Mark Herring is a passionate marketing leader with strong technical roots and deep knowledge of how to market cloud and enterprise software to open-source developers and DevOps audiences. He is the Chief Marketing Officer at HiveMQ.
In this episode, Mark shares his approach to cold outreach, explaining why leading with recognizable brands before introducing value creates engagement. He explores effective email strategies, emphasizing the power of short, curiosity-driven messages over long, detailed pitches. He also discusses pricing from the buyer’s perspective, highlighting how perceived value—rather than just function—drives purchasing decisions.
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Why you have to check out today’s podcast:
- Learn proven strategies for grabbing attention in cold calls and emails, using brand credibility and psychological triggers like FOMO.
- Discover how to price based on what buyers truly value, rather than just cost or features, using real-life analogies.
- Get practical tips on structuring sales conversations to keep prospects engaged without sounding like a typical salesperson.
“Try and understand the value in the eyes of your buyer. I think far too many times as vendors, we think there’s intrinsic value because it costs us much to produce or we think it looks like that. It’s trying to understand from a buying perspective, what is the value you’re providing.”
– Mark Herring
Topics Covered:
01:29 – How his journey from development to product marketing led him to pricing
03:41 – How his early pricing research focused on how customers would use a product rather than explicitly asking about the problem it solved
04:59 – To what is the short tenure of CMOs in B2B and consumer goods attributed to
06:25 – Explaining what a pipeline is and how pipeline generation involves value demonstration
10:38 – Comparing pipeline to running a marathon, emphasizing that while MQLs and SQLs are useful stepping stones, the ultimate goal is generating real sales opportunities
12:02 – Differentiating a pipeline from a SQL
14:18 – Demonstrating how a successful cold outreach combines multiple touchpoints
18:57 – How to make prospects more receptive in a cold call
21:13 – Why he uses big brand names as conversation openers in cold calls rather than starting with a value statement
22:27 – What an effective cold email should be
24:42 – Highlighting the importance of A/B testing cold emails and continuously refining outreach strategies to improve open rates
25:55 – Mark’s best pricing advice
Key Takeaways:
“It’s cold because you’ve never had the interaction, but usually they’ve interacted somewhere with you. It’s like they might have seen you at an event, or they might have seen some of your outreach to you already and going, ‘Okay, I’ll give this guy a bone.’” – Mark Herring
“One of the sales guys was talking about this [cold calls] at the conference we were at together, and I just loved it. And he is like, ‘Don’t over research, because there’s never a good time to know everything.’ Because you got to keep on dialing.” – Mark Herring
“You can’t stop doing it [cold outreach] because it’s like getting dice and trying to get the six, the more you throw it, the better chance you’re going to get to the six.” – Mark Herring
“I lead [cold call] with brands, not with value. And when you do that type of thing, they’re then shocked going, ‘Oh, he didn’t do a sales pitch on me. He’s asking me about these companies. Well, maybe it is something interesting.’” – Mark Herring
People/Resources Mentioned:
Connect with Mark Herring:
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/herringmark/
- Email: [email protected]
Connect with Mark Stiving:
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stiving/
- Email: [email protected]
Full Interview Transcript
(Note: This transcript was created with an AI transcription service. Please forgive any transcription or grammatical errors. We probably sounded better in real life.)
Mark Herring
Try and understand the value in the eyes of your buyer. I think far too many times as vendors, we think there’s intrinsic value because it costs us much to produce or we think it looks like that. It’s trying to understand from a buying perspective, what is the value you’re providing.
[Intro / Ad]
Mark Stiving
Welcome to Impact Pricing, the podcast where we discuss pricing, value, and the enigmatic relationship between them. I’m Mark Stiving and I run boot camps to help companies get paid more. Our guest today is Mr. Mark Herring. Here are three things you want to know about Mark before we start. He is the Chief Marketing Officer at HiveMQ. He’s held the role of CMO at several other organizations, as well. As you dig back into his history, he was a VP at Sun Microsystems, and he even was a product manager at Oracle. So he’s been at all the really cool places. Welcome, Mark.
Mark Herring
Hey, appreciate it, Mark, and good to be here with you and appreciate the kind words.
Mark Stiving
No worries. So Mark was recently a client of mine and really loved the guy, super smart. So I can’t wait to hear how he thinks about value and pricing and how he’s going to help us. But, Mark, I know this doesn’t fit you perfectly, but let me ask you the question. How did you get into pricing?
