Rich Mironov provides product management leadership and coaching to large and small tech companies, with more than 150 clients since 2001. His focus includes: Coaching VPs of Product and CPOs, Organizing the product organization, and Stepping in (occasionally) as a ‘smokejumper’ VP of Product Management.
In this episode, Rich shares that product managers must define economic value before development. He believes sales teams should communicate, not calculate, value using simple tools. And he advises focusing on broad market data instead of over-relying on top accounts.
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Why you have to check out today’s podcast:
- Learn how to define and communicate economic value effectively.
- Understand how sales teams and product managers can align for better pricing decisions.
- Gain actionable tips on framing value in sales conversations without overwhelming buyers.
“You want to look for an aggregate set of data about what’s happening in your marketplace as opposed to attaching a lot of overweight to your two largest accounts.”
– Rich Mironov
Topics Covered:
01:22 – Describing his journey into product management and an overview of his role here
03:40 – Differentiating B2C pricing versus B2B pricing as it relates to product management
09:33 – Discussing the balance between standardized pricing for most customers and the reality of frequent one-off deals in B2B
11:28 – How to systematize B2B pricing to reduce one-off deals and encourage standardization
16:59 – Aligning sales compensation with margin to protect long-term profitability
18:39 – Highlighting how enterprise sales teams generalize individual client demands as market-wide needs
20:26 – Why product teams must define economic value before development
25:00 – Agreeing that product teams must define value early but debates how to present it, with Mark favoring customer-driven insights and Rich emphasizing the need for quantifiable justification to close deals
26:25 – Acknowledging that while ROI calculators aren’t inherently trusted, they’re valuable as a conversational tool
28:37 – Rich’s best pricing advice
Key Takeaways:
“I believe a fundamental obligation of product management if we’re building something that needs this kind of discussion [communicate economic value], is to do the economic math before we start the development. Not after.” – Rich Mironov
“Expecting my sales team to be economists is unrealistic. And so, on the product side, I feel like I owe my sales team some narrative that they can read off the page, yes, fill in the numbers, fill in the values, or fill in the quantities. But the value story has to be baked into the product.” – Rich Mironov
“We lead with benefits, we lead with stories, we lead with vignettes, we lead with problems. But the last two paragraphs of that have to justify somebody actually signing a contract.” – Rich Mironov
People/Resources Mentioned:
- JPMorganChase: https://www.jpmorganchase.com
- New York Stock Exchange: https://www.nyse.com/index
Connect with Rich Mironov:
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/richmironov/
- Website: mironov.com
- 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.)
Rich Mironov
You want to look for an aggregate set of data about what’s happening in your marketplace as opposed to attaching a lot of overweight to your two largest accounts.
[Intro / Ad]
Mark Stiving
Welcome to Impact Pricing, the podcast where we discuss pricing, value, and the complex relationship between them. I’m Mark Stiving and I run boot camps to help companies get paid more. Our guest today is Rich Mironov. Here are three things you want to learn about Rich before we start. He has been running Mironov Consulting for 24 years. He’s the author of The Art of Product Management. He’s been 40 years in tech. Oh my gosh. Are you that old?
Rich Mironov
I started when I was three.
Mark Stiving
That’s fair. With his first job on LinkedIn, at least being Tandem Computers, which means something to me. Probably not you. And he is one of the preeminent thinkers in product management. Welcome, Rich. It’s great to have you.
Rich Mironov
Great. Thanks so much, Mark, for letting me join.
Mark Stiving
Okay. I always ask the question, how did you get into pricing? And I know you’re not in pricing, but how did you get into product management?
Rich Mironov
So I got into product management accidentally. In fact, it was at Tandem Computers in the eighties where I joined. I was in a strategy job for a little while that didn’t make any sense. And I was in a couple other jobs and they had this product management thing opened up, which I didn’t know what it was, and they didn’t explain it to me. And had they been more forthcoming, maybe I would’ve made a smarter choice. But I got pushed into product management. Like almost everybody who is in it does, it’s an accident. It happens. There’s an opening. There was no plan. And I had to figure out from scratch what it was that I was supposed to do. Because nobody was going to help me.
