Andy Paul is the author of Sell Without Selling Out. He’s the host of the Sales Enablement Podcast, and has experience on being VP of Business Development and VP of Sales.
In this episode, Andy talks about the importance of the “human element” and why we should utilize it more when it comes to business negotiations.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Why you have to check out today’s podcast:
- Learn how automated business sequences negatively affects your business
- Understand the importance of having the “human element” in business negotiations
- Find out why you should hire actual negotiation experts and not salespeople when it comes to price negotiations
“Managers, take responsibility. Don’t put the discounting in the hands of the sellers. And if managers show a little more discipline, then they can preserve the margins better.”
– Andy Paul
Topics Covered:
02:35 – The time Andy learned that pricing is important in the world of sales
06:02 – Selling is about listening to your customers and finding ways to help them
08:37 – How you should communicate value to a customer to make a successful sales meeting
13:28 – Making your customers feel understood is one step in winning sales
17:07 – Why salespeople are unable to utilize the human element
19:20 – Automated selling sequences is mostly persuasive, which is not the best way to go in sales
20:50 – Salespeople’s job is to build one on one relationships with customers, as all customers are not the same
22:30 – How salespeople should handle price segmentations or price negotiations
25:25 – Have professional contract negotiators handle negotiations, and you’ll end up getting better deals
29:11 – Andy’s pricing advice
Key Takeaways:
“I say sales, what you have to think about is your job as a salesperson is really nothing more than listening to your buyer, understanding the things that are most important to them in terms of the challenges they face and the outcomes they want to achieve by addressing those challenges and then helping them get that. That’s your job. Listen and help.” – Andy Paul
“If you can be the first to make the buyer feel understood, there are serious milestones happening that you can actually put yourself in the pole position, and win the deal at a higher frequency than your competitors.” – Andy Paul
“When humanity becomes the differentiator and all the automated buying experiences start to become more similar, how do you stand apart? Being human.” – Andy Paul
“Everyone wants to point the finger at salespeople as to be the blame for discounting. And the fault is really managers. It’s not salespeople.” – Andy Paul
People / Resources Mentioned:
- How to Sell Without Selling out: https://www.amazon.com/Sell-Without-Selling-Out-Success/dp/1989603572
- Humans are Underrated: https://www.amazon.com/Humans-Are-Underrated-Achievers-Brilliant/dp/0143108379
- Talent is Overrated: https://www.amazon.com/Talent-Overrated-Separates-World-Class-Performers/dp/1591842948
- Geoffrey Colvin: https://geoffcolvin.com/
- Toastmasters: https://www.toastmasters.org/
Connect with Andy Paul:
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/realandypaul/
- Website: https://www.andypaul.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.)
Andy Paul
Managers, take responsibility. Don’t put the discounting in the hands of the sellers. And if managers show a little more discipline, then they can preserve the margins better.
[Intro]
Mark Stiving
Today’s podcast is sponsored by Jennings Executive Search. I had a great conversation with John Jennings about the skills needed in different pricing roles. He and I think a lot alike.
If you’re looking for a new pricing role, or if you’re trying to hire just the right pricing person, I strongly suggest you reach out to Jennings Executive Search. They specialize in placing pricing people. Say that three times fast.
Mark Stiving
Welcome to Impact Pricing, the podcast where we discuss pricing, value, and the tight relationship between them. I’m Mark Stiving, and our guest today is Andy Paul, and here are three things you’d want to know about Andy before we start: He’s the author of his new book, Sell Without Selling Out. Very interesting. He’s the host of the Sales Enablement Podcast and he’s been VP of Biz Dev and VP of Sales in his previous life. Oh, and he married his high school sweetheart. Isn’t that sweet? But he waited until he was 55. Welcome, Andy.
Andy Paul
What a great introduction. Yes, we kind of led with the first one. I was very fortunate. Yeah, married the woman that I fell in love with when I was 18 years old. Just took a while.
