Why don’t you win deals at higher prices? You don’t get paid enough for the value you create. Or do you build products that your customers don’t value (and don’t buy)?
Today, we have no guests. It’s just going to be Mark talking about Impact Pricing’s latest course Accelerate Your Subscription Business: Your Blueprint to Packaging & Pricing for Growth. A course will help YOU drive growth in your subscription business by giving you clarity and certainty around which tasks drive growth at your current stage.
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. Please afford a few minutes to tell you about the course, share a couple of nuggets from the course, and stories behind the journey of creating the course.
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Why you have to check out today’s podcast:
- Understand the latest thinking on assessing and formulating subscription pricing strategies
- Unique challenges in creating and talking about pricing and value to the customers
- Learn how this online course can help your business create and capture more value in your business
“There’s so much to learn. Many people and companies don’t understand about value, how to sell it, how to create it, how to talk about it, how to figure out what it is to the customer. These are fascinating topics for me.”
– Mark Stiving
Get Accelerate Your Subscription Business: Your Blueprint to Packaging & Pricing for Growth Course at https://www.championsofvalue.com, Use the DISCOUNT CODE: ‘EARLYBIRD’, valid until October 31st, 2019.
Topics Covered:
00:39 – Mark’s passion for creating courses to help people and experts about pricing and value, why he left Pragmatic Marketing despite loving creating and teaching about pricing
01:51 – All about Subscription Businesses, Mark’s AHA after AHA moment that made him decide to create a course around this industry
04:03 – ‘Love Win. Keep Grow. Makes it simple.’ and more…what people say about the course
06:35 – Where to get Accelerate Your Subscription Business: Your Blueprint to Packaging & Pricing for Growth: Checkout: https://www.championsofvalue.com
People and Resources Mentioned
- Zoom
- Pragmatic Marketing
- Tomasz Tunguz’ Red Point Ventures
- Bessemer Ventures
- www.zuora.com
- Patrick Campbell of ProfitWell
- Natalie Louie-Kao
Connect with Mark Stiving
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.)
Welcome to Impact Pricing, the podcast where we discuss pricing value and the recurring relationship between them. I’m Mark Stiving, and today, it’s only me, because today we’re announcing our very first online course.
Would you please afford me a few minutes to tell you about the course, share a couple of nuggets from the course, and maybe even share a story or two as we go through.
In fact, let’s start with a story. And that is, at the end of last year I left Pragmatic as an instructor. Now, I love teaching for Pragmatic don’t get me wrong. But I wanted to go out and do my own thing.
I really wanted to be non-competitive. I had no desire to compete with the course that I already created for them. As I left, I said, ‘Well, what am I going to do first? And I was thinking, I’m going to create a course on selling value.’
Struggle in Understanding, Selling and Communicating Pricing and Value
There’s so much to learn. People and companies don’t understand about value, how to sell it, how to create it, how to talk about it, how to figure out what it is to the customer. These are fascinating topics to me.
I spent a bunch of time working on that. But while I was doing that, I was also reading, being exposed to this thing called Subscription Businesses.
Now, subscriptions have been around for a long time. And in my classes, I would often be asked, ‘Well, how does this apply to subscriptions?’ And I would always tie it back to value.
Diving Deeper into Subscription Pricing
But as I started diving deep into understanding subscriptions, I realized these things are interesting. They are so fascinating. There are some things that are so different about subscriptions than a traditional business. As I’m working through this, I’m having AHA after AHA moment. And I said oh my gosh, this is what I have to share first. Because it was so fascinating.
I spent time studying. I don’t know if you know Tomasz Tunguz’ RedPoint Ventures, I studied Profit Well and Patrick Campbell and everything they wrote. Bessemer Ventures, tons of different people. I read a couple of books. I had some coaching clients that I was working with and did subscription business and, and that was a lot of fun.
Collaborating with another Pricing Expert Natalie Louie Kao
And then I found Natalie, Natalie Louie Kao. she’s a she’s currently the Director of Marketing at Hired. She was an early guest and my podcast Impact Pricing. But it turns out that she had tons of experience in subscription pricing at Oracle and a bunch of small companies that Oracle had acquired over the years. She was perfect. She and I together, she could look at the things that I was putting together and be able to say, ‘Yeah, that makes sense. No, that doesn’t make sense.’ I would ask questions well, how do companies do this?