Mark Stiving
So, it’s funny that you say that because as I worked for Pragmatic for a little while, teaching project managers and I just became so enamored with this role. I think people should strive to get that job. It’s like running your own company, that you’re just running a product.
Rich Mironov
I think it’s the most fun you can have at the office with your clothes on, but it takes a very, very special combination of skills, right? You’ve got to be able to think really deeply about customers and markets and economics and competitors and how things get launched and sold, or you fail. But you also have to be technical enough and understand the technical nuances enough to work with your development teams and build something that actually works. And then you have to be sort of a little bit savvy about how the VC or the funding world works, because your executives are driven by a lot of forces that are not about the tech and really not about the customers, but proving success and earning money and getting to the next round. So there’s this sort of funny intersection of CS, computer science degree meets MBA meets somebody with a lot of heart and emotion and isn’t just a hard bitten, show-me-the-money guy. I think it’s a great fit for a small number of us, but when somebody randomly comes up to me and says they think they want to be in product management, I usually take the other side of the argument for the first five minutes because for most people it’s really a bad fit.
Mark Stiving
I could see how most people couldn’t do the job very well, but I could see how it’d just be such a fascinating job to do.
Rich Mironov
Yeah. All of the responsibility and none of the authority.
Mark Stiving
I know. Isn’t that amazing? So do me a favor and without me asking a pointed question, riff on pricing and how it fits in the world of product management.
Rich Mironov
Sure. And important for me to start by saying I’m a B2B enterprise guy, okay? And that’ll cover or color everything we’re going to talk about in the next few minutes. So in the B2C side of the world where we have 50 million subscribers to our streaming music service, or we have a dating app with a hundred thousand people who want to find love or whatever it is tonight, or any kind of high volume, low-price, consumer velocity kind of thing. I think pricing and packaging, really, is a science. So we think deeply about the good, better, best or bronze, silver, gold models, and what features are going to get somebody to buy up from the basic to the next. We really look at our churn and our success rates in statistical ways, right? Well, if we could get three and a half percent more people to complete the signup form, or we could get two and a quarter percent more of these folks to do the very first value transaction on our app that shows them what it’s worth. We’re talking about large aggregate numbers of folks individually who don’t matter so much to us. Right? And most importantly, none of those folks who are subscribing to my service at eight Euros a month or whatever it is, has my CEO’s phone number, right? And so I think in the mass market, high volume, big data consumer space we can approach pricing and packaging with good theory, with good tools.
Mark Stiving
So before you move on, I just want to say I agree a hundred percent, B2B pricing and B2C pricing, hugely different monsters.
Rich Mironov
Right? And so I’ve done a little bit of B2C stuff in my career, but almost all of it’s been on the B2B enterprise side. And for me, enterprise means we’re probably charging 50,000 or more a year to a customer, right? Small business at a thousand or 5,000 a year looks more like a consumer, but at 50,000 or 200,000 a year, it has some different features. One of which is we’re going to close a small number of large deals this quarter, and the CEO knows the names of every one of the top 20 potential prospects in the funnel. And only asks the VP of sales maybe once every day how those are each going, right? And the board members know the names of the top 10 or 20 prospects in the funnel, and they only call the CEO once a week each to ask how those are going.
Right? And so there’s a tremendous back pressure here that says we must close these top seven deals, whatever it is for a million a piece, because otherwise we’re going to have to fire people. Which by the way, usually starts with the head of sales, the head of marketing, and then the CEO, right? If we don’t make our number this quarter people lose their jobs, right? And what that creates is a dynamic where, on the product side, I believe pricing must live with product, not with sales, right? We do all these really careful bits of analysis and we figure out what the product tiers are, and we put the features in the right place, and we have our roadmaps and we assign value numbers based on lots of interviews for how much this is worth. My own pet theory is that we can extract something between 15 and 20% of the customer’s value on our price.