Mark Stiving
That’s pretty fascinating. So, did she fall in love with you at 18?
Andy Paul
Yeah, that’s mutual, but long story. We met right before I graduated high school, and our paths have already been dictated in terms of we were going to college, which was off sides of the country. We actually met in high school in Tokyo, Japan. Another long story there. But yeah, we eventually found our way back to each other.
Mark Stiving
That is a Hallmark movie right there.
Andy Paul
Well, it is. People keep on telling me because we definitely continue to consume the entire episodes talking about it. People said I should write it. I can write a sales book. I don’t know if I can write a love story.
Mark Stiving
So, I normally start the interview out with the question, “How did you get into pricing?” But you actually are a sales expert.
Andy Paul
Yes, not a pricing expert.
Mark Stiving
Let me tweak it just a little bit. And when did you realize pricing was important in the world of sales?
Andy Paul
Well, right out of the gate, actually, because my first professional sales job was selling large computer systems, and it wasn’t long ago, but at the time, interest rates were just about 20%. And so, it was one thing to be able to work with the buyer, to have them see the value in what we were selling, but then, it was still a mystery what the actual price should be because of financing costs. So yeah, we had this really tricky dance that we had as much to start sales as one is, “Could we sell to the customer?”, and two is, “Could we find a financing source where it still made sense to do the deal?”
Mark Stiving
Yeah. I just saw in the news this morning that housing prices are down a lot and that’s only because interest rates are going way up.
Andy Paul
Yeah, as someone who has two apartments on the market right now, yeah. Prices are soft for sure.
Mark Stiving
Yeah. I think it’s time to hold those houses and just rent them. Let the rents go up with inflation.
Andy Paul
Well, even rents have come down this morning. They really gone up a lot during the pandemic. We’ll be fine if we can sell them, but, it’s our interest and the timing. And people complain about interest rates and it’s not polite. Okay, boomer stories, but my mortgage on my first house was 13 and a half percent, so.
Mark Stiving
I’m glad I’m only 22. I’ve never seen that.
Let’s jump into the topic that I really want to talk about. That’s this concept of selling value. First off, before we get there, I’m going to take one more aside. I skimmed through your latest book this morning. I have to say, I loved it.
Andy Paul
Oh, well, thank you.
Mark Stiving
So, the title is “How to Sell Without Selling Out”, and it was about how to be yourself as a salesperson.
Andy Paul
Right.
Mark Stiving
And the reason I loved it so much is because I had a job in sales really early in my career and I was horrible, and I was doing all the things you said you’re supposed to not do. I’m, you know, get the right closing lines.
Andy Paul
That’s what you’re trained to do.
Mark Stiving
And I just sucked so badly.
Andy Paul
Well, we all do. We all do, out of the gate, for sure. But the dissonance rose with me very quickly. I was like, “I’m either going to have a very short career or I need to find another way to do this that aligns with who I am.” And then that’s sort of the through line in my career; it’s just finding what that line is, and a way to bring my best version of myself to selling, not the best version of what some sales trainer thought I should be.
Mark Stiving
Luckily, you realized that early enough so that you could be successful. I didn’t, and I was not, so I moved on to other things.
Andy Paul
Yeah, but you’re selling all the time now too, so.
Mark Stiving
Oh, and I have to say, when I look through your book and I see how you’re supposed to behave, it’s like, “Well, that’s exactly what I do now.” And I don’t even think of it as selling. I just think of it as helping clients figure out what they need and then getting a solution.
Andy Paul
That’s basically what it is. I mean, I defined in the book that there are two ways of selling. Those two basically are selling out and selling in. Selling out is the pushy, persuasive, putting your own interests before those of the buyer. And I say sales, what you have to think about is your job as a salesperson is really nothing more than listening to your buyer, understanding the things that are most important to them in terms of the challenges they face and the outcomes they want to achieve by addressing those challenges and then helping them get that. That’s your job. Listen and help.