All about Accelerate Your Subscription Business: Your Blueprint to Packaging & Pricing for Growth Course
Together, we were able to create a pretty powerful 2-day course. We called that course Subscription Value Management: Packaging and Pricing for Growth.
We just recently took the first quarter of that. So think of it as a half-day course, we took that half-day course and put it online. And that half-day version is called Accelerating Your Subscription Business: Your Blueprint to Packaging and Pricing for Growth.
Now, I got to tell you, it was not easy to figure out how to do an online course and what made sense. And it’s very possible that we haven’t done it the optimal way yet. And maybe over the months or the years ahead, we’ll tweak it and figure out how to do it differently.
What People Are Saying About the Course
We have visions of creating lots of more courses. We’re going to put them up but over the course of the last week, I’ve had several people beta testing the course. And what I’d like to do is I’m going to read some of their quotes. I don’t have their permission to use their names, but I’m going to read some of their quotes. And then I’ll use that to tell you a little bit about what’s in the course.
One of them said, ‘Love, Win. Keep Grow. Makes it simple’. when keep grows is just an easy way to say acquisition, retention, and expansion. And in fact, every activity that you’re doing, if you’re on a subscription business should be focused on one of those three things. And if you’re not clear about which one of those three things you’re focused on, you’re probably just flailing around.
Next quote, ‘These are awesome. KPIs. Love that.’ We put in a few KPIs that are crucial to being able to run your business. And they’re also crucial to know where you are in your growth path. Are you really early on? Were you still have to worry about product-market fit? Are you later on or now it’s time to really focus on how do we grow revenue? How do we grow our customer base? And how do we grow revenue from our customers? So those KPIs are great.
Next quote, ‘Great slides.’ I was thrilled to hear that because we have a professional slide developer. I write text on slides. And the slide developer makes them beautiful and meaningful. She’s phenomenal.
‘Loved the impactful insight tagline on key ideas.’ At the end of each lesson, I put up one or two slides. And the title of the slide is Impactful Insights. And essentially, it’s just the key point of what you just learned in that module or that lesson. And it’s a nice way to make sure that I’m teaching you something valuable. And it’s a nice way for you to say ‘Yes, I really did get what was important about that lesson.’
‘Love the Zoom example.’
Throughout the course I use Zoom. Sometimes I use LinkedIn, but most of the time I use zoom as a good company. And as I point out all of the different lessons that we’re teaching, I usually point to Zoom’s web page or my interactions with Zoom in the past.
Here’s a longer quote, ‘
You do a great job of organizing concepts we should already understand. You put them in a framework that makes sense them easy to think about and remember’.
I loved that quote, because it’s really what I do is I sit here I try to figure out what’s going on and in the world of subscriptions, or a world of value or the world pricing, and see if I can organize it first in my own mind, and then in a way that I could explain it to you. So it’s easy for you to remember.
And use those. last quote I’m going to give you from someone I trust and respect a ton. He said,
‘Continuing to review your course. Excellent stuff.’
And that just makes me smile, so I had to read it.
Now that you’ve made it this far, I tell you what I’m going to do, I’m going to give you a discount. If you’d like the course, if you want to see it, go to the website, www.championsofvalue.com. That’s where we’re going to host all of our courses.
And the price for that course is normally $500. But I’ll give you a promo code that’s available until October. 31st 2019 in case you listen to this sometime later and the promo code is Early Bird. Doesn’t matter what the caps are. And that’ll get you a price of 295 for the course.
I do hope some of you go try it out. Check it out, leave me some comments, let me know what you think if you like it if you don’t like it. I’m hopeful with the early bird pricing. You’re also willing to give me feedback because I’m always open to feedback and I want to make all of my courses better and better. If you have any questions about this course, or about pricing in general, feel free to email me at mark@impact pricing.com Now go make an impact.
**Note: Mark Stiving has an active LinkedIn community, where he participates in conversations and answers questions. Each week, he creates a blog post for the top question. If you have a question, head over to LinkedIn to communicate directly with Mark.
Tags: Accelerate Your Subscription Business, online course
