Bryan Whittington is the founder of ebs/growth, a firm that helps companies create a more effective sales team. Also, he is the host of the Talent Sales & Scale podcast, and was a sales trainer for over ten years.
In this episode, Bryan discusses how he handles exploratory or discovery calls. He explains how he talks with his clients and potential clients in order to find the root cause of their problems, and shares some of his techniques to get these clients to propose the possible solutions to their problems themselves.
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Why you have to check out today’s podcast:
- Learn how an expert like Bryan Whittington handles discovery calls
- Acquire new techniques in scrutinizing your clients’ problems
- Discover smart ways to find a solution to your clients’ problems
“Pricing is a belief. You either believe that your price is not worth what you’re asking, or you’re able to convey that your price is worth it to your prospect, your buyer. But price is absolutely a belief. You choose which belief you want.”
– Bryan Whittington
Topics Covered:
01:15 – How Bryan got into pricing
02:08 – Selling value vs. selling a commodity
05:08 – What to avoid when having a discovery call
07:02 – How to handle a discovery call, step 1
09:23 – Why it is better to setup that next meeting
13:30 – How to handle a discovery call, step 2
14:19 – Why you shouldn’t allow your clients to rate their problem a 7/10
15:01 – How to handle a discovery call, step 3
17:59 – Finding out the root cause of the clients’ problems
22:54 – When and how to name the price of your solution based on the magnitude of the problem
24:46 – Pricing table topics: “Salespeople use every tool available to close a deal. When given authority to discount, they will use it more often than necessary”
28:20 – Bryan’s pricing advice
Key Takeaways:
“Sales is how you identify what their challenges are, whether or not you can solve the problem of those challenges, and then understand the value of you fixing those problems for that organization will be, and you can charge an appropriate value for it.” – Bryan Whittington
“That conversation should take anywhere between 5 to 8 minutes. And if it’s longer than that, you’ve already started your initial first sales call, and I wouldn’t suggest you do that.” – Bryan Whittington
“Often, the problem that the person brings you is never really the problem. We have to identify the real root cause to know whether or not your solution will work. If your solution won’t work for that root cause, then make an introduction to somebody where it will.” – Bryan Whittington
People / Resources Mentioned:
- ebs/growth: https://ebsgrowth.com/
- Talent, Sales & Scale Podcast: https://ebsgrowth.com/podcast/
Connect with Bryan Whittington:
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brywhittington/
- 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.)
Bryan Whittington
Pricing is a belief. You either believe that your price is not worth what you’re asking, or you’re able to convey that your price is worth it to your prospect, your buyer. But price is absolutely a belief. You choose which belief you want.
[Intro]
Mark Stiving
Welcome to Impact Pricing, the podcast where we discuss pricing, value, and the fungible relationship between them. I’m Mark Stiving, and our guest today is Bryan Whittington. Here are three things you’d want to know about Bryan before we start. He is the founder of ebs/growth, he hosts the Talent, Sales & Scale Podcast, and he was a sales trainer for over ten years. That’s got to be a rough job. Welcome, Bryan.
Bryan Whittington
Thanks, Mark. I appreciate it. And you’re going to have to check out Mark, he’s on the Talent. Sales & Scale Podcast coming up here. I don’t know whenever that episode is going to drop, but it’s going to be a good one.
Mark Stiving
Good. Well, hopefully, probably before this one, so look in the history.
So, Bryan, I always start with this question and it doesn’t quite fit you, but pretend it fits you and go with it.
Bryan Whittington
Alright. I do that all the time. Let’s go.
Mark Stiving
How did you get into pricing?
Bryan Whittington
How did I get into pricing? It’s fundamental to sales, right? So, whenever you’re in sales, how you get to price is critical because pricing is a strategy that if you can get somebody to align with your belief of what your value is, you take the idea of price from a commodity to price being something that you can reveal value. Price is absolutely a commodity where if you’re going to buy me for a nickel, then you’ll get rid of me for a nickel. And so, we always want to move away from price and over to value, and that’s one of the key requirements or key skills, I would say, that you need from a salesperson.