Mark Stiving
I think that’s absolutely spot on right, but if I look back in my history or my career, I would say I only figured that out after I didn’t have to close the sale. So, once I got to the point where it’s like, “I don’t need this business, it’s totally okay if you go somewhere else”, then I don’t have to try to be persuasive. I can simply describe what the situation is and help them out if I can.
Andy Paul
Yes, there’s certainly a lot of truth to that. For me, I just didn’t have it in me to be hugely salesy. But now, I got confidence that if you help people, you start from a level of service to ask the right questions. And again, I discovered this fairly early on in my career as selling computer systems into the construction industry. I was fresh out of college, I looked 12 years old, I was meeting with CEOs and founders of companies as I was like, “Why are they giving me their time, let alone giving me orders?” It was just because I was showing up authentically, sincerely interested in them. I wanted to learn. This is like my MBA. I was talking to all these business owners and business founders, and if I just sat there and asked the right questions, they would spend as much time, practically, as I want it to help educate me about how to help them. And I was like, “Oh well, this works.”
Mark Stiving
And if I could summarize what you just said, I would summarize it with the two words: genuine curiosity.
Andy Paul
Yes, I would. I like to add sometimes engaged curiosity.
Mark Stiving
And so now, my favorite topic. I love pricing, don’t get me wrong, I dearly love it. And when I think about pricing, I always come back to what a customer is willing to pay; that always comes back to value, how much value are they getting from the product. And then when we as pricing people realize, “Oh, customers are getting $1,000,000 of value, we should charge a 100k or whatever the number is,” are salespeople able to communicate that value to our customers? And I think it really comes back to those questions that you were talking about before and the structured process that you used. So, talk to me how you would get a salesperson or how you would get to communicate value to a customer.
Andy Paul
Some of this I understood by looking back on it and looking at the experience. But I spent most of my career in the tech business. It has been one thing that’s been sort of largely true in the spaces I sold is – and it’s more pronounced now, I think you and I touched on this when you’re on my show – Is that in the mind’s eye of the customer, most products are basically alike. And the pricing is basically the same. Just talking in broad terms here. And their calculation of value they’re going to get from it if the products are largely identical in functionality – and this is very pronounced today – and largely the same in pricing than “Hey, the value calculation is going to be largely the same.”
So, in the book, I take a little bit of a different spin on value, which is not to diminish the value you talk about at all. But as I say, there is another important source of value for buyers as they go through their process. It’s “Are you helping me make this decision that I need to make? And how you do that has value to me as an individual and as an organization.” And so, talking about this book, it’s that for buyers to look at their job as “I need to quickly gather and make sense of this information I need to make an informed decision with the least investment of my time, attention and resources possible.” Because enterprises and any organizations are going make a decision to purchase something and bring groups stakeholders together from various departments. This is not their job, right? Not their day job. It’s the job that bring them together. And do they want to spend a year to make a decision they could make in six months if the seller enabled them to be able to do that?
And so, I talk about these various forms of value. But one, for buyer, that is important; and we know from research that fairly influential in their ultimate decision is the value of their experience working with the individual seller. They challenge your sale. They talk about 53% of the buyers’ decisions based on this buying experience with the individual seller.
And so, whether the number is 53% or 48%, whatever, there’s multiple sources of research that say, “Hey, this is a critical thing for buyers when they make their decision.” You know, there’s a company in Australia called Trinity Perspectives, a consulting firm doing a ton of win-loss analysis around the world with enterprises. You know, it’s in person face to face, not just survey based where they’re getting into the deep knowledge. And they recently summarized all their findings that they’ve heard over a decade doing this work into sort of the nine reasons why you win big deals and nine reasons why you lose big deals. And pricing showed up once as a factor. Functionality didn’t show up at all, and most of the reasons they cited for making decisions to give a piece of business to a company or not really boil down to this human element. You know, this experience they had with the sellers.
