Vance Morris is a former Disney Leader turned entrepreneur, coach, speaker and author. He helps businesses deliver extraordinary customer experiences through workshops, boot camps, and training at Disney.
In this episode, Vance shares practical strategies for implementing premium pricing by presenting options and building value through transparency and trust. He emphasizes the importance of creating emotional connections with customers to enhance loyalty and retention, even in B2B environments. Additionally, he advocates for confident implementation of price increases, highlighting that many pricing challenges stem from business owners’ mindset rather than market resistance.
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Why you have to check out today’s podcast:
- Learn how to confidently set premium prices and create packages that differentiate your business from competitors.
- Discover how emotional connections, rather than just logic, can drive customer loyalty and enhance sales, even in B2B settings.
- Get tips on overcoming common pricing hurdles and improving customer retention through simple yet effective strategies.
“People have enough information, they don’t have enough implementation; just go do it. You could go out right now, raise your prices 10% and nobody’s going to bat an eyelash.”
– Vance Morris
Topics Covered:
01:45 – How he found himself in pricing
02:31 – Sustaining a cycle of value and profitability as inspired by Disney’s pricing strategies
05:20 – How he justifies premium pricing in his upholstery cleaning business
08:46 – Demonstrating expertise and showcasing value
11:32 – Emphasizing the value of positioning as a premium service rather than competing on being the second cheapest
13:00 – Maintaining pricing integrity
14:21 – Adapting Disney-inspired strategies to differentiate your business making it incomparable to competitors
16:37 – How to differentiate your products or services, even in competitive markets like B2B software
17:57 – How to foster loyalty, enhance customer retention, and make price increases more acceptable
21:09 – Highlighting the value of small, thoughtful gestures to build a positive reputation and stand out in competition
22:42 – Offering premium pricing tiers in clear, non-salesy manner
24:57 – Vance’s best pricing advice
Key Takeaways:
“Not so much to justify [premium pricing], as it is being able to offer a better experience, which then allows me to charge a higher price, which puts more money in my pocket.” – Vance Morris
“It’s about creating a connection. It’s people doing business with people. It’s not people doing business with business and creating some kind of emotional connection with the purchasing manager, with whoever’s doing the buying. And it just makes selling so much easier.” – Vance Morris
“When you have that connection, a price increase may not be overlooked, but is a lot more palatable than just hard excel spreadsheets flying around.” – Vance Morris
“There is no competitive advantage to being second cheapest; if you’re not going to be the cheapest, you might as well go the other direction.” – Vance Morris
People/Resources Mentioned:
- Disney: https://www.disney.com/
- Ritz-Carlton: https://www.ritzcarlton.com/
- Dunkin Donuts: https://www.dunkindonuts.com/en
Connect with Vance Morris:
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vancemorris/
- Website: https://deliverservicenow.com/
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.)
Vance Morris
People have enough information, they don’t have enough implementation; just go do it. You could go out right now, raise your prices 10% and nobody’s going to bat an eyelash.
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Mark Stiving
Welcome to Impact Pricing, the podcast where we discuss pricing, value, and the strategic relationship between them. I’m Mark Stiving, and I run bootcamps that help companies get paid more. Our guest today is Vance Morris. Here are three things you want to know about Vance before we start. He is founder and speaker at the Deliver Service Now Institute. He’s only been doing that for 13 years. He’s president and owner of Chesapeake Service Solutions that he’s been at for 17 years, and he has Disney written all over his LinkedIn page. So we’re going to have to learn something about that. Welcome, Vance.
Vance Morris
I appreciate it, Mark. Thank you so much.
Mark Stiving
Hey, although I don’t think it is a perfect question to fit you, I’m going to ask it anyway. How did you get into pricing?
Vance Morris
Well, obviously owning my own businesses. If I didn’t know pricing, I’d be broke. So, that was one of the first lessons I learned. And I mean, I took some of it from Disney, because I learned truly about not just pricing, but price elasticity and how depending on the experience you deliver, how elastic price can be.
