Impact Pricing Podcast

 

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Today, we have no guests. It’s just going to be Mark talking about the far better things ahead with Impact Pricing. 

Listen in to hear the exciting things that Mark has in store for companies, entrepreneurs, and experts that will help them price offerings to capture more of the value they create.  

 

 

 

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Full Interview Transcript

(Note: This transcript was created using Temi, an AI transcription service.  Please forgive any transcription or grammatical errors.  We probably sounded better in real life.)

 

In pricing what we have to do is we have to look at each person’s decisions. 

They’re going to buy my product or not. They’re going to buy my product or my competitor’s products. 

They’re going to make that decision in their own best interest. And our job has to be to understand that decision they’re about to make and help them understand that it’s in their best interest to choose our product. 

Welcome to Impact Pricing. The podcast where we discuss pricing, value, and the relationship between them. 

I’m Mark Stiving. And today, we have no guests. It’s just going to be me talking. I would love to get your feedback on if it’s OK for me just to talk once in a while to you, maybe more often. But here’s what’s going on I take a lot of classes I learn a lot of things and I was listening to Jay Baer of Convince & Convert the other day at the National Speakers Association Conference and he said something that surprised me and maybe it shouldn’t have. 

But he said that, of the listeners or followers that I have on LinkedIn, at best, only 10% will see my content. Will be exposed to my content. 

And that’s pretty scary to me. 

As I started thinking about that, I said, “Well how is it that I can interact or engage with all of the people who follow me?”. 

So that you can see what we post or we don’t post. It actually means a couple of things. 

It means that I’ve put out a lot of blogs or content that many of you probably haven’t seen already. 

And it also means that I need to find a place where you can confine the things that I’m posting if you want to. 

So first, I want to share with you a blog I posted probably a week or so ago. And you may not have read that blog. I’m not going to read the blog to you. 

I’m just going to tell you the story. 

My Pricing Superpower

And it turns out that I have a pricing superpower. The reason that I’m good at pricing is it all started with a relationship. It started with a broken heart actually. 

I had a fiancee her name was Kathy. And Kathy… I was so in love. It was incredible. 

Why would you ask someone to marry you if you weren’t that in love? And it was just such an amazing experience. 

The day that she said yes to me, we went to my parent’s house and we had dinner, and we celebrated that this was a lot of fun. And then, shortly thereafter we were supposed to go to her parent’s house and tell them. 

Turns out that her aunt in Florida got really sick. And so her parents had to go down to Florida. Well, then it came weekends. And oftentimes on weekends. She had a sick grandmother in Kentucky. Now we were living in Ohio, in Columbus so the drive from Columbus to Kentucky is a few hours. 

She would go down there on weekends to be with her sick grandmother and so I didn’t see her as often as I could or wanted to. But let me tell you, I wanted to see her more often. 

On a Friday the 13th, I called her at the hospital they were working at. Now, mind you this is in the ’80s. So this is before cell phones existed. I called her at the hospital she was working at. And they told me she was scrubbed in because she was an OR nurse. I said,. ‘OK, no big deal.’. 

She calls me back probably a half-hour later. And I asked,” Where are you?” Because I was worried if she was still at the hospital or she was at home and she said these words that will change my life forever. 

She said ‘I’m in Kentucky.’ There’s no way that she was in Kentucky. 

I got in my car and drove to her apartment and it turns out that she was in her apartment. And when I confronted her my world fell apart. 

 Turns out there was a doctor that she had been dating before she and I got engaged. And her parents seemed to like the doctor better. And gosh, just crushed me. For three days I didn’t eat. I was so devastated. And I remember crying to my mother and my mom said to me, “Mark, she didn’t do this to you. She did this for herself.”. 

Trust me they didn’t make me feel any better at the time but I’ve thought about those words a million times since then. 

Because, once I started to get over the emotions, it really became obvious that Kathy didn’t want to hurt me. She wasn’t being nefarious and saying hey let’s see if I can take this guy and crush his heart. She was doing things that were easy for her and making decisions in her own best interest. 

Every Person Makes Every Decision in Their Own Self-interest!  