Mark Stiving
Alright. So, I’m sure you and I agree completely on what you just said, but the words that you chose are really horrendous in my world, if that’s okay. So, anyone who says price is a commodity, I think what you’re really saying is salespeople who choose to sell price have essentially made their products a commodity.
Bryan Whittington
Agreed. So better said there. Yes.
Mark Stiving
Okay, and so I think of price – my definition of price is, how do you capture value? It’s the thing that captures the value of your product. And so, if you’re going to treat your product like a commodity, then you get the price that everybody else gets.
Bryan Whittington
Yeah, because if you’re going to sell just on price, you might as well just put everything online and be an order taker. That’s not sales. Sales is how you identify what their challenges are, whether or not you can solve the problem of those challenges, and then understand the value of you fixing those problems for that organization will be, and you can charge an appropriate value for it. Which, yes, that’s price, but if I’m just going to say, “Hey, my widget is blankety blank dollars”, that is pricing your commodity now. You haven’t driven any value to that conversation, and you haven’t allowed that person to realize your value over somebody else’s.
Mark Stiving
Yeah, we agree 100%. I also often tell the story of how a professor of mine in an MBA program asked us all to take out a piece of paper and write our names and then give ourselves a grade for how well we did in the class. And he goes, “If I agree with you, you can have it. And if I don’t agree with you, you don’t get it”. And I think of pricing as almost the exact same thing, right? So, if you think about how well I did design and define and market and sell and communicate the value of the product, that’s what dictates the price. Just like my grade, the price is like a grade for how well we do everything else and the sales side is the very end of that.
Bryan Whittington
Yeah, and maybe the way that I would couch that is for example, if I’m on a discovery call, and we don’t get into semantics here, you’re going to have to do discovery throughout. So, that first time appointment where I’m diving deeply into that conversation, Mark, I’m calling that an exploratory or a discovery call, whatever you want to call that. But my ideal goal of that is to do a couple of things: One is to identify; do they have a problem that I can solve? And if I can’t, then I’m going to go away. And then if I can find a problem for which what I’m doing can solve, then I’m going to identify how they’re doing it today, and then get them to identify how big of an issue it is, and then get them to quantify that issue. And from that quantification of the cost of that issue, that’s where I can then start to have those value conversations.
Mark Stiving
Yep. Oh my gosh, you just wrote my book. Thank you.
Bryan Whittington
You’re welcome.
Mark Stiving
That was so well done. I mean, that’s exactly what I put in there.
So, let’s talk about this: When you have that first time call, what’s the question? Don’t you just come out and say, “Hey, what problems do you have?”
Bryan Whittington
No, and the other thing that you never want to say is, “Hey, what’s your pain?” Don’t ever ask that. So, I couch this in a couple of different ways. If we look at that in an initial exploratory call, I’m going to get them to give me the premise. “Hey, what’s the objective of today’s conversation? You’re walking away. This is a good use of your time if you’ve learned what I’ve got away from this.” So, I get the end goal in mind, and then I’m going to reverse engineer it from there. That starts the objective of the other conversation. Go ahead.
Mark Stiving
Right. So, that’s the end goal of the conversation, not of our whole sales relationship.
Bryan Whittington
Precisely, just of that conversation. Because I mean, how many times have we gone on sales calls, or I’ll admit it, how many times have we run bad sales call where the objective didn’t meet whatsoever what I had in mind for them or what they had in mind for me? So, the first thing I want to do is make sure that we have an alignment of what’s the objective of the call. And then based upon that, now I can couch the remainder of my questions to achieve that goal. But before I can really get that done, I need to find out how are they doing blank today? So, whatever that blank is in your world, for example, if I’m selling my recruiting services for salespeople, “Hey, curious, how do you go about hiring salespeople today?” Or if it’s for top of the funnel work that we do on another platform that we have, then it’s “Hey curious, do you use the phone for any outbound prospecting today? And if yes, any idea of what your call to connect rate is? And how is that impacting your meetings booked per month?” Right” So, that’s going to start it. And now, I get them to lay out a picture of what their as-is is today. So that’s step number one is really to get them to paint the picture of their as-is today.