Mark Herring
Yeah, it’s a great question, right? So I’d say from a role in marketing and started life as a developer, but then got into product marketing, and usually pricing fits somewhere. They’re going, what should we charge for this product? And it gets into a whole thing of, ‘Hey, in a lot of ways it reflects back what is the value.’ So, yes, when I was at, in fact, just thinking about my credit, Oracle, we sort of had more of an enterprise audience and we started looking at what are people willing to spend, right? And it’s been a journey since then, right? I think the whole idea of pricing based on value, I think has become more, I feel like we’ve always done it in the back of our brain, but I think it’s become a lot more to the forefront and especially sort of working with you.
It’s become a lot more of, I think, focused on let’s work on the value. But I can remember sort of one of my first times going out and we did what we used to do like this was at Oracle, a couple of startups. We used to get out on the road and basically pitch a pre-release of a product. So this was basically fail fast before fail fast became fashionable and we called it a market validation journey, right? And we would go in and pitch the product, show the demo, and then ask the customer, ‘So what do you think you’d pay for this, right?’ What problem is it solving? And I can’t say we ever got a consistent answer, but we knew whether it was going to cost as much as a loaf of bread or as much as a car.
Like it gave us sort of buckets to think about. And that was sort of the journey into pricing. I mean enterprise products, I mean, HiveMQ, we sort of have a couple of enterprise products. We also have PLG, which I think has a much quicker way of knowing whether you hit the price right or wrong. Whereas the enterprise motion, it’s like, well, did you show enough value? So it’s a fascinating topic. And Mark, you’re the first pricing coach I’ve worked with that’s got a PhD. So I mean, we’ve got to make this up to now, man.
Mark Stiving
It’s fun. So what I found fascinating is you said as a product manager, or really early on you went out and did ‘willingness to pay’ studies, which is really good. And you slipped in the comment that said, we would ask them what problem does it solve? So I want to ask you, did you really ask that question or is that something that you just said?
Mark Herring
It’s a good question. I think we asked them the question, ‘Hey, we’re producing this stuff, how would you use it?’ It’s we probably didn’t use the word, which problem does it solve? I think we probably would use more, how would you use it? So we went asking them, ‘Oh, we’re trying to get from A to B.’ It’s like, ‘Hey, would you buy my car? And would you use this?’ Yeah. And we then probably asked, so why, right? And so one of the products ,first of all, ever priced was an IDE, sort of a development environment. And it was like, okay, and we were discussing going and it got down to, would this make your developers more productive and would they use it? And we probably never went to the next thing going say, ‘Hey, how much time are you saving per developer? Which is probably where I’ve evolved my thinking to now. But it was around that type of thing. We wouldn’t just slap and go competitive, pricing is probably 199 bucks a developer at that stage do you think it’s worth more or less than that? We didn’t do that. We sort of stayed away from using competitors to price our product, but those are roughly the questions we sort of asked.
Mark Stiving
Yeah. Nice, okay, so you’ve been in, actually, I’m going to ask you a really embarrassing question.
Mark Herring
Yeah. Long time.
Mark Herring
That’s actually not the embarrassing part. Here’s the embarrassing part. I once heard that an average tenure for A CMO was like a year and a half. Is this a true statement? And can you tell me why?
Mark Herring
It’s a true statement and I think definitely consumer goods, like, if you look at any sort of consumer goods, I think you see a lot of turnover there. On the enterprise B2B space, which is sort of my neck of the world. I don’t know what the real status is. I think it’s 18 months to two years. And it usually goes something like this, a little bit of tongue in cheek, in case people don’t understand my sense of humor, is, if you’re not making your numbers, it’s either the CRO’s problem or the CMO’s problem. So the first one is, if someone’s not producing pipeline, it’s a CMO problem, so you get rid of them. And if you’re not producing revenue, it’s a CRO problem.
So, if you don’t get hit in the first round, you always have the second round to come your way. So I think that’s how the averages work. I think in all honesty, it’s a little bit like that in startup land. You’ve got to be able to show your value to the organization. Obviously not around pricing, but just value to the organization. And CROs have got to bring in the money, and CMOs got to bring in the pipeline. And I think that’s sort of a maybe in the last 10 years as sort of a new phenomenon. It’s not marketing and not sort of, I don’t know, mad men sitting in a smoky room thinking about the mixed bit of creative copy, it’s a lot more just data-driven. And so I think it’s hard to hide behind the data if you’re not able to deliver the pipeline.
