Maciej Wilczyński is a pricing expert and Partner at Valueships, a consultancy boutique specializing in software, cloud, subscription, and digital businesses. He is also a lecturer and faculty at the Wroclaw University of Economics, where he has finished his PhD title in strategic management, writing a thesis about software-as-a-service companies and their pricing capabilities.
He gained consulting experience at McKinsey & Company, where he led the EMEA part of Agile Insights solutions focused on digital marketing and customer insights.
In this episode, Maciej discusses the potential positive impact on your SaaS pricing when considering the removal of grandfathering for customers.
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Why you have to check out today’s podcast:
- Discover significant insights to expanding your business and boosting your income with SaaS pricing strategies
- Understand the ins and outs of SaaS pricing and gain insights into how companies can effectively gauge the value of their offerings, empowering them to make confident decisions in pricing
- Unlock valuable insights about grandfathering customers and potentially double your income
“Value-based pricing has an ability to at least double your current business.”
– Maciej Wilczynski
Topics Covered:
01:33 – Just wasn’t cut out for a metal band fame
02:22 – How he got into pricing
04:19 – What Valueships is all about
05:31 – B2B SaaS pricing and what makes it interesting
08:12 – Buying growth with pricing
10:31 – Four major reasons companies don’t raise prices
14:20 – Important thoughts on companies grandfathering customers [effect on short-term and long-term]
19:18 – No such thing as lifetime pricing
22:29 – Why pricing is hard and where should you get the motivation to increase price
24:57 – What you should bear in mind when increasing prices: listen to the majority and not to the few complaining minority
29:03 – Connecting your price increase to a customer-centric narrative
30:51 – Maciej’s best pricing advice
Key Takeaways:
“You should forget the word forever or lifetime in pricing.” – Maciej Wilczyński
“Where should companies look for the courage and energy to do it [pricing] is purely from value exercise.” – Maciej Wilczyński
“To really understand the value, run as many case studies as you can, quantified case studies, try calculating the ROI of your service initially internally as an exercise, as a workshop in exercise, and then move and try to do it with your customers to see the power of the product.” – Maciej Wilczyński
“Pricing starts from value, but if you’re afraid of raising prices, simply look at your churn rates. If they’re below four or 3%, you’re good to go.” – Maciej Wilczyński
People /Resources Mentioned:
- Patrick Campbell: https://www.linkedin.com/in/patrickccampbell
- Zappos: https://www.zappos.com
- Stephan Liozu: https://impactpricing.com/podcast/classic-value-based-pricing-how-to-get-started-and-how-to-succeed-with-stephan-liozu/
- Appsumo: https://appsumo.com
- Netflix: https://www.netflix.com/ph-en/
- Utpal M. Dholakia: https://hbr.org/2021/06/if-youre-going-to-raise-prices-tell-customers-why
Connect with Maciej Wilczyński:
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/wilczynskim/
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.)
Maciej Wilczyński
Value-based pricing has an ability to at least double your current business.
[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 dichotomous relationship between them. I’m Mark Stiving. Our guest today is Maciej Wilczyński, and here are three things you want to know about Maciej before we start. He is the managing partner at Valueships. He has a PhD in strategic management, and he spent his five years as a consultant at McKinsey, which is always a hard job. Oh, he also used to be in a metal band, which is pretty fascinating. Welcome Maciej.
Maciej Wilczyński
Hello, Mark. Thanks for having me here.
Mark Stiving
Okay. Just because I love the line you used in our pre-talk. I’m going to ask you this question. So your metal band wasn’t successful enough that you became fabulously wealthy?
Maciej Wilczyński
Yeah, I kind of didn’t make it. I had to move into pricing, but I just told you like, I also was alcohol, or narcotic addicted. So kind of, I think it’s a good trade off at the end of the day, obviously, being in a metal band was partially fun for a moment, but I’m kind of looking at the movies and the stories. I’m kind of glad that this didn’t work out.
Mark Stiving
Yeah. So I love the line, right? It’s like, if I’ve been successful, I’d be a crackhead. So, hey!
Maciej Wilczyński
I would keep people kind of pumping me up and reviving me every time I overdose.
Mark Stiving
Okay. So besides the fact that you didn’t succeed at a metal band, how did you get into pricing?