Mark Stiving
Before we move beyond the as-is, I want to take a step back. You had to get the sales call in the first place. I assume in the act of getting a sales call, you set some expectations or the potential buyer has some expectations. How did we do that?
Bryan Whittington
That’s a great question. We want to find pain back in that conversation. ‘So, if I’m reaching out to you, Mark, it would be something along the lines of “Hey, Mark, Bryan Whittington here. Listen, you and I haven’t spoken before. Do you mind if I take half a minute and share with you the purpose of my call?” “Sure, got it.” “Speaking with a number of different CEOs, one of the biggest challenges that they’re sharing with me is that their sales team is not setting enough meetings per month, and oftentimes, that’s because they’re not having enough sales conversation. So, I’m curious, Mark, have you ever faced that relevant conversation to have today?” “Yeah, absolutely.”
Now I dig down a little bit more deeply, Mark, and I’ll say something along these lines. I call it my magic three questions: “So, Mark, can you tell me a little bit more about that? And can you be more specific? Can you give me an example of one of your salespeople today that hasn’t hit their meetings booked per month?” And they’ll give me that. “Alright, now, out of curiosity, because your sales team isn’t hitting that – and this is question number two – out of curiosity, because your sales team isn’t hitting that meetings book per month or you’ve had turnover or whatever that pain is that you’re solving for…” Because of that, now they start to give me an impact. And I’m not giving them that impact, they’re giving me that impact.
And then the third question to make sure that this is going to be a relevant good use of both of our times, my third magic question is this: “Hey, with or without my help, Mark, is this something that you need to get solved?” “Yeah, absolutely. I need to get this solved” Then I go to my call to action. “Well, why don’t we do this?” And I’m going to be embedding commands. “Why don’t we do this or let’s do this or maybe make a suggestion, why don’t we do this,” however that comes out? And then we set up that appointment for a conversation.
So that’s the language that I use in order to book that meeting. That conversation should take anywhere between 5 to 8 minutes, and if it’s longer than that, you’ve already started your initial first sales call, and I wouldn’t suggest you do that.
Mark Stiving
Okay, so I have to ask, why wouldn’t you suggest we do that? I’ve got him on the phone. He’s interested.
Bryan Whittington
Two things. One is, if it’s easy enough or relevant enough, meaning that you can have one call close, you might want to continue on. And if you do that, it would sound like this: “Well, Mark, we’re starting to get into a little bit about what we talk about on our conversation. You weren’t expecting a call from Bryan Whittington today at 12:35 of your time. So, do you have a couple of minutes so I can dive down a little bit more deeply? Maybe, you know, a total of ten or 15 minutes? You’re good with that right now?” If he says no, then I’m going to schedule a conversation. If he says yes, now, we’re going to have a dialog.
If I don’t do that the whole entire time, Mark is going to be asking himself, “Hey, how long is this going to take?” And doing everything in his power to disqualify me. So, it’s a game of gotcha at that point. Whereas if I set a meeting with you, you have it on your calendar. When I call you back that next time, it’s the weirdest thing, but there is such a different tenor tone environment when I call back because now, he’s expecting it and it’s just a lot easier. Now, you and I can have a business dialog as opposed to the playing the game of gotcha, the other angle.
So that’s why I suggest if you can, especially if you’re on a complex sale, set up that next meeting.
Mark Stiving
I love that feedback, I think that’s really interesting because obviously, from my perspective, and I think you agree, the goal here is I want to find out how much value my solution to your problem has to you. And if I can open up their mind to say “Let’s talk about value or let’s talk about the value of solving the problem” and not “how do I get this guy off the phone?”, then it just changes the conversation. That makes a ton of sense.