Mark Stiving
Okay. So let’s dig into that. How do you deliver a pipeline? And as you know, Mark, one of my favorite things to talk about is value. So how does value fit into delivering a pipeline?
Mark Herring
Yeah, it’s a great question. So first of all, let’s define a pipeline. Pipeline to me is you’re finding someone out there, let’s call them a lead or a person, right? Or and yeah, obviously usually a person might be associated with a company that you solve some problem for, that your sales team believes that they have a propensity to buy within a certain period, right? So the pipeline is very much, I’ve qualified that this person has some money, they like what we’re giving them and I haven’t sold it yet to them, but they actually have got the desire to buy. So in some ways, looking at, I’ll use just, maybe a dumb analogy, but I think it’s an analogy, nonetheless, it’s, you go into a car dealership and you go and say, ‘Yep, okay, yeah, this guy, Mark actually wants to buy a car. He wants to buy it in six to nine months. It’s up to us to go and sell him the car, right? In terms of is he going to buy a car from us or from the competitor. That to us is a pipeline, it’s someone that’s actually being qualified. And so they’ve got to have seen some value to get to actually click the… I always, especially in enterprise B2B space, there’s a button on everyone’s website and it says, ‘Speak to Satan.’ It doesn’t really say that.
It says contact sales, right? And they’ve got to have enough desire to click on that. And especially speaking to technical audiences, I can see them shaking as they’re about to push the button. So they’ve got to see that it solves a real problem. Whether it has value is usually further in the sales cycle, so like you describe some value statements on the website, but for them, I think a lot of them are if they’re coming in through the website, and then we can sort of flip it to going, we create pipeline just going and outbounding, but it’s a little different. But inbounding, right? Let’s take the inbound one. Is it solving some type of problem? They sort of want a journey of going, yeah, I think this could solve my problem for me. I need to figure out what it’s going to cost, and they’re hiding this, what the cost is, they want me to speak to them. And so they come in and click through that. And I think when they are then in front of the sales person which is usually their first interaction, in our particular case, it goes to a business development rep first to sort of qualify.
But you’re starting to ask questions then and going, why do you need this? What do you want it for? And I think you’re starting to start down the value conversation. However, there’s a complete other side of the world where you’re having dinner at night and the phone rings and you make a mistake and you pick it up and there’s this real friendly person that says, ‘Hey, Mark, I’ve got something to sell you.’ I mean, they’re a lot better than that. And this is what we call outbounding. And I think there you’ve got to get to more value a lot quicker because you’ve got probably 15 seconds to get their attention. So again, it’s what might be something very simple like, what is the cost of downtime in your organization? Like, we sell a lot to factories and downtime or predictive maintenance are sort of hot issues for them. But you’re trying to go and say, ‘Hey, what’s the cost from you? Or what’s the revenue we can save you.’ Right? So it’s really either some type of increased revenue, reduced cost, and for some of our pharma customers in pharmaceuticals, not farmers and pharma PH, it’s a lot more in risk mitigation.
Like, ‘Hey, what’s the cost of an FDA audit for you?’ And so having to land that problem really quickly and sort of the value, I always like to say, I like to sell via my other customers. I’ve always wanted to go and say, if I’m calling into a pharmaceutical company, I’m going to always, it’s going with, ‘We did this for Elila Lee. It’s a good name. And people are, ‘Oh, I better listen to you. Or, ‘We’ve done this for FedEx, we did this for UPS, or we did this.’ And, but you’re ascribing your problem, not like, ‘Hey what we are is an MTTD broker that does a really good job of pub sub.’ You lose them. You’ve got to go and say, ‘I’ve got to hook them with, there’s some value statement of what’s the cost of downtime for you?’ Or even, ‘What’s the cost of some regulatory compliance?’ And so I think it depends on whether they come through the inbound bucket or the outbound.
Mark Stiving
Okay. You just gave us like a hundred things to talk about.
Mark Herring
I know, man, I got plenty here, Mark. You know what I mean? What the audience doesn’t know is that we can talk for hours. So that’s problematic. And we’re not going to, I know.
Mark Stiving
So one of the things you didn’t mention as we were talking about the whole process is you didn’t say the words MQL and SQL, right? Marketing qualified lead and sales qualified lead. Do you not use those or are those not important to you? Or where does the pipeline fit into that?
