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Impact Pricing Podcast

#578: Decoding the Emotion and Solution-Driven Sales Approach with Joe Woodard

Joe Woodard’s vision is to “transform small businesses through small business advisors.” And in the service of that vision he and his team educate, coach, provide resources and build communities for small business advisors, with the overarching goal of empowering them to play a powerful, high-impact advisory role with their clients.

In this episode Joe shares strategies for Infusing feelings and solutions into your pricing models that drive people’s buying decisions.

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Why you have to check out today’s podcast:

  • Find out effective strategies for your sales approach
  • Discover effective hiring strategies to find the perfect team and talent that align with your needs
  • Understand two foundational pillars of value to be effective in selling your product or service

“Infuse everything we’ve talked about [sales approach] with feelings and solutions into something the client can consume, easily understand, comprehend, and buy easily.”

– Joe Woodard

Topics Covered:

02:51 – From a Quickbooks advisor to hiring and teaching coaches how to coach businesses

05:40 – How this great quote from John Maxwell became a huge inspiration for his upcoming conference

07:28 – Understanding the two foundational pillars of value

09:31 – Methodologies used to maximize product’s value proposition

12:06 – Gaining a competitive by catering to both emotional and solution-oriented needs

13:48 – Incorporating emotional intelligence into your sales approach

18:44 – How mimicking good behaviors is effective in selling

19:33 – Understanding the DISC method for hiring people

24:26 – Delegating outcomes, holding individuals accountable using methodologies like OKRs (Objectives and Key Results)

25:58 – Infusing pricing strategies with a combination of emotional resonance

28:47 – Interplay between emotions and problem-solving in both B2B and B2C contexts

30:06 – Joe’s best pricing advice

31:51 – What this conference, ‘Boldly Go!’ is about

Key Takeaways:

“If you’re waiting for all risk to go away, you’re waiting for all fear to go away, you’ll never act. And if you’re waiting for perfection, you’ll never act. So don’t wait on those things. Enter the danger, proceed afraid, fail forward, and then read a lot. That’s how I did it.” – Joe Woodard

“People will only exchange their hard earned dollars for one of two things, how you make me feel, or how you solve my problem.” – Joe Woodard

“It’s not about price, it’s about nature.” – Joe Woodard

People/Resources Mentioned:

Connect with Joe Woodard:

Connect with Mark Stiving:

 

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.)

Joe Woodard

Infuse everything we’ve talked about with feelings and solutions into something the client can consume, easily understand, comprehend, and buy easily.

[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 strategic relationship between them. I’m Mark Stiving, and our guest today is Joe Woodard. And here are three things you want to know about Joe before we start. He is the CEO of Woodard. I like to think of them as the business coaches of business coaches. He’ll correct me if I’m wrong. He has a degree in classical Greek, and we also learned today he has a piano minor in college. So this is exactly the person you think should be in accounting. Welcome, Joe.

Joe Woodard

Mark, it’s great to be here. And I will tell you, there’s a common denominator there. Greek’s a language, music’s a language and accounting’s a language. So maybe I’m just a language junkie. I don’t know.

Mark Stiving

By the way, do you speak any languages? That’d be interesting.

Joe Woodard

You know what’s interesting? I do speak English, but that’s what’s so pathetic about my bachelor’s degree, is it’s a dead language. So we don’t even know for sure how they spoke it 4,000 years ago. 2000 years ago at the earliest was the last remnant of what I studied. It’s not modern Greek. so we can only take a guess and how they might have pronounced it. And we use that only for the purpose of educating people on a language that nobody knows how to speak. It’s really sad. Which is why of course, I could not build a livelihood out of that and became a business coach or practice coach. I would call myself for accounting practices because we only service accounting practices.

Mark Stiving

Yeah. First question I want to ask. I usually start the podcast off with how’d you get into pricing? You’re obviously not in pricing per se, although you do a lot in that space. But how did you go from being a QuickBooks advisor to leading such an amazing company that actually hires coaches and teaches coaches how to coach businesses?