And so, not to get sidetracked, but what I talk about the book is for buyers, within the context of the buying experience, for them, value is progress. Meaning, as a result of me spending my time with you, and it is our sales interaction, am I now closer to making a decision as a result of that interaction than I was before? And if I’m not, then there was no value in that interaction for me.
Mark Stiving
I’m not going to disagree with your point because I think it’s probably right. But I want to layer on top of it my perception of what you said. Because my perception is, if as a salesperson, you go in and you help the client move the decision forward – and to me, by the way, that means understanding what their problems are, where they’re trying to get to; this is all about value anyway. But it’s about product value or economic value they’re going to deliver to the customer.
Andy Paul
Within that conversation. Absolutely. Yes.
Mark Stiving
Absolutely. And so, from my perspective, I think the salesperson who can do that well and first actually builds the trust with the customer that says, “Oh, you understand my problems. It’s likely that you can solve my problems. And so, if I take someone else, they may not understand my problems the way you do. I trust you. I don’t know that they know those problems.” So, I didn’t account it to “you move the ball forward”. I accounted it to the trust that you truly know what I need and can help me solve it.
Andy Paul
I agree. But that does move the ball forward for them. And I can’t remember if we touched this when you’re on my show, but there’s a body of research in decision making that says if you can be that first to trust, if you can be the first to make the buyer feel understood, there are serious milestones happening that you can actually put yourself in the pole position, and win the deal at a higher frequency than your competitors. Put it like 60% chance if you’re the first to this vision of success in buying vision for the buyer but you don’t get there without having built the trust first, having them feel understood. And I talk about it in the book in numerous occasions where I’m selling for start-ups, selling large, critical multimillion dollar communications networks against really big competitors. And I’m always sort of bemused when we won, and it was like, “Well, why do we win?” And customers say, “Because you’re the only one that made me feel understood. Like you really understood what I’m trying to do.” That’s a source of some sort of value to the buyer.
Mark Stiving
Yeah, I agree completely. I agree 100% with that. It doesn’t move my conversation forward, but I agree with that.
From my perspective, inside that conversation that says, “Hey, I understand your problems. Here’s the results you’re going to get when you solve your problems.” And so, it’s us working through that with them, to me, that’s helping the buyer understand the value of my product, helping them get faith that my product is going to deliver a lot of value to them.
Andy Paul
Sure. But the path runs through you as an individual.
Mark Stiving
Absolutely.
Andy Paul
And that’s really what we’re dealing with in my book, and I think Gartner has some research that came out about ten years ago about surveys of enterprise buyers about trusts. And the results of the survey was that the buyers said, that “The most important level of trust we have is with the individual seller before their company”.
And so, the path to being able to have the substantive conversation with someone about the requirements and making sure you understand them and be able to present value as and pricing as you talk about an influence, that ultimate choice goes through the individual.
Mark Stiving
Okay. So why don’t salespeople do this?
Andy Paul
Part of it just falls down to training. But even if we take it a step further, I think there’s just sort of this general socialization of people in this world who think this is a way sales people act a certain way. And if you’re in sales, you’re going to “act” a certain way. Whether it’s through movies, TV shows, things they’ve read, family members, whatever.
And so, we still struggle with just that basic idea that if you’re in sales, you have to act a certain way, which is false. And then you get the training aspect of it, which basically increasingly these days, encourages sellers or sort of say, “Look, this is sort of a cookie cutter, process-driven approach we use. If you just do enough of this stuff, you’re going to win enough deals.” And it really removed the human element out of the business. And what the buyers are saying is, “Huh? Well, the more automated you become on your selling process and the more automated you become in your interactions with me, the more faceless and valueless that become.”
