things you’ve said so far today, is you really focus a lot on the sales side, helping sellers understand what value means…

Casey Brown

Yes.

Mark Stiving

Or helping sellers understand how to sell the product. So what’s the biggest problem there that you see?

Casey Brown

Well, I think it’s a lack of recognition of that problem in the first place. And so, I said before, I think a lot of folks don’t believe they have a pricing problem when it dawns on businesses that perhaps they do. And I think, frankly, because of inflation over the past couple of years, pricing is at the forefront of a lot of business owners and leaders’ minds in a way it has never been before.

So, once it’s on the forefront, once we’re shining a light on our pricing performance and saying, “Hey, we think we could do better,” most of the time – and I’m just basing this on the kind of inquiries that come our way – they think their problem is strategy, that their problem is figuring out how to charge it differently, how to tier or structure or segment their pricing; a lot of folks interested in the idea of subscription and recurring revenue. And so, they’re very interested in strategic questions around pricing, and it does not occur to most people that the biggest opportunity to make a huge improvement in your pricing performance very quickly is not necessarily to fix your strategy, but instead to help the team understand the skill set and mindset gaps that your team has. That caused hundreds of thousands, even millions of dollars, of price leaks every year that we sort of accept as a cost of doing business.

Mark Stiving

When you say the–

Casey Brown

And through relative– yeah, go ahead.

Mark Stiving

When you say the team, are you talking about the sales team or are you talking about product management, marketing, everybody?

Casey Brown

Primarily the sales team. I think it looks a little bit like a bullseye. In the center of the bullseye are folks that are making pricing and selling decisions and communicating price and defending value to the customers every day, which is typically that inside and outside sales team; sometimes, some customer service folks or some phone personnel. The next ring outside of that center of the bullseye tends to include a broader customer-facing slice of functions like marketing, like product management, and finance is always very interested in this conversation as well. But I think the person whose job it is to go out in front of the customer and take the arrows on behalf of the whole organization, they are the ones that are the most vulnerable to taking customer feedback as market intel and using that to discount.

Mark Stiving

We started the conversation on, you said pricing is the best kept secret and there’s a lot of people that are doing sales training. Do you find yourself trying to compete with people that are doing sales training and sales education? Because it feels like that’s where you’re positioning yourself.

Casey Brown

Yes and no. And so, what I mean is yes, we sometimes compete for the same training dollars or the same budget. If they have some work that they’re doing with a sales training firm that they love and that costs X, carving out a piece of X to work with on specifically, pricing execution, training to negotiate from a place of power and strength, that’s the only degree, I think, that is really competitive.

I don’t really find that content-wise it’s terribly competitive. And the reason I say that is although pricing is a piece of really effective sales execution and therefore is contained in a lot of good sales training programs, it’s usually given rather cursory treatment in a sales training program because they’re also working on all kinds of other things, teaching people to prospect better and how to reach decision makers and all kinds of elements of a full cycle sales training program.

We dive very deeply specifically into those elements that allow pricing success, overcoming the most common obstacles for pricing success, including things like how to courageously handle price objections. What’s the right way to defuse price objections? Another area of our focus and our training is how to pass along price increases – there is a right way to message that, there’s a right way to defend that – and putting a plan together that reflects good strategy and execution elements for a price increase have a lot to do with what you earn. Too often, and some of this is situational, over the past couple of years, it’s just jam another one, jam another one, jam another one. But if we’re even a little bit thoughtful about how to do that in a way that arms our team instead of sort of sending them out unarmed, then our ability to actually earn higher prices is substantially increased.

Mark Stiving

Nice. And can you share with me and our listeners what your magic formula is for communicating price increases? And by the way, I’m happy to share my magic formula in exchange.

Casey Brown

Yeah! Okay, good. Do you want to go first or do you want to go second?

Mark Stiving

I’m happy to go first.

Casey Brown

Alright, go ahead.