Joe Woodard

Yeah. Well, I failed forward. I mean, I know that can be trite to say, or false humility, but it’s the truth. So that’s number one. You learn by your mistakes. And the second is, one of the mistakes you learn from is how to hire the right people. Recruitment is key. And then you have to really actually go from hiring, which is more of a screening process and a process of elimination to recruitment, which is more of an active process of seeking people out, creating a culture and a work environment in which they want to thrive. Perhaps marry their visions with your vision. So we went from hiring poorly to hiring well to creating a culture that attracts talent and then recruiting intentionally. So that’s number one. I’m only as effective as my team, which also sounds like false humility, but me, in my case, it’s learned humility.

I am only as successful as my team, and therefore it’s my job to serve them, which would be the next thing I would tell you that I’ve learned or had to accomplish in order to do this, is to serve the people that I write a paycheck to, not the other way around. because if I empower them, I’m greater than the sum of my parts. But the actual journey itself, the tipping point, if that’s kind of what you were looking for because I know a lot of your listeners might be thinking, well, you know, I’m just this. Even if they don’t put the word just in front of their minds, they might think I’m just a bookkeeper. I’m just a paralegal or whatever. I’m just a sole practitioner lawyer, or whatever it may be. It’s self-talk that is the very first barrier you must overcome.

This imposter syndrome is natural to all humans. Just because you’re feeling it doesn’t mean it validates it. As a matter of fact, it doesn’t. It almost never is validated by your thoughts. Instead, what you have to do is you have to be prepared to fail forward, you have to understand that other people may see things in you that you can’t see in yourself. And then you have to proceed afraid. That’s the John Maxwell term for courage. You must proceed afraid if you’re waiting for the fear to go away, or if you’re waiting for all of the risk to go away. Manageable risk is prudency, but all risk going away, that’s not life. So that’s existence. So if you’re waiting for all risk to go away, you’re waiting for all fear to go away, you’ll never act. And if you’re waiting for perfection, you’ll never act. So don’t wait on those things. Enter the danger, proceed, afraid, fail forward, and then read a lot. That’s how I did it.

Mark Stiving

I got to tell you thank you for crediting John Maxwell. I don’t read him. I’ve heard of him and I know he is famous and does a great job, but I have never heard the phrase proceed afraid.

Joe Woodard

And it’s a great quote, isn’t it?

Mark Stiving

Love that. Yeah, it’s a great quote. Oh my gosh. Because we have to, right? It’s like, I don’t know what’s going to happen when I do this. Yeah, exactly. But I’m just going to go do it.

Joe Woodard

Well, that actually became the inspiration for the conference we have coming up in June. Each one has a theme. So we didn’t say proceed afraid because that seemed very negative. We said boldly go. So that’s what we’re calling the show this year’s ‘Boldly Go’ which also has some Star Trek connotations. Yes, it does.

Mark Stiving

So, before we started, before I hit record, I asked Joe something interesting. He told me about piano minor in college, and he also said that he’s a huge sci-fi geek.

Joe Woodard

Yeah. Self-professed.

Mark Stiving

Yes. I was going to ask you about Star Trek. So of course, boldly go. Has to be there, right?

Joe Woodard

Yes, absolutely. It has to be there. So definitely I did borrow that from our friends over there. But yes, it’s so appropriate for what I think anybody listening to this podcast is facing right now. Massive technological disruption. AI intersects quantum computing to create what Michio Kaku, who you’ve probably seen in the History Channel universe and several other shows, he’s one of the greatest minds on our planet, kind of Neil deGrasse Tyson contemporary. You know, he says that it’s going to create a singularity within the next decade. It’s going to change everything. So if we’re facing all of these massive technological shifts whether they’re affecting your job directly at this time or not, everybody is in a position where we must boldly go.

Mark Stiving

Yeah. Okay. So now let’s finally jump to the topic I really wanted to talk to you about today. I love the concept of value. my newest favorite phrase, and I think of this as the first principle of all of business, and that is buyers’ trade money for value. And the questions we ask are, which buyers? How much money for what kind of value?

Joe Woodard

That’s exactly right. Those are the only questions that matter.

Mark Stiving

Yeah. And I think the most important or the least understood of those three is the value side. Because when you can understand the value side, it certainly helps you with the money and the buyers pieces.