Mark Stiving
Pretty cool. I’m not sure I like the word price elasticity, but we can talk about that a little bit later. Because I don’t think what you do, it fits well. But let’s address that a little bit later because I think what you do is pretty fascinating. So, first off, let’s get Disney out of the way. What’s that have to do with anything?
Vance Morris
Well, Disney is a master at extracting money from your wallet and leaving you feeling happy about it. And they have managed to, I mean, if you think about it, the rides are boring. I mean, if you took away the music and the dancing bears, it’s a small world, the ridiculously boring ride is the boat thing that goes around and around and around. How Disney gets 180 bucks a day for something like that? It’s the overall experience of being in a Disney Park. And it includes friendly people, includes cleanliness, and all of the other stuff that goes on top of it. And then I think that that translates to other businesses. Certainly not copying what Disney does, but adapting some of their strategies that will allow us to have some flexibility in our pricing.
Mark Stiving
Yeah, I mean, Disney’s certainly been a master at marketing and pricing. I watch them raise prices every year and it just thrills me to death to watch that.
Vance Morris
Sometimes multiple times a year.
Mark Stiving
Yeah, exactly. And so I think if I get what you do, well, it’s, you’re trying to justify the fact that I’m going to raise prices on you next year. You’re trying to justify the fact that I get a higher price than someone else gets.
Vance Morris
Well, not so much to justify, as it is being able to offer a better experience, which then allows me to charge a higher price, which puts more money in my pocket. So, if I charge a higher price, I’ll take some of that, put those shekels in my pocket, take some of the money, reinvest it in the business so that I can create a better experience, thereby increasing the price again, taking those shekels, putting them in my pocket, reinvesting more. So that flywheel just keeps going. And, to me, there’s no end to it. As part of Chesapeake Service Solutions I own three home service businesses. There’s a mold remediation company, a carpet cleaning company, and oriental rug washing facility, especially with the carpet cleaning company. There’s no end to the pricing that we are implementing in that company. I mean, right now we’re close to 40% higher than anybody else in our industry.
Mark Stiving
Which I love, by the way. But, let’s talk about that for a second, right? Let’s just talk about carpet cleaning because, I mean, everybody knows what the heck it is. And so, if I were to pay you to clean my carpets, what I want are clean carpets, of course, right? I don’t need you to sing and dance. I don’t need you to make my dinner. Right? And so what are you doing to say, ‘Hey, I deserve 40% more than somebody else does?’
Vance Morris
Sure thing. Let’s say I came in to clean your sofa. So, we do upholstery cleaning too. Most guys would come in, drag their hoses in the house, clean your sofa without any care about anything else that’s in the way, get their money and leave. Our guys, so we’ve scripted this entire thing out. So we park in the street, we don’t park in the driveway. Because, God forbid, if I got an oil leak, now, I got something else I got to clean up. We get out of the van wearing clean uniforms. Because we carry extra uniforms in case we get dirty on the job beforehand. We don’t smell like smoke because I forbid smoking on the job. We don’t smell like Axe because you’re not allowed to wear cologne on the job. Because there’s nothing worse than smelling like Marlboros and Axe combined. It’s just disgusting. And so right there, we’re setting the stage that we’re professionals. When we get up to the front door, we lay down a mat. we we knock on the door. We don’t ring the bell. When Mrs. McGillicutty answers the door, we do an exaggeration of wiping our feet on this mat. We put special booties on, and we presented Mrs. McGillicutty with a gift. Now, I don’t know about you, but when was the last time you had a home service professional present you with a gift before they did any work? Yeah, pretty much.
Mark Stiving
Never.