Mark Herring
Yeah, to me, it’s like doing a race, right? You’re going to go and train for a marathon, and your goal is to probably finish the marathon in a certain time. I’m going to run this marathon in three hours. And to me, that’s the equivalent of a pipeline. It’s something I want to go and do, and the outcome that I really want to achieve is run this marathon. In order to run the marathon, you probably need to go to the gym a couple of times a week. You probably need to be able to do a couple of one mile races, five-mile races and get it up. And all of those to me are just stepping stones on your goal. And those would be the equivalent of MQL and SQLs. We track them, we monitor them, we look at all the conversions between each one of them. But honestly, if you’re making a pipeline, no one cares, right?
And so, I’ve been at startups where despite ourselves we bring in pipeline. I mean, we could have completely broken processes, and I’ve been at others where we never got to the pipeline and we had best MQL, SQLs, and you argue the whole time. But I think the marathon analogy is a lot just going, if you’re able to achieve your marathon in your timeline, right? I’m also so big into measuring, not only did I run a marathon, some people were just, ‘I want to finish a marathon.’ That’s a particular time as well. It’s a goal, yeah. And so if I look at that, that to me is equivalent to a pipeline. It’s like, a pipeline is someone comes in that wants some of our stuff.
Mark Stiving
So what is the difference between SQL and pipeline? Is pipeline meaning that we want you or is pipeline meaning we’re going to buy something?
Mark Herring
So the way I look at it is, SQL would be a sales qualified lead, right, is, someone that’s come in from a demographic that you can sell to, right? So in other words, like you identified in these couple of regions, and so it’s qualified from a sales perspective going, ‘Yes, it’s in this region.’ We’re speaking to the right person. We’re not speaking to the janitor unless you send janitor supplies, but I’m speaking to the right person, and they’ve got maybe a propensity to buy it. When it becomes a pipeline, you’ve gone to the next step. You’ve gone to the next step to go and say, ‘Hey, is there access to the budget?’ So if I’m speaking to you, Mark, before I convert you into a real opportunity in the pipeline, you go and say, ‘So Mark, do you have a budget for this?’
And you go, ‘No.’ And you might have been qualified all the way there till you said the word, No. Then I’m going to ask you now, ‘Well, do you have access to a budget? Do you guys spend money on software at all?’ If you’re, yes, but you need to speak to Bob. I go, ‘Well, let’s bring Bob into this.’ So before I flip you to the real pipeline, I want to have at least made sure that there is, in HiveMQ’s instance, every company’s slightly different. We’re always looking at about a less than nine-month bucket. So you’re not, get on budget to go and buy tomorrow, but if you have a way of, yes, I want to go and actually make a purchase decision in nine months, then you would sort of flip there. And so it’s sort of this judgment call where you’re sort of closing the gates down a little.
And so I think in some ways it’s…I never run a car dealership, but I sort of always love thinking about these analogies. I go, you come into the car dealer and you’ve got some money. You look like you’re looking for a car, that might be an SQL, right? Okay, here’s a qualified lead. You meet the salesperson and all the rest, and the only time you become a real opportunity is when you’ve done the test drive. And you go, ‘Okay, yes, I’m in there.’ It’s you’ve shown a little bit more willingness than just going sales feels you’re qualified. To me, the qualified leaders…MQL is marketing that feels you’re qualified, and we feel a lot of things are qualified, right? Sales goes, ah, little more criteria, sales is qualified, and opportunity is, there’s something real here, right? And they’re going to go and monitor and track it.
Mark Stiving
Yep. Okay. So now the hard question, oh, actually, how do you ever get someone to answer a cold call? I got to tell you that I never ever answer my phone. If your name didn’t come up, I’m not answering the phone. Period. And if for some reason I accidentally did and you started to say anything, I’m hanging up on you.
Mark Herring
Yeah. There’s lonelier people than you, Mark, up here that want to talk to someone. No, I don’t think it’s that. So it’s a numbers game. It’s a bit like, the one thing you didn’t mention in my past, I did spend two years actually running a painting company, physical painting, right? And it taught me a lot of things that I now applied to business. And this is, we won’t go down too deep on that one, but the thing we did there is direct mail. And if you think that people that own some phone calls, you think who opens junk mail as it’s called, we call it direct mail. And if in the market it’s direct mail, like who opens it? No one does. Well, I’ll tell you that statistically it’s about 0.1% of the population that opens it.