Bryan Whittington
Yeah. And if you think about it, I’m just calling you out of the blue. I’m a stranger. You don’t know me, so you’re going to be a little bit more guarded. However, if we come back, now you’ve likely looked at my LinkedIn, you probably look me up on my website, or you’ve done a little bit of due diligence before you jump on a call. So now, whenever I start to ask you really challenging questions like “Hey, listen, looking at your sales team today, how many of those knowing what you know today would you rehire?” I can ask questions like that during a deep conversation as opposed to off of a cold call. I may be able to pull that off, but I’m going to get a much better answer on a scheduled call than otherwise.
Mark Stiving
Right, because the person you were talking to went into this conversation thinking, “Hey, we’re going to talk about this problem.”
Bryan Whittington
Yeah, “I can trust this person. This is going to be a business conversation, not a sales pitch.” Which by the way, if you’re doing a sales pitch or a demo right off the bat, you’re screwing up. But that’s a different story.
Mark Stiving
I actually love that. That is brilliant.
Okay, so we went through step one. What was step two?
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Bryan Whittington
Step two in a discovery call. So that way, now I’ve gotten them to paint the picture. Now, I get them to identify 1 to 10, it would sound something like this: “So, Mark, on a scale of 1 to 10, one is, ‘oh my gosh, this is just a disaster’ – which, by the way, I’m not hearing that. A ten is angel singing from above ‘hallelujah’”. And now I’m going to lay out exactly what Utopia would look like if they’re working with me. So, it would be like “Now, Mark, your sales team is having a conversation every 3 to 5 dials. They know that they’re going to be able to book a meeting, 1 to 2 meetings every 12 conversations. They’re doing that at will. That’s a ten. Now, on a scale of 1 to 10, and let me be a pain in the neck, you can’t choose seven. Where are you at?”
Mark Stiving
Okay, why can’t I choose seven? I just have to know.
Bryan Whittington
Think of a teenager. “How are you doing today?” “Meh”. That’s a seven, right? I can’t do anything with that “meh” because I don’t know if it’s good or bad. If they say eight, nine or ten, I know things are decent. If they say six or below, I know that there’s a problem there. So, I’m going to have a different answer depending on where they are. But almost everybody will want to choose seven because it’s safe and I need to get them to either say it’s good or it’s bad, it’s positive or negative. I can’t have a “meh”.
Mark Stiving
Oh my God. I got to say that I’m learning stuff that I’ve never heard before and I’m old.
Bryan Whittington
I’ve been doing this a couple of days.
Mark Stiving
Yeah, a couple of days.
Okay, so was there a step three?
Bryan Whittington
Yeah, so after I get that person, so Mark says, yeah, I’m a… You pick a number.
Mark Stiving
Obviously, I’m a five.