However, we’re doing some vague things like that. So we’re doing all this analytical work and we create a pricing and packaging model, which is really going to work for the company, we hope. And it survives about three days because the next phone call from JP Morgan Chase to our sales team where JPMC says I’m really interested in your product, whether that’s true or not, but what I want is for you to blow up that whole packaging model and take three of the features that were in the bronze or in the gold package and put them into the bronze package for us. Or we want a different unit of pricing. Yes, you’re doing this by the seat, but we have a special treasury group and we only have four people in it. I’m sorry, we have 900 people in it, but only four are going to use your product.
So we want it to be metered on usage or transactions, right? And if we were in the consumer space, we would say no. Right? No, you can’t subscribe to my music streaming service some other way. You either buy it or you don’t. Right? But when two and a half million of the 11 million we’re supposed to bring in this quarter hangs on a deal, what I see is this tremendous, tremendous people’s political, internal organizational pressure to make an exception just this one time. By the way, the behavioral pattern is, it’s every one of the largest 10 deals we do this quarter. And so we end up with this sort of island of broken toys where eight of our 10 largest invoices are done by hand. We’re running custom reports. We have a special build on a special server for these folks. These particular two clients won’t upgrade because reason, reason, reason. We’re building a special integration for big company X because, and by the way, we’re eating all the costs and we’re going to have to support it forever. That the organizational model, that the economic model of the company basically drives over the top of the idea of a fixed standard considered pricing and packaging model.
Mark Stiving
Okay, I want to push back for a minute. First off, I don’t necessarily disagree with what you just said. If you take the top customers of any enterprise organization, we’re doing custom stuff for them all day long, right? Whatever it takes to win the deal, close the deal we’re going to get.
Rich Mironov
Yes. Absolutely.
Mark Stiving
Right? So now let’s take the other 80% of the customers. And there we actually need to do it. It isn’t the same thing as B2C, but it’s the same thought process in a lot of ways where it’s how are we going to package this into good, better, best and be able to sell up? What’s the pricing metric going to look like and how do we offer those to different customers?
Rich Mironov
And I don’t disagree, but if you look at the weighted revenue average of what’s coming in, the bigger the deal size and the smaller number of deals, the more those specials and one-offs represent the real money in the company. And so what I see is that if we don’t care so much about this prospect, then we put them in the standard bucket and that’s actually okay if we have just one special. But when my puppy pees on the carpet and I give my puppy a treat right afterwards or a big commission check, we’re rewarding the behavior that we reward, not the behavior that we want.
Mark Stiving
Yep.
Rich Mironov
And every time the puppy pees on the carpet after that, it’s my fault because I didn’t set up the right comp plan, the right reward system, the right messaging such that and by the way, in the courses I teach, we have a joke. The definition of a millisecond is the time between when I, as the head of product tell somebody on the sales team, they can’t have a special to close their deal and they escalate to the CEO. So my expectation of the science and applicability scales with the size of the deal.
Mark Stiving
Yep. So I can see that completely. And so when I think about pricing… First off, I just want to give you my feedback. I always use the number 10% of the economic value. And I think I’m setting expectations lower. And then I always say, look, if you have a great brand or you can reduce risk, you can bring that number up.
Rich Mironov
You’ve done infinitely more of this than I have. So I’m happy to follow your lead on that. That’s the number I pick.
Mark Stiving
I’d rather get 20.
Rich Mironov
Sure. Yeah. I’d rather get 50, but it just doesn’t happen.
Mark Stiving
Yeah. Exactly. Okay. And so how do you systematize any of this? Or is it just all random?