Mark Stiving

I always teach people there are four pieces to a price increase communication. The four pieces are 1) my costs went up, 2) I added more value to the product, 3) I haven’t raised prices for X number of years, and 4) do something nice for the customer, like we’re raising our prices, but we’re going to hold your price constant for the next three or four months or six months or whatever the number happens to be.

Casey Brown

Yeah.

Mark Stiving

So, that’s my standard communication. How did I do? Do you agree or disagree with what I just said?

Casey Brown

Oh, I’ll give you passing marks, for sure. I don’t think we probably have a terribly different approach. We teach some specific language and structures, and this depends a little bit if you’re delivering that message verbally or if you’re sending a letter. But the idea is we talk about a value sandwich. You deliver the bad news of the price increase on value bread.

And so, for example, “Mr. Customer or Ms. Customer, we’ve been delighted to be partnering with you to provide you with marketing services – or bolts and fasteners, or whatever the heck it is that you sell – for the past five years. During that time, we’ve invested in cutting edge technology, we’ve added four…” You kind of share with them how they’ve benefited through the partnership, then say something along the lines of “Unfortunately, at this time, it is necessary to pass along a modest price increase in order to continue to deliver the level of quality and service and excellence you’ve come to count on from ABC Company,” and then closing with a value which is sort of similar to your idea of doing something nice for the customer. It may be a specific offer such as that, but at the very least, it should reiterate and reaffirm the partnership.

I just want to say one thing about your formula that I think has been very appropriate and effective for the past couple of years, but I always ask people to do this with a bit of a watch out, which is to blame price increases on cost increases. What I liked about what you said is it’s not just about the cost; it’s also about the value, and it’s about the other elements of the relationship beyond just cost. But the reason I suppose I have a bit of I don’t call it a chip on my shoulder but I am on the lookout for people that are too ready to put the whole onus of the price increase on the shoulders of cost increase, and I think that really makes you vulnerable when costs flatten out. But the other thing – and this is the more insidious reason not to put too much of the blame on cost – is it in essence tells the customer that the reason you’re worth more is because the cost of inputs went up, not because of what you do or how you do it. It sort of reduces you to a bit of a commodity transactional player. And really quickly, I say, you know, Michaelangelo charged 3000 ducats for the Sistine Chapel; that was about half a million dollars in that day’s time. It had nothing to do with the cost of paints.

So, I agree that we have to and it’s appropriate to lean on cost as a justification, but not an over reliance on that, and certainly not an absence of value.

How did I do?

Mark Stiving

Okay, first off, the whole first part of what you said was brilliant because you have so much more tact than I do, so you are definitely in the right spot. The second part, let’s talk about costs and blaming costs.

Casey Brown

Yeah.

Mark Stiving

I don’t disagree with what you said. I think that if you blame costs on something like gasoline, so the price of gas is up, and we know the price of gas goes up and down. So, if I blame my increase in costs on gas, when the price of gas comes back down, my customer expects me to bring my price back down.

Casey Brown

They’re going to come knocking. Right.

Mark Stiving

But if I blame my price increase on increasing labor costs, that never comes down.

Casey Brown

That’s right.

Mark Stiving

So that’s just an only upward path. And the other thing I would say is – I teach this to pricing people all the time, and product people. Look, I beat out of you the concept of cost-plus pricing. Costs do not matter to the price you set. However, your customers don’t know that, and it is not your job to educate them on how we do pricing. They expect that if your price goes up, the only reason they accept is because your costs went up.

Casey Brown

I agree with both of your points. I believe that in general, I think you’ll agree with this, our communication should be designed to reduce the sensitivity to the increase. And so, sometimes that means leaning quite heavily on cost as the justification. And as I said, over the past couple of years, I think that’s been par for the course, very appropriate and very effective. Other times, it’s also very industry-dependent. If you have 70% of your product cost is steel, that’s a very different scenario than if you’re a professional services business where your input costs are knowledge workers and the cost of that labor knowing that wage inflation has gone out of control and it’s certainly never going to go back down.