Joe Woodard

And so what we teach over here is the value, it must have two different forces, two economic forces. They’re constant. And I have challenged thousands of people in live training environments to come up with anything that doesn’t fit into one of these. If you do, then you’re like, you’re going to break the bank on it because nobody’s been able to break these two foundational pillars of value. People will only exchange their hard earned dollars for one of two things, how you make me feel or how you solve my problem. Now, a lot of people will raise their hand and go, well, wait a minute, what about charity? Well, no, charity is not an exchange. Charity is a gift. And I believe in charity, that’s fantastic. You should give money to your causes that you believe in. But that’s not an exchange for value. That’s a contribution to a greater good. So either how you make me feel or how you sell my problem, and the people that are most valuable have figured out how to always provide some measure of both in every transaction with the client or the customer.

Mark Stiving

First off, I’m going to agree with you because I can’t think of anything off the top of my head that’s different.

Joe Woodard

But bring me back on, if you think of something, please.

Mark Stiving

But when you say those words, I focus a hundred percent on what problems do you solve for me? A hundred percent. And so when I think of value, I work mostly with B2B customers, and I define value for them as incremental profit. And incremental profit comes from solving problems, period. Right? And so when I think about the first part, which I know that I don’t do well, so I don’t try to teach it, and that’s how you make me feel. I think of Danny Kahneman’s system one, system two thinking and system two thinking as, let’s go cogitate, let’s go figure out what the right solution to the problem is. And system one is the reactive emotional immediate response type thinking. And so I would throw those, or I would try to categorize those in those two.

Joe Woodard

Yeah. Now that’s two different methodologies. Maybe logic and intuition to solving problems, but they’re more subsets of that outcome, their means to that greater outcome. So, you know, the therapist sits in the perfect spot and maybe that can inform the professions because the therapist makes you feel feelings you either need or want to feel because it could be not the ones you want to feel, just could be the ones you need to feel. Right. So there she’s selling feelings or he’s selling feelings, but, you know, they may not be pleasant in the moment, but they’re selling a feeling, but they’re also selling an answer to the problem. Now, in their case, sometimes the feeling is the means to the answer to the problem. Now, you just noted sometimes that’s the case too, with intuitive responses and ideation and so forth.

That’s great. But in the therapist’s case, the outcome that they’re actually buying is both the feeling and the solution. So the question to ask us as lawyers or accountants or engineers or architects, the other professions, because the ministerial professions, the religious professions also have a pretty good combination of both. They lean more on feeling, little less solution. They tend to defer that to either their religious structure or to their deity. But the therapist has to balance the skills more evenly. Well, maybe the other professions, architects, engineers, accountants and lawyers, maybe they lean more towards solution than with a mix or a spackling of emotion. But if we can tap into a little bit more of what the therapist evokes, if you could think about some of those outcomes they drive, it could be mental clarity for our clients. peace of mind, and sometimes just information solving for cash flow projections or forecast operating capital requirements. And seeing, hey, my company is not about to go under. I just thought that maybe that can be peace of mind and you can sell that as one of the aspects of the solution you bring.

Mark Stiving

Okay. Let me try a different tact with you. Sure. But by the way, I love that. So oftentimes when I think about the feeling side, I think that has to do with individual buyers inside the company I’m selling to. And when I think about the problem solving or the quantitative incremental profit side, I think about it from the organizational perspective, right? There’s someone in the organization that says, how much more profit is this going to make us? I really don’t care how you feel. And then there’s people in there that say, oh, this is really exactly what I want. How do I convince my boss to buy this?

Joe Woodard

Yes. And yes, you’re right. So the emotions could cut across all the different, you know, structures of the organization. I still think it’s a combination of both, because either the person influencing the buyer has a mixture of solution and feeling, or the buyer has a mixture of solution and feeling. I still think we mix both. And I do think that most of the time the more trade-based or the more structured and empirical kinds of professions that I listed off, they’re the ones that struggle to sell across that line. And then what’s happening is they’re losing business to people that do cross the line to understand that feeling, connection. And they don’t even know why, because they’re just looking at like, well, my blueprint was perfect and it was exactly as you asked, and my tax return was flawless and I saved you this much money. But they’re not getting why that other firm has a competitive advantage. Or to put it in the terms of this podcast, why that firm is more valuable.

Mark Stiving

I cannot wait to ask you this question.