Rich Mironov
So the reason I start by thinking of pricing and packaging as an not academic but analytical problem is because I think first you have to solve the analytical problem, you have to get to the right answer, right? But in my own B2B enterprise context, that’s not enough. What we have to do is we have to put a very persuasive set of arguments together, and then we have to change the comp plan, right? So first I think in order, first, I think about getting some allies on the executive team who are not sales who are going to take my side of the argument, right? So, I want to spend a bunch of time with the CFO where we agree that if we could increase our sales velocity, if we could close the typical deal 40% faster, because we’re not doing custom pricing, doing custom configuration, getting it wrong, having a Chinese menu of 47 things that nobody can get through, right?
I want to convince the VP of Finance or the CFO that the company’s going to make more money if we not only have a pricing model, but we stick with it, right? I want to have the conversation and the convincing discussion with the head of marketing that we can’t really market efficiently if we can’t get folks through the marketing and sales funnel quickly, right? And that we’re wasting a lot of time. I’m going to try to get the head of support if there is one on my side saying every time we do a special, the folks in support have to, when they get a phone call, they have to look up and find out what this customer’s entitled to, right? I’m going to try to build a coalition of folks at the executive level who don’t run sales, who are going to be the other voices in the room, so that I’m not the only one saying this is a bad idea, right?
Mark Stiving
I’m actually surprised you didn’t mention engineering or CTO.
Rich Mironov
Yes, of course I would start with them, right? We have a multi-tenant system and everybody runs on the multi-tenant system except our three largest customers. And so therefore we have a large portion of all of our technical staff doing CPR on not the thing that makes us the most money, and they’re all frustrated and they’re quitting and they hate their jobs, right? Yeah. So if we think of that group of folks and say, I want to be the thought leader who doesn’t have to say in every executive staff meeting that’s breaking the pricing and packaging model. And so we shouldn’t do it. I want everybody else to say it, right? And notice that’s not about spreadsheets. And so many folks who come from the product management side of life believe that spreadsheets convince people of things, right?
I’m usually thinking about Dr. Sheldon Cooper from the Big Bang Theory, right? He’s on the whiteboard, he’s going to show you he’s smarter and you’re going to do it his way because he’s smarter. I don’t think so, right? And so many folks in the engineering and product side come up in the, I’m the smartest person in the room theory. And it actually works really well with product and design and engineering. That’s how we do it. But it’s a really bad message on the go-to-market side. And then finally, I want to sit down with the CEO and the head of sales, and I want to talk about the comp plan. A great example here, I’m sure you’ve run into it a thousand times. We have a really good core selling product that’s making lots of money. We launched a second product, which is really good, and nobody on the sales team sells any of it because everybody on the sales team can make their number and get to the President’s Club by selling the thing they know and that the customers understand.
And they’re not interested in learning or taking a risk because that’s not who they are. And so, if we’re going to spend 5 million building a new product that the CEO’s really unhappy about us spending 5 million on, and it’s always six months late I really want the sales team to have a comp plan that says every single member of the sales team has to sell at least one of the new product, or they can’t get to a hundred percent or whatever that equivalent is, right? Or we’re going to split out 20% of the sales team, maybe the hungry ones, and they’re going to only sell the new thing because product building things that the world wants if sales doesn’t want to sell it, it is bad for everybody. So again, notice I’m thinking about the organization, I’m thinking about the motivators. I’m thinking about why people do the things they do.
We both know that first prize in the sales contest is a Cadillac, right? Second prize is a set of steak knives, and third prize, you’re fired. Right? So we have sales teams who are going to be fired if they don’t close these enterprise deals. And the prospect says they want a thing. And so I fully expect every member of that sales team to lobby within an inch of their lives to get whatever the customer says they want, even if it’s bad for the company. So a comp plan, for instance, that says you get extra points for selling the standard licensed product as is. And then we deduct revenue for every dollar of professional services specialist stuff we do for them. So that you are incentivized as a salesperson to not sell specials instead of, we considered all revenue to be the same. So if you can sell 2 million of one-off consulting or IT, then we send you to the President’s Club, right? Again, I’m thinking more about how do we make it real more than how do we make it right? Because you are the expert in making it right and the science of pricing and packaging. But I’ve just seen so many of those die on the vine.