Mark Stiving

Or you’re a software company.

Casey Brown

Right, and I agree with you. You and I could probably fill five podcasts full of our dislike of cost-plus as the basis for good pricing decision-making. But it is a language that the customers speak.

And so I think, my starting point for helping an organization figure out their price increase language really is what is going to be most palatable to the customer and reduce their sensitivity around this increase? And sometimes, cost plays a very large role, and sometimes, it plays none. And it really depends on their industry, what else they’ve done to add value, market conditions, competitive conditions. It becomes quite specific at that point, which is always when a strategy is most effective, when it’s really tuned to your business and your situation.

Mark Stiving

Yep, absolutely spot on. Okay, so let’s talk about helping salespeople in other areas. Do you teach them how to sell value?

Casey Brown

Yeah.

Mark Stiving

And I have to say, for every company I’ve ever talked to, I don’t think anybody in the company actually understands the value of their products the way their customers do. And so the idea of a salesperson being able to do this without someone helping them seems insane to me.

Casey Brown

Well, what’s really why I’m smiling so big when you say that is one of the things that we do in our training programs is at some point in the program, a very specific point in the program, we ask everyone to grab a piece of paper and write down, say, don’t overthink it, take 30 seconds – write down the three biggest benefits your customers derive by buying your products or services, and have everybody do that. We gather the responses, and first of all, the amount of disparity from one response to the next tells the story that the company does not have a unique value proposition that is well understood and able to be articulated by the entire team. So, that’s proof.1 of your point.

But secondly – and this is probably the more alarming – is that the answers are ‘quality service’, ‘speed’, ‘one-stop shop’. They’re words that are so overused in our current economy that they’ve become meaningless; they’re not a differentiator. ‘We’ve been in business for 37 years’; ‘relationships’. I mean, all the things, right? That’s the input for the next element of training that we do with them, which is kind of a ‘so what?’ Why does it matter that you have great service and great quality and have been in business for 37 years and have more expertise than your competitors?

And so, it’s really drilling down from the attributes of the company or the attributes of their products and services very deeply into the language of the customer and sort of getting in the hearts and minds of the customer. The Elmer Wheeler phrase of “sell the sizzle, not the steak”, that’s a little bit of what we work on and what we teach. Because unless you can make the customer care about it, it doesn’t matter how good you are. Another way of putting that is customers will never pay you what you’re worth; they’ll only ever pay you what they think you’re worth. But the good news is you control their thinking. So don’t abdicate the responsibility for how you share your value message in a way that makes them sit up and pay attention. The only way that’s going to happen is if you’re talking about what they care about. And that’s just as true, by the way, and you know this – it’s just as true in B2B as it is in B2C. Connecting with the emotional component of the buyer is not just a consumer phenomenon.

Mark Stiving

Okay. So, you and I are both engineers; we started out as engineers. I still tend to ignore the emotional part from the buyer in B2B. In B2C, it’s all emotional. But in B2B, I want you to convince me that I’m wrong.

Casey Brown

What will convince you most – statistics or stories? There are volumes of research by all the big names in business research that indicate, and not just business research and behavioral economics but also things like psychological research. There’s this idea of system one and system two thinking. System one is methodical and slow and careful and fact-based and system two is fast and instinctive; I hope I didn’t get that backwards.

Mark Stiving

I think you got that right.

Casey Brown

Okay. There’s tons and tons and tons of research that says we make a decision based on two and then justify it with number one. We make decisions on emotion and justify it with facts. I joked that my brother has a fast, red sports car because it’s got a really good warranty. He wanted that fast, red sports car. He fell in love; his mind and his heart were already owners of that car. And then he had to tell his wife all the reasons why it was going to be a good purchase, right? This is less specific to pricing and more psychology, human behavior, behavioral economics. But we don’t make any decisions in absence of emotions; certainly not ones that have any meaningful impact on ourselves or our business.

Mark Stiving

Okay, my turn.