Joe Woodard

Okay.

Mark Stiving

So, you are now talking to Mr. Spock who is a salesperson selling some services, could be accounting, let’s call it accounting services, since you know it so well, how do you teach Mr. Spock, by the way, for anybody who doesn’t know this, Star Trek reference. Someone who has zero, has no emotions, perfectly logical.

Joe Woodard

Well, technical point. He has them, he suppresses them through his powerful mind. Okay, go ahead. But just to surface who I am here. All right. Anyway, go ahead.

Mark Stiving

So how do you teach him to sell feelings, communicate feelings?

Joe Woodard

Yeah. So that’s the great debate, which is, by the way, first, fortunately none of us are Vulcans, but I do get your point in that we have certain people that have higher degrees of emotional intelligence than other people. So that your point is very well received.

Mark Stiving

I put myself in the low category? Is that okay?

Joe Woodard

Absolutely fine. And it doesn’t, that’s not good or bad, it’s just a thing, right? It’s just a thing because if everybody was really high on the emotional intelligence scale and everybody was navigating life empathically, then reason would not be enough of a factor in human decisions. So we need people like you to kind of keep the empaths, you know, balanced and you need them. So, absolutely. Now I get your point though. Even though none of us have completely suppressed our emotions, we still have different degrees of emotional intelligence. And it’s a very profound question because it’s one of the biggest challenges that I have to deal with when I’m coaching accounting practices. How do I take people who gravitated toward accountancy largely because of their analytical minds and help to, which is very left brain.

How do we stimulate that right brain thinking on their part? And Mark, I don’t have an exact answer to that. It’s not like 1, 2, 3, boom, the problem is done. But what I can tell you is we solve it from a combination of strategies that take time to develop. And one of the strategies is peer-to-peer interactions so that they can see how some of their peers who have a stronger emotional intelligence scale behave with their clients. And they can start by mimicking the behavior. And there’s this interesting, that happens. Psychologists would agree with you, because I’ve read their books would agree with me because I’ve read their books. That if you mimic the behavior of the emotional intelligence, you actually develop emotional intelligence. Emotional intelligence unlike academic intelligence or IQ intelligence quotient, unlike that, you don’t necessarily have the same genetic ceiling.

But with IQ, I can tell you I have a genetic ceiling. I have an average IQ. My daughter has 155 or something. She’s smarter than I am. So that’s just genes. And by the way, my daughter’s adopted, so I’m not even bragging on passing any genes to her. It’s just bragging about my daughter. But that’s just genetic. And I’m not saying I can’t rise above my pay grade there. I’m just saying I have to work twice as hard, three times as hard as my daughter. Now, Malcolm Gladwell addresses that actually in his book, Outliers, that you can outwork a genius and outperform them, but it takes work. Now, on the flip side, emotional intelligence, you’re not as constrained through genetics. You might start from a different starting place with either your nurture or your nature. But you can work the muscle to greater compensation for where you start.

And you can achieve it. Now, that’s number one is they mimic the behaviors of others through peer-to-peer influence. Number two is I will encourage them to hire based off of, not solely off of because that’s actually, you know, wrong to do it, but appropriately influenced by personality studies like DISC and Myers-Briggs. because if they can hire people who are more complimentary to their personality traits, then those people can compensate or make up for the difference in the practice. And that would be the second pronged strategy. The third, surprisingly, is to read the right books. Because you can read books like Positive Intelligence, which surprisingly is not a book on emotional intelligence, but it will stimulate it. if you read the right books, emotional intelligence, coming back around to the first point is a methodology. And analytical people love work methods.

Mark Stiving

Fabulous answers. Can I say that? Those are really good. Okay. Let me jump onto the mimic one for just a second. And share a story about me, if I may.

Joe Woodard

Sure.

Mark Stiving

And I remember being a younger engineer in sales. And the attitude in my head was always what’s in it for me? Always. What’s in it for me? And there was one day I was in Toastmasters, I was watching these really professional speakers get up and give a free hour talk. And I was like, wow, why are they doing this for free? And I realized that they give away so much because eventually it comes back to them, right? They don’t know where, they don’t know how, but eventually it comes back to them. And so I started this attitude of, well, let’s see how much I can give away. And I started giving away tons of content. You know, this is free for everybody, right? I give away tons of stuff. And the feelings of giving it away and helping people just make it multiply and say, wow, this feels really good. Let me keep doing this. And of course it comes back to me. But that’s not why I do it anymore. I do it because I love helping people learn and get the stuff better. So I think the mimic thing is so true.