Mark Stiving
Yep. It’s that last mile. It’s when the salespeople present to the customer.
Rich Mironov
That’s right. That’s absolutely right.
Mark Stiving
I often talk about comp plans, and my comp plan conversation always goes around, can we create something that’s correlated with margin. Which gives them incentive to sell the value of the product as sure as to doing discounts. But I love what you just said. Because I’d never thought, ‘Hey, you’re going to get a higher margin or a higher commission check when you sell a standard product than when you sell to customers.’.
Rich Mironov
That’s right. And there’s usually this sort of wrongly thought economic argument where we say, well, but they’re going to give us $300,000 worth of one-off special IT consulting project dollars. And we think it’s only going to cost us 150,000 to do the work. And there’s margin. Right? But what that really does on the engineering side, because we can’t just hire more people, we certainly can’t hire the best people. And by the way, we’re going to have to support that piece of code forever until that customer goes away. What we’re doing is stealing, we’re borrowing people from the core strategy, the core roadmap, the core value, the core engineering to do a thing that isn’t going to make us much money. And by the way, we’ve always underestimated the work. And so there’s no money in it. And then we’re saddled with one more and two more and 10 more things that engineering has to maintain because that special projects team moved on to the next thing. So again you are much smarter about how we manipulate the comp plan, but I think you have to go there.
Mark Stiving
Yeah. I just want to pile on because I’m enjoying this conversation way too much. And so then JP Morgan Chase says, ‘Hey, we really need this.’ And everyone in the company’s think, well, if JP Morgan Chase needs it, everybody…
Rich Mironov
Yes, of course they do.
Mark Stiving
Even though that’s not true.
Rich Mironov
It’s not true. But again, let’s be generous in our thoughts with our sales team. Okay? So if you’re an enterprise sales team, you only have three accounts or four accounts. And by the way, only one of them is up for the major renewal in these two quarters. So there’s no intellectual or linguistic difference between JPMorganChase wanting this thing and all of the customers I’m calling on want this thing. Right? And I expect every one of my enterprise sales reps to make that leap from one instance to many because we pay them to think about the world one account at a time. Right? That’s their reward system. They’re not paid to do market research. They’re not paid to do surveys. And in fact, they’re paid to believe what the customers tell them because they don’t actually care if it works. Right? If JP Morgan Chase says we need an interface to this really, really old database that was written in the nineties that nobody remembers anymore and will pay you for it. Right? no one else in the world is ever going to see that or use that. And in fact, JPMorgan Chase isn’t going to make that connection, but somebody wrote it on a post-it note and the buying committee has it on their list. And so we’re going to agree to do it because it’s a seven figure deal.
Mark Stiving
Yep. Absolutely insane.
Rich Mironov
Well when I see CEOs who came out of any role other than enterprise sales, we can have this argument, we can have this discussion, we can paint the picture, we can bring the evidence.
Mark Stiving
Yeah. So I want to jump back to, we’re talking a lot about sales. And I love talking about pricing. You had mentioned we’re going to the 10% or 15 to 20% of economic value that we’re going to charge a customer. How do you convince salespeople to actually communicate economic value or determine economic value as they’re selling the product?
Rich Mironov
Okay. I do not expect them to determine economic value. I expect them to communicate it. So I believe a fundamental obligation of product management if we’re building something that needs this kind of discussion, is to do the economic math before we start the development. Not after. Okay? So I or somebody on my team is going to sit down one-on-one, maybe in person if we can do it with a half a dozen or a dozen prospects early enough in the cycle. We haven’t built it yet. Okay? We’re not actually trying to close them. We’re doing discovery, we’re not selling. And those are opposite things, right? And I want to ask a lot of questions of these folks who are friendly-s, who have gotten a connection with, who don’t have any incentive to lie to me yet. Because I’m not trying to get them to sign anything, right?