And if you send out enough, it becomes relevant, right? Because there is the demographic that’s not you that you’re selling to that actually does open it. So like in my example, and maybe in the painting business, which obviously has got nothing to do with HiveMQ, but the people that opened it primarily were retired people. They liked getting junk mail. They didn’t know they liked it, but they read it, right? And it’s the same thing if I think of it like HiveMQ. Like, why do people pick up the phone when we call them, right? it’s not always through the phone, right? You might have picked it up through LinkedIn, you might have commented to something there, you might’ve been sort of following us in LinkedIn, or you’re following one of the influencers that are out there and I come up to you and say, ‘Hey, Mark, I see you know this guy, Mark Herring. Could we have a chat about it?
You go like, ‘Oh, yeah, I’m interested to talk about that because I’m interested in wah wah wah, right? And I think it’s that, it’s you have to go and be a little more creative than just, it’s only a cold phone call, right? It might be a couple of cold emails, a LinkedIn request and then you pick up the phone and go, ‘Hey, this is Mark from HiveMQ.’ ‘Oh, I was just reading about you guys. You know what?’ And so it’s cold because you’ve never had the interaction, but usually they’ve interacted somewhere with you, right? It’s like they might have seen you at an event, or they might have seen some of your outreach to you already and going, ‘Okay, I’ll give this guy a bone.’
Right? And so for me personally, just sort of my… I also very seldom pick up the phone and I’ve been caught a couple of times, but, so if you looked at my LinkedIn profile, there’s a picture of me on, it looks like a beach, and I have a dog and anyone that uses LinkedIn and comes to me and tells me where that photograph is. And with AI, it’s so much easier today. I actually will respond to them and tell them, ‘Great job,’ you now you can have a conversation with me. Because it’s just, they’ve done their work. I feel like you’ve done the work and I’m just a softie and that stuff. I go, ‘Hey. Yeah.’ And for those of you that are checking it out, it’s Lake Powell and yeah, it’s with the dog on Lake Powell. And so people can say, ‘Hey, how’s your dog doing?’ How is Lake Powell. Love Lake Powell. Even if they don’t, I’ll always respond to that email, right? And if they called and said, ‘Hey, I’m talking to you about Lake Powell, I go, ‘Lake Powell. Yeah, I went to Lake Powell.’ ‘Ah, you’re selling me technology stuff.’ ‘Ah, but no, yes.’
Mark Stiving
But what was so cool about that? And by the way, I love that. Right? What’s so cool about that is that if someone knows and looks up, ‘Hey, this is Lake Powell,’ they’ve at least spent time looking at you.
Mark Herring
Exactly. Yes.
Mark Stiving
It isn’t just a, ‘Hey, here’s one of 7,000 emails I sent out to.’
Mark Herring
Correct. Yeah. And I think those are the ones that have a better and I think statistically it’s, you’ve got 15 seconds to try and get to someone before they hang up the phone, right? And I’m also not a big believer in these auto dialers because as soon as I hear hello and there’s this pause, I go, ‘Ah, I got you before you got through to me.’ Right? And again, it might just be statistically that people actually do better at this stuff. But yes, I think you want to feel that someone’s taken a little bit of that creativity to understand you, maybe looked at your background and can at least then articulate their company message based on what they think about you, right? Because, I mean, I’ll take HiveMQ as a good example.
If we’re phoning into a plant manager versus an IT architect, we have different stories for them, right? The plant manager’s probably more worried about maybe uptime or visibility, and your IT architect is more like, ‘Hey, does this actually hook up to all my other systems?’ Right? And so you’ve got to know who that persona is. but I think again, sort of one of the sales guys was talking about this at the conference we were at together, Mark, and I just loved it. And he is like, ‘Don’t over research, because there’s never a good time to know everything.’ Because you got to keep on dialing, right? So, yes, you can’t stop doing it because it’s like getting dice and trying to get the six, the more you throw it, the better chance you’re going to get to the six, right? So yeah. It’s just more than six sides on this die.
Mark Stiving
Okay. And so now you personally have called, I pick up the phone, I’m an operations manager. You’ve got 15 seconds. What are you saying in 15 seconds? That keeps me from hanging up.
Mark Herring
Yeah. Let me ask one quite clarifying question. Operations manager where?
Mark Stiving
Manufacturing.