Maciej Wilczyński
That’s actually a very good question. So we have this joke in my family that we are the biggest pricing family in Poland because my brother was in pricing back in the days. His wife was in pricing, this is where they met. And I’m also in pricing, and my wife is into e-commerce. So it’s kind of related to the price as well. So this is the joke that we are in the biggest pricing family. So I kinda got this vibe from my brother with this difference that he was most into retail FMCG products, and as the fact that I was working at McKinsey at the time in a digital practice in digital marketing and digital McKinsey Digital. So I was doing a lot of B2B work, and I realized that subscriptions, all these things are kind of more interesting for me. So I kind of started my pricing journey because I had someone whom I could talk to to get some initial books, guidance in general, the interesting topic, but kind of my journey was mostly from the digital world, from the software pricing, so to say B2B pricing. And this is why I decided to do my PhD in the area as well. So kind of these whole things are somewhat connected.
Mark Stiving
Yeah, that’s pretty fascinating. As you were talking about that I was playing through my brain. I cannot think of any two people in the family who are in pricing together. So, that’s pretty impressive.
Maciej Wilczyński
Yeah, like we have three of them. And if you consider that my three-year-old daughter is pretty good at haggling, you can count it four, it’s like, but we have three of them. And that’s funny. This is actually, when you ask me about kind of fun fact, I should have mentioned this but I’m glad this kind of came out accidentally
Mark Stiving
Yeah. So what does Valueships do?
Maciej Wilczyński
Well, we are a pricing and value management consultancy specializing in, I would say three types of companies, mostly software slash subscription businesses, because technically they’re the same, more or less the same problems to solve, B2B companies, including, agencies, custom software development, but also to some extent enterprise software. Because if you look at that from the pricing perspective, this is more about B2B sales rather than subscription sales. And the third type of company is e-commerce. But with a heavy focus on platform and digital businesses like hotel travels, OTAs marketplaces, all these kinds of platform businesses. Effectively, this is where we are the best. So to kind of conclude everything that it’s digital and has a pricing component is kind of where we have the best kind of fit, and this is our ideal customer profile.
Mark Stiving
Yeah. And so talk to me about B2B SaaS pricing. So why is it unique? And by the way, I know a lot of pricing people that are in B2B SaaS pricing because there’s a ton of companies that are in B2B SaaS.
Maciej Wilczyński
Well, the pricing topic in the B2B SaaS pricing kind of merged. I think we can say that Patrick Campbell was a founding father when it comes to popularizing it in the tech world, because it’s one thing to be a pricing expert. And the second thing is kind of to evangelize it in the field, right? This is kind of like two things. And also there are several people who are good at pricing, but they’re not necessarily pricing experts. They’re product experts. And this is interesting. So why B2B SaaS is kind of, pricing wise, is interesting. I believe there are like two major reasons for that. First of all is like, until the AI kind of, let’s say evolution revolution, you name it we had a situation where you kind of had the zero marginal cost, with every additional unit of volume sold. It was either free or almost free. Even if you consider the HWS servers all this stuff, it was mostly free. So there was no way to kind of apply the cost-based pricing strategy, which is like the usual thing that people do.
And this is kind of the first and second thing is that because of the fact this is recurring, this is, and I’m talking mostly about the SMB or kind of product-led growth. So where you can click the credit card, add users, all this is not necessarily enterprise level sales, but kind of product-led growth or sales assisted. But with the transparent pricing, so to say, you kinda have this opportunity to for the first time since forever almost, you had this opportunity for people to self-checkout from the actual packaging. And you could observe a design test, not necessarily A/B test, but because this is something that, there are different rumors, but we can get into that, but why you shouldn’t do it, but kind of, you could check what is happening if you change minor things on your pricing page. And similarly, because of the recurring model, you kind of had this vibe of grandfathering the customers ensuring they stick to the same prices because they have already paid. So we are mentally not prepared as I believe for a subscription model, which is a very old model, but in the kind of monthly recurring subscription model, because we believe when someone paid $99 in 2018, they should still pay $99 for 2023. And even though the value of the product evolved like five or six times already,
Mark Stiving
Who actually believes that? Because I can assure you Intuit and QuickBooks doesn’t believe that. Because I pay them more money every single year.
Maciej Wilczyński
Yeah. Well, this is funny because you kind of realize when they realize that when they are posting for a VP of pricing or VP of commercial, that there will be pricing increases. This is kind of like you could literally create a SaaS tracker, pricing tracker on when they’re hiring, looking for a role or actively doing projects in the field, that there will be major price increases. So in general, what I see and what I observe as a consultant when we serve companies, is effectively companies start with some level of pricing. Usually they kind of make it up from a kind of win finger type of the pricing and then kind of build the product. They scale it, they get the initial traction.
