How to Build Confidence in Your Price and Your Process with Casey Brown

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[00:00:00] Casey Brown: We hear them launch a price objection at us, and we take it as a price objection. But usually what that means is it’s too expensive for what I perceive I will get in exchange. So you as the salesperson, when you’re getting this kind of pressure, it often means you haven’t done a good enough job yet of uncovering those pain points and connecting them to your solution so profoundly in the customer’s mind that they don’t perceive a disconnect and the value for the price. They perceive a bounty.

[00:00:27] Lee Brumbaugh: There’s no silver bullet in sales, but on Sales Against The Odds. We’re here to give you the best shot at building a sales infrastructure that helps you scale. I’m your host, Lee Brumbaugh. Welcome everyone to another episode of Sales Against the Odds. My name is Lee Brumbaugh, CEO of Sales Xceleration. Very excited for our guest today. Casey Brown is the founder of Boost Pricing. She’s joining us and if you have a sales team where you think they’re just basically giving away pricing and not tying it to value, this is probably the episode with you. Casey works with companies all sizes, helping them rethink pricing strategy, tying it to value. She’s the author of Fearless Pricing and recently joined us in Dallas as one of our keynote notes speakers where she challenged many of us, including myself, to think differently on pricing and have been doing that ever since then. So thank you Casey, so much for joining us today.

[00:01:21] Casey Brown: Oh, I’m excited to have this conversation, Lee. Thanks.

[00:01:23] Lee Brumbaugh: Yeah, well, I was looking at your website and I think you might refer to yourself as pricing. It was either nerd or geek. I’m going with Guru today, but what shaped how you think about, I mean, this is your full-time. You were focused on pricing, helping companies. How did you get to this part where pricing was your gig and how did you come to this valley in juncture of where you’re at in your journey?

[00:01:46] Casey Brown: Sure. Well, as you can imagine, it wasn’t a career path I necessarily foresaw as a kid. It’s not like there’s a pricing consultant that came in on career day. It’s like doctor, lawyer, teacher, painter, nurse, whatever. So I didn’t even know that this field existed. I didn’t know really anything about it. And so I kind of stumbled into it a little bit by accident. I’m an engineer by training. I started my career at GE and the Jack Welch day when Six Sigma was new on the scene, and I became an early black belt, six Sigma black belt at GE, and it was a rotational program and I did a rotation in pricing and absolutely fell in love with it because the engineer in me loves the math and the numbers and the precision, but I suppose the humanist in me, or I’m curious about psychology and brain science and why and how we behave the way we do as human beings. And there’s so much of that in pricing too. It’s sort of an intersection of art and science of people and process of data and psychology. And so the intrigue of how pricing negotiations work in the real world caught my attention back in my early twenties and haven’t

[00:02:56] Lee Brumbaugh: Looked back since. Huh?

[00:02:57] Casey Brown: Yeah, that’s been it for me.

[00:02:59] Lee Brumbaugh: Yeah, a really cool story. And it’s interesting, I mean, you say so many of these words. I mean, typically we’re setting pricing what you’re saying, the psychology and the value, and there’s just so much that goes into it, and obviously we’ll dive into that today. So you’ve worked with companies of all sizes, large enterprises, SMB world as well. When you think about pricing problems are universal regardless of company size, what jumps out to you?

[00:03:20] Casey Brown: Great question. The reality is that the tactics that customers use to try to get our stuff for less are pretty agnostic to industry. They’re pretty agnostic to company size. They’re agnostic to the nature of what you sell. So you could sell a good or a service, you could sell your stuff, can sell for a penny per pound or a million dollars per project. Customers do and say the same kinds of things. They’ll say, it’s too expensive, it’s outside our budget, so-and-so down the street can do it for cheaper. Is that your best number? Can you sharpen your pencil on and on and on, right? So because the person across the table or across the Zoom call or across the email or the website is using fairly similar tactics across every buying environment, that means that a lot of the most effective countermeasures that salespeople can use and deploy are also pretty agnostic to industry size, product or service, et cetera.