Mark Herring
Yeah. I would say, ‘Hey, Mark. I work with companies like Magna and BMW. With their manufacturing you’re interested to hear what we do.’ I lead with brands because I go, ‘Oh, you might have something to talk to me about.’ Not value.
Mark Stiving
It’s okay. So that’s not horrible, but I wish it had value in it.
Mark Herring
I know, the response I usually get for this thing is a pause and go, okay. And then I’d come back and say, what we solved for them is we moved them from four nines to five nines and saved them about $10 million. Is that interesting to you? Because then I move it to value because now I’ve forced a pause in the conversation. We have thrown you a little off because no one usually starts that way, right? They usually start with the value going, ‘Hey, we can save you $10 million.’ And I’ve tuned out, but I go and say, the SER team reports to me. So it sort of have an insight, passion for a lot of this.
I also love it when people try and get rid of me, right? In terms of going, okay. Yeah. And I always then land back to, and we’re just very lucky as a company, we’ve got some really large brand names that use us. But it’s like if you sort of again, let’s say a manufacturing company and you’re about to leave, and I’d say, well, ‘Oh gee, Mark, I’m just surprised, man. Mercedes-Benz uses us and you would never use us? You got to have some of that little, I don’t know, swagger, right? You got to be a little, I don’t know, cocky, maybe it’s the wrong word, but I think that if you start value too soon, and you’re starting value as that second sentence, right? It’s not 12 sentences in, right? But if you don’t, you’ve got to like, because people just want to, that they’ve answered the call. They’re like, ‘Oh my God, I shouldn’t have done this,’ or want to get off the phone. And when you do that type of thing, I think they’re then shocked going, ‘Oh, he didn’t do a sales pitch on me. He’s asking me about these companies. Yeah. Well, maybe, it is something interesting, right? Because people want to be part of the crowd. FOMO, man.
Mark Stiving
Yeah. So I was going to say exactly that, right? It’s FOMO and it’s brand or credibility building for you. Yes. Right? That says, ‘Hey look, we work with these other big clients. Can we just talk about what we might do for you?’
Mark Herring
Exactly. And it’s trying to get out of the whole, ‘Hey we’ve got the best broken industry and it scales to 200 million devices. Are you interested?’ It’s like wah wah wah. Thank you, goodbye. Right? Yeah. Even though that might be a huge criteria for you as we get down in our journey, that might be one of the most important things to you is scalability. But I’d never start there.
Mark Stiving
Yeah. Okay. So on a cold call, I could go with that. By the way, I’m not an expert. Oh, I have no video of what works, what doesn’t work.
Mark Herring
I can just tell you, it’s like, well, and I think it’s stylistic, right? I think not everyone on my sort of team would use the same type of thing. I mean, you’ve got to be comfortable in keeping the conversation going. I just find that it just could be my, and I’ve always had this crutch, right? It’s like, I’d rather love to tell the story of what we’ve done for others than just tell you generically what we’ve done. I just go, I feel like, ‘Hey, we’ve got some big brand names. Why don’t you use those as the door opener as opposed to just a pure value statement.’
Mark Stiving
Yeah. Okay. What’s the email look like? You’re going to send me a cold email.
Mark Herring
Yeah. So let me tell you my email story. So it goes back and for the audience, they might find this interesting. but it’s my first gig as a CMO. And I’m sitting down with our CRO and we say, ‘Oh, let’s write some cold email.’ And I’m very competitive, which you might have noticed when we work together. But I say, ‘Okay, you write one and I’ll write one and we’ll see who wins,’ right? And so I wrote the world’s best marketing copy, right? ‘Hey, we save you this value, here’s our things. We are the best at this, here’s customer references.’ And it was beautiful. And CRO we wrote the following subject, quick question. And in the body was, ‘What are you doing to solve MTTB meantime between failures,’ right? That was it. And he beat me in about an hour. I just quit. I said, ‘You win. Took him out for beers. And so I think a lot of it is like you got to have the hook. I think email systems are becoming a lot clever enough for like, quick questions now it gets flagged by Google, usually it’s spam. And so you got to be a little bit like that. Maybe it can be a, ‘How can we help at company name or first name’, ‘How can we help you?’ And so people look at this and go like, oh.