And after they hit like more or less 150, 200, 250K MRR, which is monthly recurring revenue, they kinda realize it’s like, hey, how about we do something with the pricing because maybe we can do something about it. And then they change the price or they were already after some initial price changes, but they don’t really focus on the older customers. And then they kind of see the initial impact of the pricing. And then there is the moment in which they realize it’s like, okay, how about we increase the prices to old customers as well? And once we talked about drugs, so when they take this pricing drug, they want to do it more often because they quickly realize that the easiest, the cheapest way for a kind of early stage or kind of not early stage but medium stage SaaS in a scaling kind of journey, is that you can literally buy growth with pricing because you have so many discounts. You have so many grandfather customers, you have limited cross, up-sell potential, no add-ons policy. Usually you don’t have these features properly monetized. The packaging sucks. Like there are so many things and once they take it there is something like, do you have any more of this pricing? And this is literally what is happening also when it comes to our clients.
Mark Stiving
Yeah. And so I’ve worked with a lot of clients where you can just see the fear that they are terrified to raise prices because they think they’re going to lose their customers. And what always happens is they raise the prices and two customers call and complain and pay the price anyway, right? Like, okay, got it. That didn’t hurt that much.
Maciej Wilczyński
Yeah, this is so we even have a, obviously we are consultants, ex McKinsey, so we kind of have a slide for that. There are like four major reasons companies don’t increase prices. So reason number one is, but these customers have been with us since the beginning, right? This is kind of the argument number one. And I mean, yes, they have been with you since the beginning, but the product evolved since the beginning. Like as I said, like five to six times better, more features, better working better UX, everything is pretty much better. Second thing is that we are afraid they will leave us and go to competition. And I’m like, yeah, what are the two types of people that are actually checking pricing pages, founders and pricing consultants. And if you look at that from this perspective, and I think you had this in your book with whether this has like will I or which one moment? Yeah. Like 90% of customers are in will I kind of…
Mark Stiving
Especially if they’re existing customers who are subscribing. Absolutely.
Maciej Wilczyński
Oh, well of course they are, because they kind of actual value and perceived value is much higher. And then therefore they can, they know what they’re getting from the platform. So, that’s obvious. And the third thing is we want to make our customers happy. This is kind of the Zappos belief that the fact that you have lower prices means that your customers are happy. This almost never correlates as long as you are not honest, I don’t think it ever correlates, especially in B2B software. Like it might correlate with budget hotels or with a B2C type of the situation. And the fourth thing is kind of, we don’t know how to do it, right? So this is a fear of capabilities in the organization that we don’t know how to do, right?
So this is kind of a thing that I would rather not touch in my organization because we might screw some things up. And the pricing is so interconnected with retention, with acquisition model, with your finance, with effectively the whole product obviously the value that is the communicator of value. So you decide to kind of not touch it. And I think this is kind of another layer for the companies. Stephan Liozu created this article, which is the organizational confidence factor in pricing. And one of the fun most fundamentals that I had in my PhD, was actually coming from this paper. Pretty awesome. And the reasoning was that the organizational confidence, so the organizations believe in themselves actually in kind of the self-worth in the value of their product, means that they can value their pricing as well and value their product in the right direction. So it is the same as with you kind of, when you have like a high level of self-worth, you’re not engaging in toxic relations, you’re not engaging in toxic situations, you kind of, it’s very psychological if you look at that from this kind of philosophical perspective, this is a pure psychology that is happening here.
Mark Stiving
Yep. Absolutely. Let’s go back, I want to talk briefly about grandfathering in customers. So I actually have a, I don’t know, pro and a con thought about that, right? One is, look, they’re getting a ton of value. There’s no reason that I can’t raise their prices. The other thought though is when I’m first starting out as a company and I’ve put people on at a really low price, I don’t need to raise their price right away because that’s not where my revenue’s going to come from. My revenue’s going to come from growing or winning new customers. Now over time, as I’ve created a large customer base, then it makes a ton of sense to say, look, I’m going to go raise prices on my existing customer base because that’s free money. And they’re getting a lot of value from me. so it doesn’t bother me to grandfather in customers for a period of time, not forever by any means.
Maciej Wilczyński
And what do you think of it?
Mark Stiving
What do I think of?
Maciej Wilczyński
Yeah, do you think that is actually a problem when companies grandfather customers?