Casey Brown

Okay. Hit me, teach me, convince me.

Mark Stiving

I don’t know who’s right. We’re probably both right in a lot of ways.

So, if you are going to go sell to a committee of people in a potential customer, I can just imagine someone saying, “Yeah, but this one feels good to me” or “I really like this one,” where instead, as a member of the committee, if I really like your product, I have to be able to articulate the value of that product to the company, and my emotions are completely irrelevant to that communications.

Casey Brown

Right up until the last thing you said, I agreed with you. Yes, you have to communicate value. Yes, you have to communicate the specific tangible benefits to the company. No, your emotions are not irrelevant.

In any buying decision, let’s use B2B environment for our conversation because I think that’s the context we’re talking about, there’s four different kinds of factors that determine the buy. One is rational, one is emotional, one is individual, one is business. So, the individual versus business means if you’re selling to a person, are they going to look good for their boss if they make a good decision? Are they going to get a promotion? What are their risks to them personally if they make a bad decision? There’s an individual component of the person or people that you’re selling to, and then there’s a business. “Hey, we can help you save $27,000 a year on telecom,” whatever.

Most sales efforts in B2B are focused. If you imagine a quadrant, where one half is emotional and one half is rational and the top half is business and the bottom half is individual, you have four quadrants. In most of our value selling effort, most of our value selling messaging and preparation and training is exclusively in the quadrant that says what are the rational, tangible benefits of this solution to the business? And we’re ignoring the rational, tangible benefits to the person, we’re ignoring the emotional impact to the person, and what kind of emotional tenor vibrations, if you will, are left behind in the organization because of that.

And so, it’s not that I would ever say don’t sell in the quadrant that you are comfortable selling in regarding tangible, specific benefits to the company. You’re just ignoring all the other factors that also influence that decision. And so, you have to sell to all of them.

Mark Stiving

Okay. So first off, I’m going to agree with you, which is really hard for me to agree with, but I’ll agree with you.

Casey Brown

Okay.

Mark Stiving

But I will say this in the quadrant that I like to play in. I think companies suck.

Casey Brown

Oh, yes.

Mark Stiving

They have no idea how to do that, even though they think they might be spending all their time there.

Casey Brown

Yes.

Mark Stiving

And in the other three pieces, especially on the individual side, I certainly think that the rational individual piece I focus on, and I think about it, and that’s a really important part. And on the emotional side, because I’m an emotionless engineer, I believe that salespeople can handle that without any help at all from me. That’s why they’re in sales and I’m not.

Casey Brown

Yeah. Well, I’ve got plenty of experience that says they’re not quite as good at as you probably think they are. And I don’t mean that they’re not. I would say, by and large, the sales population is full of folks that are better than average at reading the other person, reading their emotions, connecting, building rapport, sort of those relationship building aspects of selling. So, yes to that, but the ability to use that to understand specifically the person you’re speaking to and what challenges they’re facing and how it affects them.

Here’s a simple example. You’re talking to a plant manager, and you’re trying to sell them a piece of equipment because there are other pieces of equipment causing all kinds of problems. “What’s that doing for your business?” “We have this much downtime, this much waste.” “Is that causing you headaches? How’s that affecting your life?” “Oh, yeah. I have to come in every Saturday because nobody else can do that.” “Every Saturday? Imagine you could think of what else you do on a Saturday. Can’t you think of anything else?” “Oh, yeah.” And then you start talking about “So the idea is to…” and given more time, I could think of a better example. But the idea is to understand that the scope of the impact on that person is not just the $17,000 a week of lost production; it’s also what that means to them.

But I think you’re making a very fair and good point, which is okay. You agree that that’s a thing. But if they’re so bad at the core stuff of communicating the rational benefits of the organization, shouldn’t we start there? Shouldn’t we agree on the meatiest part of the value prop and get everybody effectively communicating and articulating that before we maybe fix some of these softer pieces? I say, sure, yeah, I don’t disagree with that. I like to fix it all, which is what we do. But yes, if you can’t even talk about the benefits to the company of buying your product or service rationally, then that’s the place to start, 100%.