Joe Woodard

Yes. Absolutely it is. And it is one of the most effective, which is why everything, which is why the head of our coaching program, her title is actually executive Vice President communities, because we see coaching as being a means of serving the greater good of this community benefit that we’re bringing to the profession. So that just reinforces, again, peer-to-peer and mimic.

Mark Stiving

Yeah. And then the other thing, I don’t know how I learned this. I’m going to jump on your second one of hiring. Uh I don’t know how I learned this one. I have people who work with me that are much nicer than I am, right? And I let them make all their own decisions, right? I don’t second guess their decisions. It’s just like, just go figure out what you have to do and go do it. And I’ll focus on this little narrow piece that I can have. And I know that I can do this. You guys go do the other stuff I can’t do.

Joe Woodard

Yeah. Well, and if you’ve got somebody who’s self-directed, this is outcome driven, which by the way is the only way that we lead here. So we’re going to unpack this. You can have whatever management strategy you want to, if you delegate tasks and not outcomes, you have a different hiring strategy than we do at Woodard. But our philosophy here at Woodard and what we coach practices toward is hiring people who can own their own outcomes that are self-directed, but are coachable. And then we take a servant leadership position, which some people call a coach leader position, where we coach into or serve them as they generate their outcomes into the benefit of the company. Now, so when you’re hiring for that, kind of we come back around to the personality styles. I would recommend that you do let those appropriately inform your hiring decisions.

Just understand people are always greater than some of their parts, right? And don’t make it the sole determinant. And if you’re using, for example, the DISC assessment, if you’re not familiar with it, the acronym is DISC, I know you are Mark, but for your listeners, DISC, where if somebody tests D they’re very operator, very task-oriented, very, they could even be a bull in a China shop. On the negative side, they’re very driven people. And they’re sort of first cousins on the task side would be the C. So the D’s and the C’s because the Cs, it’s called cautious, but that’s a little bit too, you got to explain that. What we mean is that what the DISC assessment means is that the C is for people who make very data-driven decisions.

They’re not scared, cautious, they’re prudent, cautious and they follow processes and they love perfection or as close as they can get to it, right? But they’re also task-oriented. It’s just the C person wants to do tasks through processes and participate in a system of scale. And they just want to bulldoze through the trees and get it done. And those two are balances or counterbalances for each other. Alright? Now you got your other side of the spectrum which is not task oriented. It’s incredibly people-centric. And it gets us back to this emotional intelligence thing we were talking about. There’s a little left brain right brain stuff going on a little bit here. Where I, in your DISC acronym is intuitive and inspirational and very visionary. They’re the center of attention at parties. They’re the person telling the jokes.

They’re the livelihood, the life of the party. And they’re very broad thinkers. Now on the S side, and this is like some of your nicest people in the world, they could possibly be S’s you can be nice and be any of the four, but S’s are really nice because they’re the supportive and synergistic role. That’s what the S stands for. And so whether you’re supporting or being synergistic with people or you’re trying to inspire people, entertain people, delight people you are a very people person. A very people-centric person. Now then people are usually combinations of D’s and I’s and Ss and C’s, right? But understanding their basic makeup will help you to understand how to hire for the role. If I’m hiring for a salesperson, I do not want, surprisingly, somebody who’s all I, because if they’re predominantly I and they don’t have enough D they’re going to make people feel good all day.

They’re not going to close, right? But if they’re all D and they don’t have enough I, then all they’re going to do is just bulldoze their ways through the deals, and they’re not going to think about the human connection, how to inspire the feeling. And they may even be a little bit too strong in their clothes. So maybe all these things, people are greater than some of their parts. I’m just telling you. We’re talking about hiring and you want to unpack a little bit. We do lean very heavily on these to the proper way they can inform a hiring process. And it’s made a big difference.

Mark Stiving

Nice. I always have a hard time putting myself in those labels.