Mark Stiving
I think in the long term, it becomes a problem in the short term, it isn’t even worth worrying about. In the short term I would rather see you test a new price point and see if you can win new customers at higher prices. And then later on we can go back and say, okay, now let’s get the old customers or the original customers to pay us more. But when you’re first launching a company, you’re two years old. Whether you go back and raise prices on existing or the ten first customers, who cares, right? I’d rather see you go win a hundred new customers because there’s way more revenue there.
Maciej Wilczyński
So, yeah. So there’s one angle of looking at that in terms of a timeline. but there are like two things that I believe are important. One is this scene from Godfather when they have this, the carpet scene when they roll the carpet and they walk it, kind of, you remember this scene? So kind of what we also say is like, you need to roll the carpet in order to move it. So if you have the customers, initial customers because you’re actively engaging in discounts, getting initial traction, getting initial customer feedback, and you’re already gathering a certain scale and you have customers paying you like $5 for a subscription that should cost like 500. And this is literally what is happening because you have this all long tail of some level of fools, family name friends, people who are like getting this at 90% Black Friday discount sales or Appsumo discounts, all this stuff.
So cut this out immediately, like, just raise them. What we had for some customers was like minus 1700% margin on these customers. Yeah. So like 700 negative margin on the customers because they’re paying $1. And only just by cutting these accounts off, if you consider the cost that are coming from the customer support costs, buy every ticket all this kind of how much it takes to actually have it. We retrieved like, I don’t even remember, but there were like five or $6,000 of the pure MRR. But when we increased them, the overall impact was like 50 or 60K, but only cutting them off if you just turn off their account was already immediately five to 6K in kind of operational costs. So this is something that you should be doing anyway, but what you said in terms of this long-term strategy, I kind of see that testing that price point with this rolling kind of carpet rolling is like you test the new price point.
You see that it’s okay, you upsell these customers to this point, you raise it and you upsell these customers and it’ll take time to roll them because you have annual sales, these two-year sales deals, car resale it takes time to upsell the whole base. So if you do it regularly, it kind of becomes the process. And then as I said, this is where you can buy growth with pricing. This is becoming the same kind of revenue growth mechanism as your sales engine, your marketing as everything you do, just pricing becomes simply and yet another function in your organization that is actively leveraged. And this is what we are usually encouraging companies to do, kind of to move from the passive to active role in the pricing management.
Mark Stiving
I mean, obviously I agree with that completely. I don’t mind young companies leaving grandfathered customers alone only because they only have so many, let’s say they only have so many hours in the day to worry about things and worrying about that just doesn’t make sense to me. Yeah. Because it doesn’t cost them very much, it doesn’t bring them very much. It’s like, go worry about something important.
Maciej Wilczyński
Yeah. If you’re a pre-product market fit type of a company, if you’re still about to reach the certain scale, if you’re overall net dollar retention, gross dollar retention is okay ish, so why should you care? Right? It’s just like, obviously if your other aspects of the business are okay, don’t, yeah. There are other things you should be focusing on. More strategically, you are trying to win the market. Having said that, I have seen companies in distress, which were saved by pricing actions like that they actually did it.
Mark Stiving
Sure. And because I said those words that I’m okay with the company’s grandfathering customers, that doesn’t mean I’m okay with them leaving prices low forever, right? It’s like eventually you have to come back and say, okay, now how do we make sense of this? How much value are they really getting from our products? And what should they be paying us? And let’s start to move them in that direction. Because now we have time, we have energy, the the value is 500 times what it was when they first bought the product. So there’s lots of reasons why we say, look, let’s not leave it there, but in the beginning, I don’t care.
Maciej Wilczyński
Yeah, definitely. Like you should forget the word forever or lifetime in pricing. This is something that is, pure simple thing, when you are giving discounts, just say to them that yeah, this is 10% for the first year and that’s already enough. But obviously this is the pricing execution function. have an Excel or whatever. If you don’t have the CRM to kind of do it properly to just cut off this pricing and this is already enough, it is already an active function and you’re actively increasing, you’re boosting the expansion revenue. So this is simply, this is a good rule. Like forget forever or lifetime words. And this is already a lot.
Mark Stiving
I’ve never said those words in my work, but I’m going to start saying them. I think that’s a hundred percent right. The word forever pricing doesn’t exist.
Maciej Wilczyński
You should not do that.