Bryan Whittington
Okay, five. You know what, Mark? [That’s the] number one answer I always hear. I’m going to agree with you, and say “ain’t that a boy?” that’s the number one answer I get. So, hey, at a five, fully anticipating – that’s the number one answer – Kind of out of curiosity, why a five? Now, I get Mark to justify why it’s a five. “Well, I didn’t think it sounded that bad. Why a five?” Now, it’s your number and you’re fighting me. “No, it is a five. It’s that bad.” “Alright, you win.” So now, Mark owns that fully and is not my number. And then once I get a little bit of information, I believe him now that he truly believes it’s a five, I say “Okay, knowing it’s a five, what are the top say, two, three, four things that you believe has to happen to get you closer to a ten knowing fully well it’s never going to be likely a ten, but what are the maybe the three or four or five things that you believe are most important to get you to that ten?” Now, what he’s going to do is give me a list of everything that he believes he needs to do for the solution. So, he’s going to now give me his vision of solution. And so, he’s going to say, well, “I’m going to do this”. “Okay, what else?” “I think this would be important”. “What else?” Now, notice I’m saying “what else?” as opposed to “anything else?” It’s “what else, what else?” Say “Got it”. Okay. And now I’m going to repeat back to him to confirm that I have everything. “So, you need to do this, this, this and this and this. One, two, three, four and five. Is that right?” “Yes, that’s right”. I do a little bit of Chris Foskett of “That’s right”. And then I say “Of those five things, if you could only solve one, which do you think would be the most important?” And now I get them to prioritize. Then, then, then and then. And at this point, my discovery call time is almost up so I’m going to say, “Hey, would it be helpful before we dive down into this if I share with you at least a high level a little bit about what we do, how we do it, and based upon that, we can come back and schedule another conversation?” So, that’s if I have a more complex enterprise type sale or if I have more of a commodity – not a commodity, but more of a transactional short sale cycle, I’m going to condense this a lot more quickly. So, depending on the complexity of what you’re doing, always know what that next step should be and pace this. Ask those questions to align with that. So, I don’t know if I explained that to a point of clarity, but I do want to point out that it’s not a one size fits all. It really depends on size of your sale, complexity of all that buyers group, is it one-person, five-person, ten people –that’s going to really determine how you play that last part out for the next step.
Mark Stiving
That was actually really fascinating.
Now, I work with many, many different people inside companies, and one of the groups I work with sometimes are product managers. And product managers, when I ask them to go out and talk to customers and potential customers, I caution them because a customer is going to say to you, “I want this feature”, right? “Can you build me this feature?” And I always tell them that’s the wrong thing to look for, right? Instead, what you want to look for is, well, what’s the problem you’re trying to solve? Because when they’re giving you the feature, they’re giving you the solution. Now, what I just heard you talk about was you’re asking this potential buyer, so what are the top three or four solutions to the problem? I use my words, not yours.
Bryan Whittington
Yep.
Mark Stiving
And so how do we reconcile the fact I’m going to ask a buyer for solutions or that I would never ask a buyer from a product development perspective about solutions?
Bryan Whittington
So, here’s where I’m going with that, what I’m trying to do. So, consider this from a top of the funnel prospecting, early discovery, early exploratory call where I have a limited constraint on time, say 20, 30 minutes, and I have to go through this whole entire process. What I’m looking to do is now I had that list of 1 to 5 items that we need to dive down more deeply on, but that at least gets them to open up that “I do have a problem” and we’ll need to come back again to really dove down deeply. Now, whenever we come back again or even during that topic, I’ll say, “Okay, Mark, you said that you had problem one: you only have a 3 to 5% connect rate. So, can you tell me a little bit more about that? How long has that been a problem?” And now I’m going to ask more clarifying questions to get at the root cause of it, to find out, “Hey, what is the root cause?” Because often, the problem that the person brings you is never really the problem. We have to identify the real root cause to know whether or not your solution will work. If your solution won’t work for that root cause, then make an introduction to somebody where it will. Now, that person is going to become your biggest evangelist. But if you just try to fix that top-of-mind problem, you’re probably going to get the wrong solution and have an angry person on your hands. So, I don’t know if that help clarified of it.
Mark Stiving
I think it does. And I think the other thing, as you were talking and I had a chance to think about those words in the previous ones, I think what often happens is that people think in solutions. They don’t think in problems. And so, if I ask a customer what solutions they think might solve it, then it’s much easier for them to answer than to say “What are the root causes of the problems or what else causes that?”