Mark Stiving

Okay. I wasn’t even saying let’s start there; I was just saying that’s where I like to play.

Casey Brown

Yeah. Would you be willing to consider that you could sell more at higher prices if you did not lean so heavily into “I’m an emotionless engineer”? Is it possible?

Mark Stiving

Me, personally?

Casey Brown

Yes, you, personally.

Mark Stiving

Uhm–

Casey Brown

I’ll tell you what, you don’t have to answer it. Turn that over in your head for the next couple of weeks when you’re having selling conversations. And I know you’re a pricing guy, so you don’t sell yourself too cheaply. I’m a pricing person; I don’t sell myself too cheaply either. It’s likely to show up in our world not so much as underpricing as it is failure to close a piece of business that we could have made a huge difference with the company. We could have helped them a lot. But something about our ability to connect with the emotional side of that buy, we’ve missed that chance. And look, I eat my own cooking. I am far from perfect. I’ve been a student of this discipline for more within 20 years, and I’m always learning, and I’m always trying to get better at it. I think value selling is the evergreen. There’s a horizon line out there called perfect, and none of us are ever going to reach it.

Mark Stiving

Yup. So, to be totally fair, I’m old, and I’m not going to change.

Casey Brown

That’s fair. Let’s call it a parable for me, reaching your audience…

Mark Stiving

There you go.

Casey Brown

Your podcast audience, to have them look. Here’s what’s true about pricing – we believe a bunch of things that are not really true. And this is true about pricing, it’s true just about everything; we have self-limiting beliefs. And one of the most powerful things that we do in our training programs is to help people look at something they’ve taken as a fact, maybe for decades, turn it over, shine a light on it, and maybe they don’t totally change their mind about it but they see a new angle. And the beauty of a slight improvement when it comes to pricing is that can mean double digit impact to the bottom line of the company, as you know.

So, we don’t have to turn everybody’s paradigm on its head. We just have to make tiny little shifts.

Mark Stiving

Nice. Casey, I am having so much fun with this conversation. We’re going to have to wrap it up. Final question for you.

Casey Brown

Okay.

Mark Stiving

What is the one piece of pricing advice you would give our listeners that you think could have a big impact on their business?

Casey Brown

Add 1% to everything.

Mark Stiving

Is that 1% of the price?

Casey Brown

Yes, of course. That’s the only language I speak.

Mark Stiving

Okay, good.

Casey Brown

It’s overly simple, right? But the question is set up for that. It’s a little tricky. I believe that there is headroom, even in companies that have passed along their fifth price increase in the last two years. They were torn and weary and stressed out and worried about the recession on the horizon, and that that’s going to start to really put a lot of pressure on price going the other way even as costs continue to arise. I have yet to find – even in this current economic climate – a company that doesn’t have some pricing opportunity. And I would just ask everyone to keep looking for it; it’s there.

Mark Stiving

Nice. Beautiful, beautiful answer.

Casey, thank you so much for your time today. If anybody wants to contact you, how can they do that?

Casey Brown

They can find me on LinkedIn. My handle on LinkedIn is caseybrownboost. Casey, C-A-S-E-Y, Brown like the color, Boost like the energy drink. Caseybrownboost.

Mark Stiving

And I’m sure we will have that URL in the show notes.

And to our listeners, thank you so much for your time. If you enjoyed this, would you please leave us a rating and a review? The last person who was smart enough to figure out how to leave a review is Armin on February 13. You can get instructions by going to www.ratethispodcast.com/impactpricing.

And finally, if you have any questions or comments about this podcast or pricing in general, feel free to email me, [email protected]. 

Now, go make an impact.

Mark Stiving

Thanks again to Jennings Executive Search for sponsoring our podcast. If you’re looking to hire someone in pricing, I suggest you contact someone who knows pricing people contact Jennings Executive Search.