Vance Morris
Pretty much never. And I mean, that’s not a massive gift, but, and it’s not a chip clip either. It’s not a tchotchke. It’s a bottle of spot remover, a bag of cookies. A little note from me saying, ‘Thanks so much for allowing us into your home. If you’ve got questions, give me a call.’ And then when we get into the living room, we’ll put drop cloths all around the sofa so that we don’t get anything else dirty. If there’s lamps or end tables, those are all moved out of the way. The cushions are then put on top of drop cloths so that we’re not cleaning them on top of carpet, that we’re not going to clean or wood floors, the framework of the sofa is protected. And really each cushion, each piece of that sofa is cleaned separately and it’s actually cleaned the way the industry trains people to clean it. If you can believe it, there is a method to clean upholstery. And then we speed dry it. If you don’t speed dry it, you run the risk of wrinkles. You run the risk of stretching and you run the risk of colors bleeding in your sofa. Most carpet cleaners don’t even bother to do that. They’re packing up their hoses and they’re leaving. That in of itself, one, there are hard costs for me in order to provide a service of that level. There are soft costs that don’t, but the overall experience of delivering that sofa cleaning allows us to charge 40% higher.
Mark Stiving
Okay, fabulous story. Now, I spent a lot of time thinking about how we sell the value of what we do. Now, if I had hired you 10 years ago to clean my sofa and I want it done again, now I’m hiring you again. There’s no doubt. But I assume you can’t wait 10 years in between hirings and running a business. So, there’s probably word of mouth, right? Some people say, ‘Hey, where’d you get your sofa cleaned?’ And I’ll say, ‘Oh, these guys at Chesapeake, they’re amazing. You got to go there.’ And so maybe some people will do that. But someone calls you on the phone and says, ‘Hey, I hear you clean sofas.’ What do you say to them? How do you sell the value of what you just described to me?
Vance Morris
Well, first and foremost, we don’t discuss price on the phone. Because it’s like calling the doctor and saying, ‘How much does it cost to fix my broken arm?’ He’s immediately going to say, well, ‘I don’t know.’ ‘Come in here. And we’ll look at your arm and then I’ll tell you.’ So, my guys are trained to say, ‘Look, we’d be more than happy. Come out, we’ll do a thorough inspection of your carpet, your home. And then the technician will give you the results of the inspection. And we will give you a firm quote.’
Anytime you give a quote over the phone, especially if you give a range, they never hear the top price. They only hear the lowest price. So if I say, ‘Yeah, it’ll be between 175 and 200 bucks, and we get in a house and it’s 200 bucks, ‘ they’ll say, ‘But you said one seventy five on the phone.’ So we just eliminate price from the telephone conversation. But when we get into the home, we have what’s called a client folder. And I’ve also written three books on carpet cleaning. Now, some people will think, well, that’s nuts. But I’ve written the book, ‘Pet owners and Carpet Care: Seven Things Every Pet Owner Needs to Know About Caring for their Carpet.’ And we’ll give them that book while we’re doing the inspection, and give them a chance to read it.
And then we go through our client folder. And in the client folder, is obviously the inspections. And we go through our results doing a urine inspection. Now, you think that that’s kind of disgusting, but man, it’s fun and it’s dollar signs. Because we go through with a black light and we got a moisture detector, and we’ve got big golden paw prints that every time we find a urine spot we drop a golden paw print on the floor, and then we bring Mr. McGillicutty in and show her how bad Fluffy’s been in the living room. And so we’re demonstrating that value. Not only are we experts, we wrote the book on dog P but we’ve also shown her where all that is. We’re not just guessing.
And we’re showing her all of our in the client folder, we’ve got our guarantees, we got our warranties. I mean, we’re the only company in our area that guarantees carpet cleaning. I got five days of whoopsie insurance. Within five days of the cleaning, if you got a sloppy husband, knocks his beer over onto the carpet, give us a call, we’ll come back up, clean it up, no charge. So, I can’t do that over the phone. It has to be face to face. And my guys would just refuse. And if people are like, well, we’ll just call the next guy. Fine. You’re probably just not a client for us then.
Mark Stiving
Right. Excellent. So, I love the story, by the way. I think it’s awesome. And I think about all of the clients I work with. In fact, I was working with one just the other day and we were saying, well, how do we handle someone who wants a low price? And part of the question is, well, is that your customer? And maybe we just say, ‘Look, it’s not our customer. They can go somewhere else.’ Totally okay.