Bryan Whittington
Because it’s really a process to work them down, right? Because if they identify the root cause, then in my mind I almost have an NCAA sweet 16 bracket going in my head, right? So, if they say, “Well, I don’t think my sales team is effective.” Okay, that could be for one of a couple reasons. Is it they’re not effective because they’re not doing the activities, or they’re doing the activities but they’re just not very good at it? And now I can benchmark if they say “it’s this”. “Okay, so you said it’s because they’re not doing the activities. Is it because they don’t have the tools, or they don’t have the talent or the belief that it will work?” “Well, I don’t think that they have the talent.” So now, I can just be off of that. It’s like whenever you go to the eyeglass place, right? So, is it better now? Or now? And you can just ask those questions so you’re guiding the conversation through questions. It’s not pitching. It’s laser guided questions to help them uncover the problem and get down to the root cause. So now they go, “Wow, I have never really considered that. So, it’s not necessarily I have a training issue. It’s really the fact that they’re just simply not having enough conversations in a day. That might be it. Let me make this suggestion. Let’s test that.” Now, I can go on to the next phase because we’re at the likely root cause problem.
Mark Stiving
And what I like about that, and what I often talk about and think about as well, is we as salespeople need a long list of what are the possible problems that we’re looking for, right? What are the problems that we could possibly solve that I want someone to say, “I’ve got this problem.”
Bryan Whittington
And that’s the beauty of it, because if you know the problems that you solve, then you can reverse engineer that NCAA bracket to go to, in medical terms, “What are the presenting symptoms?” So, if I can identify what the most common presenting symptoms are, now I can reverse engineer from those presenting symptoms to my likely solution that’s going to fix it at a root cause, and if I can do that, then I’m bringing tremendous value to my prospective prospect.
Mark Stiving
I think that’s absolutely brilliant.
So, hard question for you: When do you put a dollar value on the solution to the problem? Not the product that we’re selling, but the solution to the problem.
Bryan Whittington
I do that as early as possible – if I can’t do that on a discovery call, worst case is on that second call. So, I’m going to say, well, let me back up even further. Oftentimes, people don’t know how to identify what the cost of that is. So, I, as a salesperson, have to be really good at identifying that. So, it might be things like, “Mark, kind of curious, how are you measuring success today?” “Okay, so if that’s what you’re measuring success today, what would you like it to be?” And then I get that gap and then I start to figure out what the value of that gap is. And then I ask, “Is that a repeat customer? Is there a value of that gap over time? Or is that a one-time incident? So now I know the value of the gap. What’s the value of the gap over time? Then before I say, “Oh my gosh, it’s a $2.3 million problem. I don’t want to get excited.” Well, I went to public school, right? How much is that? Make them do the math so they own the problem, and go, “Listen, I don’t want to pretend to know your world better than mine or I don’t want to pretend to know your world better than you do. I mean, you know, 2.3. Is that a big issue? Little issue? I don’t know what some of the other problems are that you’re facing.” Because for oil and gas, $2.3 million might be like nothing. Whereas for a software company, maybe that’s a ton of money. You never know. So, I ask them a question. $2.3 million, I mean, is that a big deal? A little deal? How does that compare to some of the other initiatives that you’re working on? Let them tell you. Don’t paint their own picture. Let them paint it for you.
Mark Stiving
Absolutely brilliant. Okay, we’re going to be running out of time so we got two more things we have to do real fast. We’re going to start by pricing table topics. So, for our listeners, you’ve heard this before, but Bryan has one minute to talk about whatever this card is that I’m about to draw for him.
Bryan Whittington
He did not prep me for this, so I have no idea what this question is. So, alright, let’s see if my improv classes paid off.
Mark Stiving
He has no idea. You get to talk between one and 2 minutes. I’ll let you know when your one minute is up. By the way, this is the two of clubs from my Selling Value playing deck. You ready, Bryan?
Bryan Whittington
I’m ready. Let’s go.
Mark Stiving
Salespeople use every tool available to close a deal. When given authority to discount, they will use it more often than necessary.
Bryan Whittington
And I’m supposed to do pro or con of that, or?
Mark Stiving
Whatever you want to say.
Bryan Whittington
Okay, so if you give your salespeople the autonomy to discount, they likely will discount more often than not, and it’s a negative opportunity for negotiation.