Joe Woodard

If they’re labels, that’s bad. If they inform you of the way that you see the world, your perspective, what motivates you. If it’s properly informing you and your peers, then it’s okay. But I would agree, labels, no.

Mark Stiving

You know, the other thing I find hard is, a lot of my colleagues in the speaking world and they live the DISC world and they can look at someone and say, oh, he’s a high I or, oh, he’s a C. I never think that way.

Joe Woodard

No. Because you are labeling and you’re compartmentalizing the human condition. It’s way too complex for that. It’s a good caution.

Mark Stiving

Okay. Yeah. Okay. Well, it isn’t caution, it’s inability.

Joe Woodard

No. It’s caution though. Because I don’t want your listeners to think, let me just go DISC people and I can know everything about them in an instant. No, you can’t. But you can understand a little bit better what their perspective is and what motivates them.

Mark Stiving

And it’s like anything, right? It’s like anything, you can look at them and say, hey, is this a person who smiles all day or doesn’t smile that much.

Joe Woodard

Well, yeah. And there’s so many things that factor into that, right?

Mark Stiving

Right. It’s just a characteristic.

Joe Woodard

But that is part of our hiring strategy. And the other is to delegate the outcomes. And the third is to hold people accountable to driving those outcomes, which we use John Doerr’s method for that, in his book Measure what Matters, the OKR methodology, a very popular measurement system that we can hold people accountable for their activities and see if they’re driving key results and objectives. We find that to be so much more valuable than the traditional employee evaluation, which is basically a grade on what you did or didn’t do in the last quarter. this is a forward looking, what are you going to do in the next quarter? And an evaluation of how successful those activities were in the last quarter. And it kind of puts the objective in the center of the table and it makes the conversation about the objective. Now, if the objective is not being reached or the activities are not being worked, then we could ask, is this a ‘you’ problem? You know, did something happen to you? And if so, how can we help? So, I’m not saying they’re off the hook if they messed up somehow. But we start with what happened? Not, who are you or did you do good or bad? Just, what happened?

Mark Stiving

These are the facts.

Joe Woodard

These are the facts. Then we start asking who, what, how, when, where.

Mark Stiving

Yeah. So, let’s pull this back to value for just a second. How is it that you communicate value on the side of, how do you make me feel?

Joe Woodard

You can communicate it using the correct framework. So it’s not like if you get too touchy feely, if you say, hey, you know, I’m going to make you feel goosebumps. Well, okay, well no, that’s Disney’s job. That’s not your job, right? But if you do use phrases like I’m going to, the systems and processes we will put in place as your outsource controller department will generate peace of mind and it will protect your journey as a business owner. Well, that’s evoking emotion, right? But I’m not manipulating emotions and I’m not out of my swim lane on that. Hope is an emotion. Or it’s at least informed heavily by emotions, right? So if you can give people hope by saying no, if you go through this capitalization strategy, you won’t lose your business in six months like you think. Or if you will do these things over the next three years, you will sell your business for an appropriate valuation. Or you could. Right? Just give them a plan and a plan that is reasonable, however aggressive it may be, is hopeful, but you’re not going to go out and sell hope on a billboard. You’re going to sprinkle your solution with emotion like hope and peace of mind.

Mark Stiving

Yeah. So, the first two you mentioned peace of mind and one other, I don’t remember what it was.

Joe Woodard

Protecting their journey, which isn’t really an emotion, it’s more of that thing which invokes emotion like hope.

Mark Stiving

Yeah. And so it’s almost like you walk in and tell them the emotion and then something like hope, you’re certainly not going to go say, hey, I’m going to give you hope.

Joe Woodard

Yeah, I don’t, I’m just selling hope.

Mark Stiving

Right?

Joe Woodard

No, but I am connecting the fact that if they will do what I say, if they’ll follow this process, I’m recognizing that it could make them hope.

Mark Stiving

Yes.

Joe Woodard

That’s the difference. Now if I’m Disney, I’m selling emotion, right? And I’m going to be really stretching to figure out how going to Disney World’s a solution to their problem. not saying that they don’t advertise for it to be, but they’re starting with the emotion and we don’t.