Vance Morris
And it takes some time. I mean, when you’re starting out, you need every nickel you can get. And it’s difficult to turn business down. I get it. I mean, I struggled the first few years, but at some point you have to put your foot down and say, ‘You know what, these are the customers that I want.’ There is no competitive advantage to being second cheapest? So, if you’re not going to be the cheapest, which Walmart pretty much has that cornered, might as well go the other direction.
Mark Stiving
Yep. So, what do you think of the following strategy in the carpet cleaning business? So, I want to start a new carpet cleaning business. By the way, I don’t, so don’t worry about it.
Vance Morris
No, you’re fine. It’s good, Mark.
Mark Stiving
I don’t want to. So I want to start a new carpet cleaning business. I don’t have the revenue today to be able to say I’m going to walk away from business. But what I could do is based on the phone call, so someone calls and says, ‘What’s your price?’ We say, ‘Look, really what we do is we come out and we do an inspection, and we’re going to tell you exactly what you need and we’ll give you a great price.’ And you go, ‘No, I really need to know about the price.’ I now know they’re a price buyer, so I could quote them a price to come in and clean the carpet. Or if they say, ‘Great, come on out, do your inspection.’ They come on out, we do our inspection, we lay the dog prints on the urine stains, and we say, ‘Look, it’s this price.’ And that this price happens to be 40% or 2X or some much, much bigger number. So, what do you think of that strategy?
Vance Morris
I agree with it. Okay. I mean, 100%, and what my guys say over the phone is, ‘Look, we’ll come out there, we’ll do this inspection, we’ll give you a price. If you’re happy with the price, we’ll be prepared to clean. If you’re not happy with the price, throw us out.’
Mark Stiving
Well, so you do the cleaning on the spot, that’s pretty good.
Vance Morris
Oh, yeah. We’re ready to clean on the spot. If they want that. Sometimes they just want the quote, okay, fine. We’ll send a different guy out who… That’s all he does is quotes. But if they’re ready to clean, we’ll send that guy. But, it’s not too often that we get the… Once we’ve built the value, it’s very rare that they throw us out and we don’t discount the services. We’ll eliminate things from the cleaning menu. Like, ‘Okay, we won’t clean that chair. We won’t clean grandma’s room, but I’m not discounted.’
Mark Stiving
Yep. Good. Okay, so now, by the way, I dearly love the story so far.
Vance Morris
Thanks.
Mark Stiving
When you teach this to people, how do you extrapolate this concept to go beyond carpet cleaning? Because I’m sure you’ve mastered carpet cleaning, but now I’m a dog groomer. So now, we want to master dog grooming. And it’s not something that you’re an expert at yet. So what do you teach us?
Vance Morris
Well, similar to Disney, it’s the adoption of the strategy. So how do you adapt the strategy to your business? So with the carpet cleaning, we have packages. So it’s difficult to compare pricing when you have package A, B, and C or silver, gold, bronze, whatever it is. So I encourage the dog groomer, which by the way, I have two as a client. And to come up with a package, because once you do that, you become uncomparable to your competition because you become the only, I love it when you can put the word only in front of anything, because now price becomes irrelevant because there’s nobody else that can do what you do. You’re the only one that does it.
But so you create a package and then you include in the package, okay, you get this shampoo, you get this drying, you get this fluffing, and they get the nails trimmed, ‘Oh, you want the next package up?’ Great. Well, we’ll also do the conditioner and this and that. And we create the packages. All of the same things can be translated over. They have this one boarding school. I have their thing around here somewhere. Brilliant, brilliant, what I call a shock and awe box, but it’s an onboarding package that they give to all their new dogs that board there. They stole it from Ritz-Carlton. I mean, it was just a Ritz-Carlton residence, where people buy to live there. Absolutely brilliant. So yeah, I think anything can be adapted just given a little thought and a little creativity.
Mark Stiving
So, what I loved about the first story you told was the way you were able to demonstrate the value to a client before they said yes. Right? I mean, you could truly, if you’re going to let me see urine stands on my carpet, there’s no chance I’m letting you walk out without cleaning that, right?
Vance Morris
Yeah.