The point of differentiation is the interaction with the human seller that can make the difference. That can be the standout to really understand what we’re doing and has empathy, true empathy for what we’re trying to achieve. And ironically, I think that’s become more your ability to become – as a great book written by Geoffrey Colvin called “Humans Are Underrated”, he had also written the bestseller “Talent is Overrated” – but the really interesting book, “Humans are Underrated”, about the future of work and employment based on his conversation with all these experts in the field and people researching. It’s interesting. It seems like the key skill for people moving forward is the ability to become more intensely human. When humanity becomes the differentiator and all the automated buying experiences start to become more similar, how do you stand apart? Being human.
Mark Stiving
As you were talking and I’m applying this to your book, it seems like automated selling sequences, almost by definition, are persuasion – which is a bad word in your book, right?
Andy Paul
Yeah. Not the desired state. Doing the influential as mostly persuasive. Well, it’s interesting you bring up that one because there’s just inklings we’re hearing a little bit about companies now starting to say, “Huh, maybe carpet bombing or prospect-based with unending sequences of emails isn’t the right thing to do. Maybe we should try to become more human again.” And you know, I think one of the biggest oxymorons that exists in sales is mass personalization at scale. And you hear people talk about it all the time.
There was some big company recently – I can’t remember the name, that they just mentioned to me – has told their sales team, “You can’t use sequencers anymore. If you’re going to send an email, you have to write it”. And I think, “Whoa”. Right? Inkling of change. Doesn’t mean there isn’t a place for sequences, but just as a de facto way of operation, I don’t think that it’s served anybody’s interests.
Mark Stiving
Yeah. And I would almost say let the marketing folks do the sequences.
Andy Paul
Yeah.
Mark Stiving
You know, salespeople, your job is to have one on one relationships.
Andy Paul
Well, I would agree. Relationships is such a loaded word these days in sales, it’s like there’s a whole cadre of people out there, sort of shouting from the rooftops, “Your buyers aren’t relationships”. That’s like, “You guys don’t really have a really nuanced understanding of the word relationship, do you?”
Mark Stiving
That’s right. And even if you took the word relationship out, it’s really a one on one conversation. Every buyer is different. Every buyer needs different information. They have different problems. And so, sales people’s job is to help individual buyers figure out how much value there is.
Andy Paul
Well, yeah. And you used the key term there, which is everybody’s different. You know, the way sellers are trained today is everybody is the same. So, if we go and ask these scripted questions, to these prospects you’re going to get these answers that’s right by the book. Sure, you can do that. What do you have? You got a collection of information, but you have no context for it. You don’t understand what’s important to the buyer and why, because you’re treating them all the same. And when salespeople think about having any sort of business acumen or sales acumen, the acumen isn’t from being able to recognize how two situations are the same. It comes from being able to recognize how they’re different and to be able to operate differently when you spot those differences and ask different questions and lead the customer perhaps down a different path. That’s what creates consistently good salespeople: not treating everybody the same.
Mark Stiving
Okay, so let me take a 90 degree turn in our conversation for a second. If we’ve got customers and buyers who are all different and have salespeople who are talking to them, different buyers get different amounts of economic value from our product. How do you recommend salespeople deal with – I’ll call it price segmentation – you can call it negotiation.
Andy Paul
I come from more of a selling complex systems background, and I have a very specific view on how you “negotiate”, which is that you sort of don’t. You negotiate through how you sell. You negotiate through how you structure the deal. Meaning that your goal as a seller is to be able to present to procurement or legal or whatever, a package that they can’t pick apart because you’ve got such solid buy in from the business units and economic buyers and so on that you’ve been dealing with. And I equate it to like a big Jenga tower. That if somebody tries to pull one of the pieces out, the whole thing’s going to collapse.