I internalized that concept and my entire life since that point I look at every decision, every person makes and assume they’re making that decision in their own best interest. 

Ok. How does that relate to pricing and why is that a pricing superpower? Because in pricing what we have to do is we have to look at each person’s decisions. They’re going to buy my product or not. They’re going to buy my product or my competitor’s products. They’re going to make that decision in their own best interest. And our job has to be to understand that decision they’re about to make and help them understand that it’s in their best interest to choose our product. 

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Please demonstrate to us, and the entire world that you value this podcast. Would you please pause the podcast, subscribe if you haven’t already done so. Rate the podcast and leave us a short review. You’d be doing a huge favor. And research shows if you invest this little bit of time you’ll probably like the podcast even more. Win-win. Pause. Do it now. We’ll wait for you. 

This whole concept of self-interest or people making decisions in their own self-interest is a concept that as a pricing person we have to internalize. 

We have to believe this so hard so often I hear companies say, “We’ll just go create demand. Or get somebody to go buy this.”

And those things don’t work. What we always have to do is think about our customers our buyers and how are they making decisions. 

It may seem super obvious to all of you. To me, it took a major catastrophe to learn that life lesson. 

Linkedin Viewing Analytics for Your Shared Posts 

So sorry about that. The next topic was because of the LinkedIn issue that we’re facing. I’d really like to start a community of people. 

I’m not going to get this launched right away. This is just a precursor or a preview I’ve captured the URL championsofvalue.com and we’re going to build a community. It’ll be a free community. People can come there, talk about pricing, ask pricing questions, have conversations about pricing or value. 

Building a Community – ‘Champions of Value’ 

And the reason that I’m going to do that is that I can’t trust LinkedIn. I don’t think they get the content out to everybody who wants to see it. 

And so we need to create some kind of community and we’ll do something in a place like that. On that same site Champions of Value. I’m going to start launching some online courses. 

Many of you know that I already have a Subscription Value Management course that we teach to companies, that’ll be the first course that we move to an online program. So that people could subscribe and take it one person at a time. 

We might do that in cohorts groups of people that’s what we’re thinking of at the moment. 

Impact Pricing’s Upcoming Courses

Other courses that I’m thinking about putting out are cost and pricing, what is value, creating a value table, competitive pricing, psychological pricing. 

These are all fascinating courses and I think I could probably get them out faster online than try to create them and sell them to companies individually. But we’ll see how the company works out and how the company goes in the near future. 

What is Subscription Value Management?

One more comment I really want to bring out and I wrote this in a blog this past week. And that is, I started using the words Value Management- Subscription Value Management. 

In fact as the name of this first course that I put out. And the reason I do that is I often say to people, “Oh, I teach pricing.”. 

Inevitably the response I’m going to get is, “Oh I don’t do pricing.” But if only they knew what I teach, they would say, “Oh I need that. Thank you so much.”. 

I had to find a way to move away from ‘I teach pricing’. 

This concept of value management to me feels like what I think about when I think about pricing. 

I think of value management as, well, first we have to capture the value of course. We have to communicate value to our customers, of course, and we have to create products that have value in our marketplace. 

When I think of value management then I think of creating, communicating, and capturing value. 

It turns out those are the exact same things I think about when I think about pricing. But many other people don’t. 

This concept of value management then, I’m going to use that quite a bit. But this first-course Subscription Value Management is really about creating, communicating, and capturing value in our subscription products to our marketplace.

What do you want to hear? Tell us what you think?

Well, that’s all I have for this week. Please let me know did you like this format? Are you okay with me just talking to you? Did you really want to hear somebody else join me to mix it up? Your opinions, your thoughts are hugely valuable to us. 

If you’re interested in the new subscription pricing, I’m sorry, Subscription Value Management Course that we’re going to be putting online relatively soon. 

Drop me an email or send me a question if you have other questions as well. 

You can reach me at [email protected]. Now, go make an impact. 

 

 

**NOTE: Mark will participate in the conversation about this post on LinkedIn which you can get to here.

Tags: community, courses, pricing data, pricing strategy