And, we all know the difference between listening, learning, meetings, and selling, right? So questions I ask specifically and quantitatively, how are you going to measure success for this product? Right? Is it faster through the factory? Is it lower cost of manufacturing? Right? What is the unit of your success, right? How do you get a bonus, right? What’s the target number for this? What we do, the sort of current and target state. Okay? You are telling me that you’re building cars and the current overhead for parts and labor and whatever is 62% of the car. And if you could get it down to 60%, you would get a bonus and a promotion and the company stock would go up, right? Or, we’re worried about outages for our systems and downtime. And every minute of downtime costs us where the New York Stock Exchange and every minute of downtime costs us a billion dollars and an apology letter to the SEC, right?
I need to know how they measure success, right? And then we’re going to go into this sort of current state and I ask a lot of questions about if they were going to take this purchase order to their CFO to get it signed, what argument would they make? Right? And sometimes it’s a top line revenue argument. we could sell more of our widgets ‘if filling story’. Sometimes it’s a cost-savings argument. We could lower our cost burden ‘if’, or our support burden ‘if,’ or our warranty replacement cost ‘if, right? Or, I have to have the argument that they give me. Right now, I usually disbelieve the specific numbers I’m looking for, we’ll collect a bunch of numbers and put them in, but for me, that’s the tool that I can put into a three-line spreadsheet.
Because I would never give anything with more than two or three inputs to my sales team or to my customers, right? But we could have a little three-line spreadsheet that said, ‘Your current cost per car to manufacture, we are going to save you 2 to 4%. That’s our guess. That’s what our product does, your savings, and we multiply it by the number of cars that you make every year,’ right? I need to help my sales folks not talk about price, but to talk about value and value is on the customer side. And so we need some very simple tool where we can discuss the value before we get to the price. This product’s going to help your support team answer calls faster. Okay? How much faster? How many calls do you get? What does your support team cost? We multiply and we say, ‘Hmm, based on your situation, I think our product could save you 10 to 20 million a year.’ Right?
Because as a salesperson, I know that somebody on this other side has to sign for this and expecting my customers, my prospects to know all the numbers and do the math is unrealistic. And expecting my sales team to be economists is unrealistic. And so on the product side, I feel like I owe my sales team some narrative that they can read off the page, yes, fill in the numbers, fill in the values, or fill in the quantities. But the value story has to be baked into the product. We have to know what it does and why it does it, and how it’s going to make or save the customers money, or we shouldn’t build it, right? So notice I didn’t say after we launch it, we should figure out what it costs or what it’s worth. But before we build it, we need to have a good theory.
Mark Stiving
Okay, first off, I agree with the entire first half of what you said. In fact, I tend to rejoice and jump up and down and it’s like I work with companies all the time who haven’t said, what’s the value of this product to our customers? Right? And so the product managers haven’t done what you just recommended. And it’s like, please, right?
Rich Mironov
It’s like, let’s not spend that next 10 million if we haven’t figured out how we’re going to monetize it.
Mark Stiving
Yes. There’s so many reasons why we people develop products and rarely is it because we think it’s going to make our customers more money.
Rich Mironov
Yeah. Right? But you were going to take issue with the second half?
Mark Stiving
The second half. So I can see where you come from when you say that. I just teach it. I teach something slightly different in that I ‘ that when you go in and say, ‘Hey, we’re going to save you 2% on the cost of a car,’ right? I think that that’s not as believable as where are the problems that you’re facing and what do you think we could get those to?
Rich Mironov
I’m not going to disagree. We have to lead with the story about how and why we’re going to add value. But if we don’t have the number at the end, right? If I go into some auto manufacturer and I say, qualitatively, I can save you a lot of money. We have this AI system and it’s going to design your cars better and it’s going to be cheaper to build them and they’re going to come off the line faster. And I don’t quantify it. I don’t think they can buy it.
Mark Stiving
I’m totally with you.
Rich Mironov
So yes, we lead with benefits, we lead with stories, we lead with vignettes, we lead with problems. But the last two paragraphs of that have to justify somebody actually signing a contract.