Maciej Wilczyński
If I see it in a book without a quote…
Mark Stiving
I’m going to rephrase it. So nice. So what was the fourth one? The fourth one was, oh they’re afraid they don’t know what to do.
Maciej Wilczyński
They don’t have capabilities.
Mark Stiving
Yes. And I think that’s actually true with pretty much every company. You and I talk the same language I could tell just from the conversations we’ve had and so we get it, but there aren’t that many people like us out there. And so what’s fascinating is most companies don’t have someone working for them that understands what we understand.
Maciej Wilczyński
But don’t you have this internal fear when you’re raising prices for your services?
Mark Stiving
So I don’t have a fear that says I don’t know how to do it. I sometimes have a fear that says, will people pay my new price? And so I understand that, right? But that’s just a fear of I don’t understand my customer’s willingness to pay and I’m just going to go test it.
Maciej Wilczyński
Yeah. So, but look, you are already, I would say top 0.01% top professional in pricing in the field. And from time to time you are afraid of whether people will pay the price. So now imagine an average startup or software as a service company founder or borrower, whatever, on what they might be experiencing. This is literally the situation they are in. And I think that pricing is super easy conceptually, but super hard to actually be knowledgeable in because to become a pricing expert, and I’m obviously, we are pricing experts so we can talk about how awesome are we, but technically you need to be an expert.
Mark Stiving
Well, you’re awesome Maciej.
Maciej Wilczyński
But technically you need to be an expert in strategy, in marketing, in, in finance, in economics, in psychology, in statistics, in product. If you’re into product, in sales, if you’re into value-based selling and all this stuff. So you really need to kind of be a jack of all trades, essentially to be a moderately good pricing expert. That’s why this is hard because pricing touches so many things that it’s simply a hard decision to make. So where should companies should look for the kind of courage and energy to do it is purely from a kind of value exercises to really understand the value, run as many case studies as you can quantified case studies. try calculating the ROI of your service initially internally as an exercise, as a workshop in exercise, and then move and try to do it with your customers to see the power of the product, in other words.
I believe this is kind of mind bending for some companies when they realize that their customers are saving like hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars and they are taking a penny for it. I had a client, like in the facility management field where one of their biggest customers was so fascinated by the product that they realized it’s like, whoa. Like they didn’t increase the prices because the price was okay for that kind, but they realize it’s like how awesome the product is. Because sometimes you need to hear it from others. It’s like, yeah, your product is awesome. And when someone externally does that as a consultant, as a research agency or whatever it also is a totally different story. So I think this is important. So this is where you need to start from. Obviously the pricing starts from value, but if you’re afraid of raising prices, simply look at your churn rates. If they’re like below four or 3%, you’re good to go.
Mark Stiving
Yeah. So one of the things, and as you were talking about this, it struck me, I think one of the things that where we add value when we go into a client isn’t necessarily the ideas, or isn’t necessarily the process, it’s the confidence that says this is going to work. And so people can now say, oh, got it. This guy thinks it’s going to work, it’s probably going to work. And they can get over their own fear.
Maciej Wilczyński
Yeah, totally. This is kind of a, you can do it type of situation, but also, especially when the company kind of has this community-led growth. there is a strong community around the company very popular, SaaS business, very popular that they’re like communities of freelancers supporting the product, designers, all these type of creative jobs type of products. They are very often community-based. And when you’re raising the prices for a community, you immediately have a shit storm alert and the community backlash. So I think a role of a pricing manager, not necessarily consultant by a pricing manager, is to stand strong. And this is kind of like brace yourselves moment and to stay firm and to ensure that 99% of the conversation is mostly buzz. And you shouldn’t care. You shouldn’t even bother, but mentally it hurts you because someone says bad things about you. So you kind of, you don’t want to make your customers unhappy, right? And because,fundamentally, we don’t want to make other people unhappy. And then this is the same with the companies.
Mark Stiving
So here’s what you just said. I’m going to put it in d in a different setting for a second, right? So I’ll go out and I’ll do a speech for a thousand people and two people write feedback that said he sucked. And that’s all I focus on is those two people, right? The other 998 thought it was amazing. And so now as a pricing person, we go and we raise prices, and two people come back and complain, it’s, I can’t believe you raised prices and I’m going to quit and leave. But the other 998 we’re like, yeah, okay, not happy, but here’s the money. And so did we make the right decision? Heck yeah.