Mark Stiving

Yeah. And I was going to say this at the very beginning of our conversation. When I think of the difference between feelings and solving problems I would categorize those pretty dramatically in the problem side as B2B and the feeling side as B2C, right? Because when I buy a shirt, I have no idea what the true value is, right? What’s the value of solving the problem of having a nice blue shirt or whatever it is I have? So, it seems to me that that’s way more heavily slanted towards feelings. And when I move to the B2B side, I can slant that way more towards problem solving.

Joe Woodard

Yeah. Except, yes, and I agree with you, except that they do intermingle the two. They evoke feelings, but they’ll do solutions like Axe body spray. If you’re a nerdy, skinny, geeky kid who otherwise is scared to talk to girls, just spray that on and they’ll come to you. That’s what the commercial says, right? So it is the solution to the problem. I can’t get a date. So Axe body spray solves my problem. Now the difference is usually from the B2C side because I’m agreeing with you. The reason that we don’t see it as solution to problem is because typically it’s stretching its promise to solve the problem. You know, Red Bull doesn’t give you wings, which they actually got sued for, which is why there’s three eyes in the word wings. but no, red Bull doesn’t give you wings, but so they’re reaching, they’re stretching with their hyperbolic solution to the problem. and that’s the reason you kind of gravitated toward it being a feeling cell. But they’re still working on the pillar of solution. They’re just being so hyperbolic that you can’t possibly take them literally. And if you do, we’ll add some extra eyes to the word wings.

Mark Stiving

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Joe, as always, this is fascinating, but we are running out of time. but let me ask you the final question I always ask. Nothing to do with anything we’ve talked about so far. What’s the one piece of pricing advice you would give our listeners that you think could have a big impact on their business?

Joe Woodard

I would say infuse everything we’ve talked about with feelings and solutions into something the client can consume, easily understand, comprehend easily, and buy easily. So, some packages, and I know that we could have a whole other conversation on the pros and cons of tiers, but I coach professional service firms, so I’ll speak out of my strongest expertise. If you’re at a professional service firm, have package A, B, and C, but do not package those based off of pricing levels. It’s not that A starts at 500 a month and B starts at a thousand a month. That could be irrelevant. A could be, package A could be 5,000 a month, and package B could be a thousand a month. It’s not about price, it’s about nature. So, if I’m speaking to an accounting firm, the nature of Tier A would be that I maintain accurate financial information for you. And the nature of tier B is I’ll run your back office for you while I do A and the nature of C is I’m going to interpret your financial information forward looking and lagging indicators. I’m going to help steer your company with actionable management advice based on the financial information that I control in Tier B and compile into your A. So they’re all cumulative, but they’re nature distinctions, they are not scope distinctions. If your listeners can get that difference, they will do much better.

Mark Stiving

Nice. I really want to comment, but it’ll take us another hour to have that conversation. Okay,

Joe Woodard

Wait for the next time.

Mark Stiving

Next time. Joe, thank you so much for your time today. Oh, by the way, tell us just briefly about the conference coming up.

Joe Woodard

Oh yes. So scaling new heights, like we said, is called ‘Boldly Go’. And it’s a conference for accounting professionals, whether you’re a professional bookkeeper, tax preparer, auditor firms from all sizes, all the way from sole practitioners all the way through to the top 10 largest firms in the world. All have representation there where the nation’s largest accounting technology exhibition, not to be confused with finance, which has more banking. And so this is all accounting systems and technology. We’re the largest expo in the country now. We’re the third largest conference. We’re going to be in Orlando from June 13th through the 16th. And you can learn more about it at my last name, Woodard, with one W. Don’t put in Woodward because I don’t know where that’ll take you. I have no idea. But woodard.com will get you right there.

Mark Stiving

Excellent. Thank you Joe. And to our listeners, thank you for listening. If you enjoyed this, would you please leave us a rating or a review? And if you have any questions or comments about the podcast, please 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.

Tags: Accelerate Your Subscription Business, ask a pricing expert, pricing metrics, pricing strategy
Mark Stiving

Mark Stiving

Mark is a pricing expert who helps companies understand value, how to create it, communicate it and capture it. He has a PhD from U.C. Berkeley and an MBA from Santa Clara University, plus 25+ years pricing experience. As an educator, speaker and coach, Mark applies innovative, value-based pricing strategies to guide growth and increase profits for large and small companies.
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