Whether you’ve been with us since the beginning or you just discovered Impact Pricing last week, this episode is for you. If you’re one of our longtime listeners, you know Mark’s voice, you’ve heard his insights, and maybe you’ve even implemented some of his strategies in your own business. But have you ever wondered what drives him to keep showing up week after week, year after year?
If you’re new here, welcome. You’re about to meet the person behind the podcast—not just as a pricing expert, but as someone who genuinely loves teaching and believes that understanding value can transform your business and your career.
Mark Stiving is the host of Impact Pricing and founder of Impact Pricing LLC. But before he was a pricing expert, he was a teacher—of scuba diving, kayaking, and marketing. That passion for helping people learn never left him. Even after retiring in 2019, Mark couldn’t stop sharing what he knows about pricing and value.
In this heartfelt solo episode, Mark pulls back the curtain on his journey. He shares why he chose to dedicate his post-retirement life to pricing education, what keeps him energized after blogging every week since 2010, and the two critical topics that consume his attention right now. This isn’t just another pricing lesson—it’s an invitation to understand the “why” behind everything we do here at Impact Pricing.
For our loyal listeners: Thank you for being part of this community. This episode is Mark’s way of reconnecting with you and reaffirming his commitment to your success.
For our new listeners: This is the perfect place to start. You’ll understand not just what we teach, but why it matters so deeply to the person teaching it.
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Why you have to check out today’s podcast:
- Discover why teaching and sharing pricing knowledge became Mark’s post-retirement mission and driving passion.
- Learn about the two critical topics dominating modern pricing strategy: AI pricing and context-driven pricing.
- Understand how value impacts decisions across sales, marketing, product development, and packaging—not just pricing.
“Probably my single most favorite thing is when I share something with someone and it has an impact on their life. I absolutely love that.”
– Mark Stiving
Topics Covered:
00:30 – Mark’s Retirement and Continued Mission. Why Mark retired in 2019 but couldn’t stop sharing pricing knowledge, and how his blogging streak since 2010 kept him connected to his passion.
01:15 – The Joy of Teaching. Mark’s history as an instructor across multiple disciplines—from scuba diving and kayaking to university-level marketing—and why teaching is his core passion.
02:00 – The Pricing Knowledge Gap. Why pricing and value are critical business topics that remain poorly understood, and Mark’s mission to change that.
02:45 – Working with Different Organizations. How Mark’s work differs between large enterprises (focusing on sales teams) versus small and mid-sized businesses (focusing on executive teams).
03:30 – Two Current Focus Areas. Deep dive into Mark’s concentration on AI pricing and context-driven pricing, including the concept of value architecture.
04:45 – Context-Driven Pricing Framework. How buying contexts differ for every purchase and how companies can structure their product portfolios to deliver and capture more value.
Key Takeaways:
“Pricing and value are such important topics in all of business and so few people understand it. And that’s almost my mission now is just to see how many people I can get to have a better understanding.” – Mark Stiving
“All buying is contextual. Every purchase that’s made is made in a different way than any other purchase has ever been made.” – Mark Stiving
“When we start thinking through context-driven pricing, that drives me to something I call a value architecture, which is how do you structure the way you think, the way you built your product portfolio, the way you have packaged your greatest features?” – Mark Stiving
Resources and People Mentioned:
- Impact Pricing Blog (since 2010): https://impactpricing.com/blog/
- Mark’s Substack newsletter
- Impact Pricing monthly newsletter
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.)
[Intro]
Mark Stiving
Welcome to Impact Pricing, the podcast where we discuss pricing, value, and the solo relationship between them. I’m Mark Stiving, and today it’s just me. So why is it just me? Well, mostly because I didn’t line up a guest for this week, although we’re going to have that problem fixed for next week. But instead of playing a classic episode, I thought it would make sense just to talk a minute about why I do what I do.
In 2019, January 1st, in fact, I retired. I decided I didn’t want to work anymore, but I’d been blogging on pricing every week since 2010. And I didn’t want to break that streak, so I kept blogging. And then I found that I dearly loved just sharing what I know. Probably my single most favorite thing is when I share something with someone and it has an impact on their life. I absolutely love that.
I became an instructor. I used to teach scuba diving when I was much, much younger. I used to water kayak and I would teach people how to kayak. I was a marketing professor for a while, so I would teach people at university. I just, I love teaching. I love helping people learn and understand these concepts.
And yet pricing and value are such important topics in all of business and so few people understand it. And that’s almost my mission now is just to see how many people I can get to have a better understanding of how it is that buyers use value to make purchase decisions and how companies can then make better decisions, whether that’s in pricing or even in marketing or product development or packaging.
So we have a lot of impact or have the ability to have a lot of impact on different customers. So I tend to work with small and mid-sized businesses. When I work with really large enterprise organizations, it’s almost always with the sales team because salespeople are trying to understand, what does value mean?
When I work with small and mid-sized businesses, it’s almost always with the executive teams because they, A, wanna know what value means, but they’re not only trying to figure out how to sell the value better, they’re also trying to figure out how do we coordinate and organize our entire company so that we can deliver value and then capture that value we’re delivering. And we need to do that in a way that makes sense to our customers.
Lately, I’ve just been focused on two topics. If you read my blogs, if you read my sub stacks, almost everything I write revolves around two things. One is pricing of AI, or maybe even using AI. Everybody in the world’s fascinated with AI. I am working my derriere off to try to learn as much as I can because I want to help people, especially when it comes to how do you price products that have AI in them?
The other topic that I work a lot on, I call context-driven pricing. And that’s because all buying is contextual. Every purchase that’s made is made in a different way than any other purchase has ever been made. There are contexts that are different. Some contexts matter a lot. Some contexts don’t matter at all.
But when we start thinking through context-driven pricing, that drives me to something I call a value architecture, which is how do you structure the way you think, the way you built your product portfolio, the way you have packaged your greatest features? And so we put all that together to say, how do we deliver and capture more value from our customers? And so that’s what I’ve been doing.
Feel free to reach out. I’d love it if you’d follow me. Let me know that if I’ve ever impacted you, it makes me very happy. But follow me on LinkedIn, follow my blog on the website, follow the Substack. It’s mostly the same content. We have a newsletter that goes out once a month. Feel free to sign up for that just in case you might miss some of our content.
So I promise next week, it won’t be me. It’ll be someone else. Well, it’ll be me plus someone else. But for now, I hope you enjoy the podcast. I’d love it if you would subscribe. I would love it if you would leave us a review and a rating. But in the meantime, feel free to email me if you have any questions, mark at impactpricing.com. Now, go make an impact.
[Outro]