Mark Stiving
Yep. Totally. And so what I usually say, I say these words to my clients all the time. Nobody believes in the ROI calculator.
Rich Mironov
Sure. Absolutely.
Mark Stiving
And so if it’s too simple.
Rich Mironov
Well, so I would say it differently. I would say nobody believes in an ROI calculator, but they’re not going to do it themselves, right? So the best outcome for me is to have one of these really cheap, stupid ROI calculators that has wrong numbers in it. Okay? In fact, I’d like to understate the value, okay? I’d like to sit down with a prospect and say, well we’re going to reduce your tech support costs. I’m guessing your tech support people cost 50 bucks an hour and it takes you four minutes to close a ticket and you get a hundred thousand tickets a year. And I want them to come back and say, ‘Well, actually our tech support folks don’t cost 50 bucks an hour. They cost 90 bucks an hour, and it doesn’t take us four minutes to close a ticket. It takes us 10 minutes to close a ticket.’ And gosh, that ROI just got bigger and we’ve bought a bunch of credibility because we lowballed it a little bit and they’re the people convincing us that they’re going to save more money than we originally proposed. That’s just psychology. Right? But I can’t depend on having smart buyers. Okay? If you only sell to people who know how to do ROI calculators for themselves, you have a limited market.
Mark Stiving
Yeah. So the way I do it, or the way I recommend that we do it is that the salesperson knows what the ROI calculator looks like in their head. But they don’t bring out the spreadsheet and say, ‘Let’s stick your numbers in it.’ Okay? ‘Hey, how many cars do you do a month?’
Rich Mironov
That’s fine. But when the person in the other sense, well, how did you get there? Maybe we show them the numbers. Right? Again, I think that’s a good sales philosophy question that I don’t have a position on. What I do have a position on is I can’t send my salespeople naked out into the world without this kind of tool or information because I get fired if we don’t close enough revenue.
Mark Stiving
Yep. Rich, I think we have come to an agreement.
Rich Mironov
Okay, good. Great. I’m so glad because I’d hate to have to rearrange my thinking on this after 40 years.
Mark Stiving
Me too. Hey Rich, we are running out of time. I’m going to ask you the final question. Sure. Even though it isn’t your field, what’s one piece of pricing advice you would give our listeners that you think could have a big impact on their business?
Rich Mironov
I think you want to look for an aggregate set of data about what’s happening in your marketplace as opposed to attaching a lot of overweighting to your two largest accounts. Because they’re special and different and your sales team has a lot of incentives to give them tremendous discounts and special treatment that you’re not going to give everybody else.
Mark Stiving
Yeah. And so your two best accounts are not like everybody else.
Rich Mironov
I hope they’re not. Well, maybe they are, but the motivations are different. Usually the use cases are different. Politics is different. And so I want to look at the big fat middle of my market rather than the top two.
Mark Stiving
Yep. Perfect. Rich, thank you so much for your time today. If anybody wants to contact you, how can they do that?
Rich Mironov
Two things. One is, cleverly, my last name is also my domain name. So if anybody wants to get free access to the last 25 years of blog posts and talks and tools and stuff, it’s free. They can just come get it mironov.com. And then my email address, which is how I address the world, is cleverly my name, [email protected] because I bought that domain in the early nineties before the Soviet Union was on the internet.
Mark Stiving
That works. To our listeners, thank you for your time. If you enjoyed this, would you please leave us a rating and a review? Walter S said about my latest book, Instant Profits: How to Raise Prices without Losing Customers. He said:
‘This is the kind of book that gets right to the heart of pricing strategy without wasting time. What I really appreciate about this book is how direct and practical it is. Mark cuts right to the chase with advice that’s easy to apply immediately. It’s made me rethink how I approach pricing for my properties and services.’
Walter, thank you so much. The check is in the mail. And finally, if you have any questions or comments about the podcast or if your company needs help getting paid more for the value you deliver, feel free to email me, [email protected]. Now, go make an impact!
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