Mark Stiving
I think that’s absolutely brilliant. But now when I think about a B2B software company and I’ve got a salesperson and he’s out there saying, ‘Yeah, but we’ve got an easy to use user interface and let me do a demo and show you all my features.’ And so how do I take what you’re explaining and help that sales person?
Vance Morris
Yeah, I mean, that’s a great question. And these days with everybody’s got an app, everybody’s got a new SaaS, whatever it is, it’s difficult. And I think as much as possible, putting a guarantee behind it really helps get those businesses to stand out. Or putting a warranty behind it. Like our guarantee is the most thorough cleaning ever, or your money back, plain and simple. There’s no weasel language, there’s nothing like that. I think people tend to overcomplicate things. So can you come up with a simple guarantee for your service or product? Does your app do what it says it does? Great. We don’t have a problem. If it doesn’t, you know what? I will smile and cheerfully give you your money back. Life’s too short. World is too small. I don’t need a bad name.
Mark Stiving
Yep. Hmm. Okay. So when I ask, I always ask my guests, what is it that you want to talk about? And one of the things you brought up is that it’s not about the widget. And so if we think about it, let’s go back to selling SaaS software for a second. I got a widget, right? I want to sell you my widget. But it’s not about the widget, but it’s also not about the guarantee, right? There’s something else that it’s about. What’s it about?
Vance Morris
To me it’s about creating a connection. I think a lot of, especially small businesses, and I’m not talking about big corporations because that’s difficult, but, at the end of the day, it’s a business. It’s people doing business with people. It’s not people doing business with business and creating some kind of emotional connection with the purchasing manager, with whoever’s doing the buying. And it just makes selling so much easier. And the widget doesn’t matter at that point. Wining and dining still works. It’s creating that connection, taking them to a Redskins game or taking them, or not Redskins, where are they now? Commanders. Bringing over coffee in a Danish and just shooting the breeze on the back dock of their building. These kinds of things, these building of connections works. I mean, I’ve got, I don’t know how many connections I have, some of my larger commercial clients, I still, I mean, I don’t do much work in the cleaning business anymore, but I still go to see my larger clients just bringing them coffee and just check in and chat with them, and they’re like, ‘Oh my God. Yeah. How are you doing?’ It’s creating that connection.
I mean, it has nothing really to do with pricing, but it has everything to do with customer retention. I shamelessly use my children in all of my marketing. My customers have watched my kids grow up. And like my daughter, five years, when she was five, the first picture in her ballet costume for her recital front and center in my newsletter was a picture of her. And every year I took a picture of her and her tutu and put it in there until she was like 12. And we’re at the grocery store one day, and some lady came up to her, didn’t even come up to me, went up to my daughter, said, ‘Oh my God, Emma, how was your recital?’ We’re freaked out. We’re ready to run. And the thing, she’s one of my clients, she gets my newsletter, she’s never leaving me. I could screw up so badly and she’d probably give me a second chance. That’s the connection that not only B2C, but B2B people need to make. And when you have that connection, a price increase may not be overlooked, but is a lot more palatable than just hard excel spreadsheets flying around.
Mark Stiving
Yeah. So, I would agree with you that in the world of B2C, these relationships are huge, right? I mean, B2C buyers buy more on emotion than they do on logic, although we try, right? In the world of B2B, they still buy on emotion, but they try really hard not to, right? It’s like, I’m going to put an RFP out, or I’m going to build a buying committee so that a whole bunch of people have to make the decision, or I’ve got three layers of approval before you can spend this money. Because I don’t want you spending money based on, it’s your friend, right? And so they put all these things in place that say, ‘Look, I don’t want the relationship to be the thing that drives it.’ It still does some, but not as much.
Vance Morris
It does. I mean, we bid on a lot of government projects in and around DC and Northern Virginia, for the mold remediation company. And always my guys always bring a truck of coffee and cups, they’ll stop at Dunkin Donuts, they’ll bring the big box of coffee cups and everything for everybody, for the three or four contract guys from the feds, any of the other guys from the competitors. And it’s just about setting yourself apart and you’re like, ‘Oh, crap, that was really nice.’ And you get a reputation for being good guys. And if that is the only edge that I got, and if my price was identical to somebody else’s, but I was known for, ‘Oh man, those really nice guys that brought the coffee, I’ll take it.’