So, for example, if I’m a sales leader and I want to give my salesperson autonomy to discount as needed, I still want them to be able to defer to me as a negotiating tactic. So, if I said “Mark, listen, I don’t know, let me take that back and have a conversation. But a couple of questions, because I know my manager is going to ask me this: If we were able to do that – and I’m not saying we can because we don’t tend to discount, but let’s pretend that I can – would we move forward or what would happen off of that?” I’d get an answer back: “Yeah, we’d absolutely move forward.” “Okay, so other than price, you’re suggesting that this is the only thing preventing you from moving forward?” “Yes.” “Okay, got it.” I’ll ask him whether or not I can do that. “Now, let’s pretend I go to Mark and he says, no, I can’t. What happens then?” And I allow that silence to do the work. And if he says something like “Then this is over”. “Okay, got it. I’ll really work hard.” Or it goes “I don’t know, we’ll just have to figure something else out.” Meaning, “If I can find some different terms to allow this to work, maybe spread this out over time or something like that. We could still make things work out?” “Yeah, we would just have to be a little bit more creative.” “Okay, got it. So, we’ll go back, talk to Mark, see what he says. Worst case scenario, you and I can put on our brainstorming caps to see how to make this work. Is that fair?” “Yes.” So, if you teach your people to do that and come back to you as opposed to just carte blanche discounting, that would be my suggestion on how to do it.
Mark Stiving
Beautiful. Okay, Bryan, a couple of comments. First off, I feel like I was just buying a new car at a new car dealership.
Bryan Whittington
Come on, man, you only gave me 2 minutes.
Mark Stiving
No, no, no. But that’s how they do it when you go buy a new car, right? Oh, I got to go check with my manager. I don’t think they do the other part of the clause, which was “So what if he says no?”, right? I think they just come back with another number. And then the other thing I was going to say is you went almost 2 minutes, which is the most anyone’s ever done on pricing table topics so far. So, nice job!
Bryan Whittington
I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing. Maybe I’m just verbose. But you know, now that you bring that out, maybe one thing to say is switch the order. “Mark, let’s pretend that I can’t do that. What happens? I’m not saying that I can’t, but let’s pretend I can’t. What happens?” If you start with that negative and then go to the positive, that would be an interesting play at it. But on the spot, that would be my suggestion.
Mark Stiving
That was actually well done.
And so, Bryan, we will wrap it up with the final question: What’s one piece of pricing advice you would give our listeners that you think could have a big impact on their business?
Bryan Whittington
Pricing is a belief. You either believe that your price is not worth what you’re asking, or you’re able to convey that your price is worth it to your prospect, your buyer. But price is absolutely a belief. You choose which belief you want.
Mark Stiving
Yes. And you’re absolutely talking to salespeople. I often talk to product people, pricing people. And what I tell them, which is very similar, is sales must be confident they can win at your price.
Bryan Whittington
Yes. Because with that confidence, and that goes back to that belief – if I’m a salesperson, I believe, “Oh, my gosh, there’s not a better value out there”, they’re going to sell with conviction and confidence. If they don’t believe in that price, they’re dead in the water.
Mark Stiving
Bryan, this has just been fabulous. Thank you so much for your time today. If anybody wants to contact you, how can they do that?
Bryan Whittington
Easiest way is I spell my name wrong on LinkedIn, but check it out. It’s Bryan with a Y instead of an I, so Bryan Whittington. Check me out on LinkedIn, or you can also reach me through email. It’s [email protected]. And then check us out on the Talent, Sales & Scale Podcast where you can hear Mark coming up here in a couple of weeks.
Mark Stiving
Alright. Episode 191 is all done. Thank you for listening. If you enjoyed this, would you please leave us a rating and a review? The easiest way to do that is go to ratethispodcast.com/impactpricing. And I don’t know why people make it so hard to figure out how to rate a podcast. So go to ratethispodcast.com/impactpricing.
And finally, if you have any questions or comments about the podcast or pricing in general, feel free to email me at [email protected]. Now, go make an impact.
Tags: Accelerate Your Subscription Business, ask a pricing expert, pricing metrics, pricing strategy