And so, the way to sort of start that is to approach everything with the buyer as a series of trade-offs. You can have, “Delivery now, or delivery in two months?” ”Delivery now may be priced a little bit more. We’ve got to expedite certain things in two months or a little less.” “Oh, no, we need now because we need to hit our timeframes.” Okay. And you, as you are selling, you’re recording all this and getting their agreement, you’re building this package. And it’s I said, it’s not negotiating, it’s trade-offs. And you’re helping the customer come to solutions. So, these series of trade-offs enable us to achieve success at the level we want and get the value and the ROI we want from the economic value from the investment we’re making. And then you present that to procurement as well. “Yeah, we need 10% off the price”. “Okay, we can do that. But the trade-off is that, you know, deliveries can be slower and we may have to de-scope the product and the project in this amount in these areas and so on. But hey, let’s talk to the guy that owns economic decision making to see if that’s okay with them.” And every time it’s set up that way because they had made the choices leading up to it, and so then when you get with procurement, it’s like trying to touch a porcupine because everything is loaded. And I’ve found from negotiating seven, eight, nine figure deals that taking that approach doesn’t mean you’re not going to be vulnerable in some cases, but you can protect yourself as much as possible against it and you have the support of your internal customers.
Mark Stiving
My least favorite procurement experience. I was an employee at a company. I was on the committee to help choose a multi-million- dollar software package. We had chosen the vendor, and I got to go to the meeting, the first meeting between the vendor and procurement. And I am not joking, I heard procurement say the words “We’re looking at two other vendors and you’re about 30% higher. You need to lower your price.” Now, I knew for a fact that was a lie.
Andy Paul
Yes, right. And as a seller, if you’re hearing procurement say that and if you don’t know for a fact that it’s a lie, then you haven’t been doing your job. Because you wouldn’t have gotten to procurement. They’re not talking to three people. They don’t negotiate with three vendors simultaneously. They’re not going to waste their time doing that. They’re pretty much talking to one vendor. So, you just know the fact that that’s just bullshit. I mean there’s still one-upsmanship, there’s another thing that companies don’t do enough of when it comes to negotiation: It’s to get the salespeople out of the way. And that’s a lesson I learned early on as I start-up. And their backgrounds come from the defense side of the world and all their contracts department is led by an attorney. And I had always, for that time, taken pride at negotiating my own deals and big deals and so on. And I was so resistant to it. And then, I saw the guy in action. I was like, “Oh no, this is great”. We got to the buyer’s point where they said, “Yeah, we want to do business with you, we’re going to send this deal to procurement legal.” Yeah, get salespeople out of the way. Don’t let salespeople do that. Have professional contract negotiators, handle negotiations, takes the emotion out of it. You end up getting better deals. It’s nerve racking as a salesperson to watch somebody else do that to your baby that you put together. But at my experiences, you have much higher success rate in the long run.
Mark Stiving
Yeah. And if you think about it, procurement, any given procurement agent negotiates way more deals than any single salesperson.
Andy Paul
I mean, salespeople, they’re going to negotiate price and that’s about it, right? So, yeah, you’re just assuming they’re going to give the money away. And it’s nice you sort of take that off the salesperson’s hand. You’ll find out, “Oh yeah. We start selling higher margin sales. And the customers, the customers are happy.” And yeah, a lot of myth is about negotiation for sellers. And that’s I said in general, you’re best served to get them out of the way.
Mark Stiving
Andy We are running out of time and we have exceeded time, so we’re not going to play pricing table topics. Oh my gosh, you are in luck.
Andy Paul
Well, thank you. But I do recommend eBay listing. If you haven’t experienced Toastmasters where the tabletop has gone, you should do it. I did it for about a year. I really enjoyed it and I recommend it to entry level salespeople or anybody that’s going to get into public speaking, whether it’s internal, public speaking or external. Yeah, Toastmasters.
Mark Stiving
I was a ten-year Toastmaster. So, I dearly loved the organization.
Andy Paul
Yeah. But you just have to make sure you find the group that fits you. It didn’t really click for me in terms of like the third group I went to because of my personality. And people have been there, like you said yourself for a long time and there’s certain ways of doing things. And yeah, once you find a group that you’re really quick with, it’s a tremendous amount of fun.