Maciej Wilczyński
Heck yeah. So this thousand people that you gave the speech to they didn’t say anything but they enrolled for your next seminar, right? What is happening with the price? So this is something that I believe is important because with the recurring revenue, look, customers, they make a decision every month. If you look at this, I know that this is the default option. They forget about these subscriptions or this is just come and go, this is like the beauty of this model. But technically they are making pricing decisions every month to stick to your product. I know it’s not that decision as a subscription moment, but still these are like micro moments every month they are making, obviously with annual deals it’s a little different, but considering that there are so many multi payments, this is slightly different. So look at Netflix, for instance. Let’s move to the B2C world.
Netflix literally has this problem because they have this case. If I don’t like the Netflix content, if I believe that the TV shows are not great anymore, too woke for some people or too whatever, or too boring or too duh because this is like the things that I read about Netflix is like, they cancel. So they vote with their wallets and they are making decisions every month. They’re making a decision every month, and then they can come back and see that there is like a new Witcher season or whatever, right? And this is kind of, that is the beauty and pain of the whole model. So you kind of also need to be aware that these people make these decisions every month. And if they are making them for the last 18 months, the probability of them leaving, if you raise prices by 10%, it’s pretty low.
Mark Stiving
So I actually look at what you just said differently. and so the way I think about it is that as a Netflix subscriber, I never think about it until they send me the notice that says they’re raising my price by $2 a month, and then it causes me to rethink my decision, right? Am I watching Netflix enough? Should I switch to Hulu or Max or something else? And so the act of the price increase causes people to make the decision again, where they, if they’re just paying the subscription fee, already made that decision. I don’t have to rethink it.
Maciej Wilczyński
Yeah, that’s happening and people don’t like it, right? Of course. But it also comes to how you communicate it. If you explain the reasons clearly link it to the narrative, that kind of the customer-centric narrative, if you call it a price increase, not some, we have just updated our trade policy or something like this, right? Utpal M. Dholakia has this awesome article on HBR that I have like, if you’re going to raise prices, tell your customers why. I google it so often that if I put it into my Google Chrome, this article immediately pops up. And this is something that I very often send to my customers as well. I think this is pretty awesome, if you call it a price increase, if you tell why, I like to put the data into the communication.
I really like to put the value in communication even to some extent that we have saved you hundreds and thousands of whatever. Yeah. The more quantified value we can do the more ROI we can show and we should be doing it. So, with personalized communication, it’s pretty easy to do. Obviously you need to have this value quantified first. This is hard, but still, you can, even if you don’t have it, you can say like you have like 20 users on the platform, they have locked like 100,000 hours in it and, whatever, to make it personal, to make it relevant for them. Because sometimes people don’t even know how many, the owner, the decision maker doesn’t even know if this tool is worth it.
Mark Stiving
Yeah. I have to say that I think it is absolutely brilliant that if you are able to calculate how much money you’re making your customer to put that into your price increase communication just is brilliant. Absolutely. So Maciej, we are running out of time, so I have to ask you the final question. What’s one piece of pricing advice you’d give our listeners that you think could have a big impact on their business?
Maciej Wilczyński
Focus on grandfathering, like we’ve spent enough time on that. So I even have this, because when I was preparing for this conversation, I always knew there is this one advice. Value-based pricing has an ability to at least double your current business. I honestly believe it that you can double the business usually if obviously done right, not immediately, but it can double. So at least 10% of this a hundred percent impact you can get from the grandfathering removal. Usually, if you look even on the case studies on our website, on valueships.com website, you can see that we are achieving like 27, 40%, 50 even percent levels, but 10%, this is my value claim. If you ask me, Mark, and I can say that every SaaS company has a 10% of untapped MRR potential, and I mostly take this 10% from the grandfathered customers and the discounting done right. This is critical if you have to do it right, and I believe you have this 10% of clear uplift only in the discounting space, especially if you’re SMB. You have like thousands of customers already. You actually have a certain scale and so say the internal market that you can work on. So this is something that would be my parting advice here.
Mark Stiving
Nice. It’s free money, so go take your free money. Excellent. Yeah. Maciej, thank you so much for your time today. If anybody wants to contact you, how can they do that?
Maciej Wilczyński
Well, considering that it’ll be pretty hard to spell my name, it’s [email protected]. You can also check Maciej on LinkedIn or just google our website, valueships.com.
Mark Stiving
Excellent. And to our listeners, thank you for your time. If you enjoyed this, would you please leave us a rating and a review? And if you have any questions about this podcast or pricing, 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.