But it’s got to be almost a two-sentence thing where you’re just trying to lean with them with enough going, ‘Would you be interested in learning how to reduce downtime?’ Are you worried about regulatory compliance? So some of the things we solve so that they give you the permission and let’s use your first email, right? And then your second one you can start layering on top of that going, getting back to you we’ve helped companies like this, this, and this. And you’re starting to layer, because they usually don’t respond to the first one either, right? And I think Gong has done a really good job if you sort of look up their website, they have the best cold emails and stuff. Like they’ve an analysis on this stuff. And a lot of it is just these real little snippy quick things to just land one little point in the door. You do long ones, people ignore it. We’re micro, I was going to say micro-learning, but it’s probably more just dopamine addicted society. We’re like, what’s the quick thing? used to be what’s my tweet? But like, yeah, whatever you are using now for your social media.
Mark Stiving
Okay, I’ve never done cold outreach on email. But I might write one and send it out just for kicks.
Mark Herring
Just do it. Well, and what’s great on a lot of things is like, and yeah, tooling has come so far in the industry, right? I mean, so a lot of this A/B testing everything, right? Send this one, send that one. So when I started this, we didn’t have a lot of sort of tooling. And so when Sierra and I did this, we just knew who had the best open rates. Now you can actually go and do an A/B test on every single thing. And so it gets a lot more sophisticated. And we sort of do this internally and just compete. We have teams competing with each other to see who’s winning. And then we all learn from that, right? Because, and then the population changes, right? I mean, like I said, probably 10 years ago. Quick question was probably the most popular one. And I think, yeah, the spam filters are getting better at this stuff, right? And it doesn’t go into, usually to junk, it goes into promotions and stuff like that. And so you’ve got to stay ahead of some of these things so that you don’t find your way down into the abyss of no one ever opening your email, right?
Mark Stiving
Yeah. Alright. Mark, as you said, we could probably talk for hours. We’re going to have to wrap this up. Let me ask you the final question. And you only have a couple minutes to answer. You can’t take like a half hour.
Mark Herring
Okay. Got it. Final question. Half an hour.
Mark Stiving
What is one piece of pricing advice you would give our listeners that you think could have a big impact on their business?
Mark Herring
Great question. I think, to try and understand the… I’m going to use the word value because we’ve talked about it, but the value in the eyes of your buyer, right? I think far too many times as vendors, we think there’s intrinsic value because it costs us much to produce or we think it looks like that. It’s trying to understand from a buying perspective, what is the value you’re providing, right? And I’ll take the car analogy, again, right? Because again, I love analogies, but a car gets you from point A to B, but you’re selling a different value when you’re in the Ferrari dealership than you’re in the VW dealership, right? Or in the Toyota dealership. Each of those things get you from A to B. But if you look at pricing there, there’s something for the value you’re providing in the Ferrari dealership to the buyer. And it’s always, you got to put your feet in the feet of the buyer. They are probably looking for some form of prestige, some for quality, some things like that. And you’ve got to be comfortable on your own.
And this gets to a marketing thing, your own brand, right? At HiveMQ we definitely think we’re a premium brand, right? We obviously price on value, but we also think we are a little higher on the value thing because we want the brand to stand for something. We want to stand for trust, we want to stand for premium.And so we want to price accordingly and we want to make sure that the buyer understands it that way. So I think it’s like you’ve got to be comfortable in your own shoes, but you’ve also got to flip it and go and say, ‘I’m pricing what the buyer’s looking for.’ And maybe just the last bit of advice on that. And back to the car analogy, getting from point A to point B is usually not what people are paying for. That’s not what they got the car for. They guess that’s what they got the car to do, but that’s not why they bought it.
Mark Stiving
Yep. Or at least that’s not why they bought the one they bought.
Mark Herring
Correct. Exactly. Right.
Mark Stiving
Correct. As they chose cars. So Mark, I thought that was a brilliant answer. Absolutely loved it. Thank you so much.
Mark Herring
I appreciate it, Mark. And appreciate hanging out with you.
Mark Stiving
Oh, hey, if anybody wants to contact you, how can they do that?
Mark Herring
Probably the easiest is just to go to LinkedIn. It’s just Herring, Mark. Because Mark Herring was taken. So Herring, Mark. I think Mark Herring’s a politician. So don’t send him any stuff. Just off LinkedIn or if you’ll contact me at work, it’s just [email protected].
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 or comments about the podcast or if your company needs help getting paid more for the value you deliver, feel free to email me, [email protected]. Now, go make an impact!
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