Mark Stiving
Yeah, absolutely. But I am going to ask you the final question. Sure. Final question is, what’s one piece of pricing advice you would give our listeners that you think could have a big impact on their business?
Andy Paul
Don’t let salespeople negotiate. My theory about discounting. Everyone wants to point the finger at salespeople as to be the blame for discounting. And the fault is really managers. It’s not salespeople. And I tell people the way to look at it as if you’re running a car dealership and you’re getting toward the end of the month and you’ve got too many unsold cars on the lot, what do you do? The manager says, “Let’s start discounting them” because he has a surplus of inventory. Well, it’s true. In any other field, software, hardware, whatever you’re selling is if you have a surplus of unmet quota as you face the end of the month. Managers start discounting, they get the unmatched inventory of unmarked quota cleared off their books. So, it’s the same dynamic. So, yeah, managers, take responsibility. Don’t put the discounting in the hand of the sellers. And if managers are a little more disciplined, then yeah, they can preserve the margins better.
Mark Stiving
I’ll agree, you don’t put all of the blame on the seller, on the salesperson, but they also have a lot of incentive to discount. They close deals. So, here’s my favorite saying, I want to hear your opinion on this: Never let a CEO negotiate.
Andy Paul
Oh, well, yeah. Yes. I had some bad experiences with that, watching some of my commission disappear. Yes.
Mark Stiving
Yes. I say that because CEOs are powerful. They will get the deal done and they’re not patient.
Andy Paul
Yeah. And they don’t care about your commission. I’ve had a couple of bad experienced CEOs that gave the firm way when I was like, “They didn’t really need to do that.” We’re going to close the deal anyway. But they want to show that they were in charge and desk at a discount. But it’s like everything you bring your CEO involved, your CEO in a deal, they have to be briefed. They’ve been given directions. This is your remit for this call stick within the boundaries of what I say.
Mark Stiving
Yeah. And so, your real answer to the question I asked was hire a professional negotiator.
Andy Paul
Yeah. Have a contracts department. Yeah. If you’re a SaaS business, you’ve got tons of contracts and you’re assuming that your success team is sort of managing all the details of that which they’re not. And contracts seem really, really excellent at contract renewals. I mean, people just suffer because the world just isn’t paying attention the way that companies have done business successfully for years in this regard.
Mark Stiving
Nice, Andy. This has just been fascinating. I love talking to you. If anybody wants to contact you, how can they do that?
Andy Paul
Well, you can start at LinkedIn, message me and connect a message with me on LinkedIn. And let’s try the easiest these days and you can always email me at [email protected]. It’s on my website, andypaul.com. Learn more about my book, Selling Without Selling Out by that, anywhere books are sold. You can download a free chapter on the website as well.
Mark Stiving
All right. And we’ll have a link to your LinkedIn URL on the show notes. Okay, perfect. And believe it or not, this was episode 200.
Andy Paul
Yeah. Congratulations. I know. That’s fantastic.
Mark Stiving
Oh, thank you. Yeah. This is going to be the last one we number, though. So, from now on, there’s no more numbering. Why? I’ll explain after the show.
Andy Paul
Okay. Alright.
Mark Stiving
But to our audience, thank you so much for listening. If you enjoyed this, would you please leave us a rating and a review? The easiest way is to go to ratethispodcast.com/impactpricing. Once again, I have no idea why everybody makes it hard to rate a podcast, so go to ratethispodcast.com/impactpricing, they will hold your hand.
Andy Paul
Nice.
Mark Stiving
And finally, if you have any questions or comments about this podcast or pricing in general, feel free to email me at [email protected]. Now, go make an impact.
Mark Stiving
Thanks again to Jennings Executive Search for sponsoring our podcast. If you’re looking to hire someone in pricing, I suggest you contact someone who knows pricing. People contact Jennings Executive Search.
Tags: Accelerate Your Subscription Business, ask a pricing expert, pricing metrics, pricing strategy