Mark Stiving
Yep. There is no doubt that being nice doesn’t hurt
Vance Morris
It doesn’t, being a jerk will definitely work against you.
Mark Stiving
No doubt. People try hard not to do business with you. Yeah. So, excellent. The last thing you had said you wanted to talk about, which I love by the way, was the premium pricing tiers. And so that’s kinda like the story we told where I said, ‘Look, I want to do your carpet for the base price, or I want to come in and quote it and I’m going to do the right thing for you. Give you a great, great service, but I’m going to charge you a lot for it.’ Was there more to that story or more to that thought process that you wanted to add in?
Vance Morris
Well, I just a little bit. I don’t believe in the word upsell. This thing has a negative connotation. I do this in my consulting business, I do it in my home service businesses, we present options. What we think is the best solution to your problem, like, let’s just go back to the dog pee. We can clean your carpet, with just our regular cleaning. It’s not going to remove the dog pee. It’s not going to remove the odor. We will get it a nice color, but it’s still going to stink. Now we recommend that you do our pet urine removal treatment, which is going to remove the odor. It’s going to remove most of the urine. and it’ll be like new. We guarantee it. But it’s 85 extra dollars to have that done. What would you like to do? And then we just leave it at that. And if they’re cheap, well, they sign a little waiver and say, well, we don’t want the urine treatment. All right, fine. You want to live with that. It’s not on me. But when you present people with all of the facts, in a non-salesy way, I think it’s just a presentation of what’s going on. Here’s my best recommendation. What do you want to do? Nine times out of 10 they go with the recommendation.
Mark Stiving
Of course. Cool. And you have the packages put together because you know what you’re about to face.
Vance Morris
Yep. And the way the packages are laid out we have a basic package and labeled over top of the basic package is not recommended for homes with pets or children. So, I mean, because it doesn’t reapply the stain resistance. The reason is we don’t reapply the stain resistance in that package, which if you got pets or kids, you probably want the stain resistance in your car, but your carpet’s not going to last.
Mark Stiving
At my house. We have me, we need stain resistance.
Vance Morris
Yeah. Usually the guys get the brunt of the issues.
Mark Stiving
No doubt. Vance, this has been a lot of fun. Oh, I got to ask you the final question. What’s the one piece of pricing advice you would give our listeners that you think could have a big impact on their business?
Vance Morris
I will twist it around a little bit, in that I find people have enough information, they don’t have enough implementation, just go do it. I mean, you could go out right now, and this is my personal belief, you could go out right now, raise your prices 10% and nobody’s going to bat an eyelash just because.
Mark Stiving
You have no idea how much I think that’s right.
Vance Morris
Think it’s right.
Mark Stiving
I think it’s right. Absolutely. I think everybody undercharges and they’re just terrified to raise prices.
Vance Morris
Well, yeah. And we are not our customers. I mean, most pricing issues are head trash of the owner of the business. At least that’s what I’ve found.
Mark Stiving
Yep. I agree completely. So, Vance, thank you so much for your time today. If anybody wants to contact you, how can they do that?
Vance Morris
Best place is on my website deliverservicenow.com. All sorts of free resources you can snag there. And if you want to connect with me on LinkedIn, it’s Vance Morris. I think I’m the only one there. So LinkedIn, Vance Morris, or deliverservicenow.com.
Mark Stiving
Alright. And we’ll throw the LinkedIn URL in the show notes. And to our listeners, thank you very much for your time. If you enjoyed this, would you please leave us a rating and a review? Steve left me a review on Amazon for my book, Selling Value. He said:
‘This is a terrific book full of excellent real life examples and practical as well as actionable tips on selling. Selling Value has earned a place in my short list of re-read and reference often books. I highly recommend you add it to yours too.’
Steve, the check is in the mail. Thank you. And finally, if you have any questions or comments about the podcast or if your company needs help getting paid what their true value is, feel free to email me, [email protected]. Now, go make an impact!
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