[00:04:20] Lee Brumbaugh: So when you think about countermeasures by sales team, is there typically an area where you think we’re just, you see all the time that they’re just missing the boat. This is our go-to and it’s just wrong? Anything that jump out from that perspective?

[00:04:32] Casey Brown: Oh gosh. Yeah. I mean the list of what’s wrong, we could follow our time on that.

[00:04:37] Lee Brumbaugh: The call itself, huh?

[00:04:38] Casey Brown: Yeah. Let me maybe come up to 50,000 feet a little bit rather than getting into the 10,000 ways that people kind of go sideways. And really bucket ties it into two different areas. One is sort of skillset and one is mindset. So skillset, sometimes we’re just not equipped with the fluency of skill around communicating, presenting, defending value, handling price objections, asking deep enough, smart enough questions to really pierce the sort of the veil of this friendliness of buyer, seller and get to the heart of what their real pain points are. So skillset benefits from showing up, but really that’s the least of the problem because very often, and I’m sure in your sales career you’ve seen this too, Lee, you’ve got a sales person who’s had the training, who’s got the scripts, who can, when you’re sitting down and talking to them in the office, in a safe environment, they say and do all the right things, but sometimes a salesperson, even when they know what to say, what to do, what process to follow, what words to say, to defend value in the moment, in the sort of heat of battle and the customer’s in front of them breathing down their neck and they get afraid that if they don’t discount, they’re going to lose the deal.

[00:05:50] Casey Brown: Fear comes in, we get afraid. We get in our head, we get in our, we feel pushy, we feel salesy, we feel weird, we get terrified. And when fear is running the show, and this is where my brain science intrigue comes in, that’s the amygdala and that’s not fear center is good at running away and keeping us safe from threats. It is not a reasonable, nuanced, profitable decision making center. That’s the neocortex. So psychology mindset are far and away the biggest problems in terms of how salespeople respond when the customer is pushing back.

[00:06:24] Lee Brumbaugh: Let’s say I’m A SMB, listen to this, and I’ve got three salespeople and one of ‘em good at sticking to value and holding to pricing and driving the customer relationship one’s okay and one’s bad at it. We talked about skillset mindset, we do training around that and those types of things. How do you train that? How do you get over that fear? What have you seen? Is that innately in people that you can not train around it or how do you fix that?

[00:06:49] Casey Brown: Well, I mean, call us. That’s literally what we do in 10 weeks. We reprogram people’s beliefs around pricing and selling, but no, it is very fixable. I think there’s different kinds of things there. This use skillset mindset categories, again, their skillset is easiest to fix, say this differently, ask these questions in this way. The skillset stuff is generally pretty easy to fix, but like I said, that’s generally not what’s really causing someone to be poor at this or average at this. It’s usually the mindset and mindset’s certainly harder to fix. But one of the keys to addressing mindset gaps is really shining a light on blind spots. People have, they don’t know what they don’t know about what’s holding them back. They authentically believe if they don’t discount, they’re going to lose the deal. It looks like a fact to them. And so once you are able to shine a light on some things they might not have considered about how their beliefs are infecting and affecting this sales process, and then you give them a chance to practice some different stuff.

[00:07:53] Casey Brown: So there’s a little bit of fake it till you make it like, okay, you believe X, but Y is true. Do these things as if Y is true. You might lose some sales, but you probably won’t try it out, and then they don’t. And then customers say yes, and then they win more deals. So much of this is about the confidence to do it. And where a lot of salespeople think the line is the cliff, if I charge any more than this, I’m falling off the cliff and all my customers are going to leave. It’s just pushing their confidence to try to expand that cliff a little bit. And when it works, we build on those successes. But it starts with giving them a safe place to examine their beliefs and be willing to interrogate those beliefs and maybe even be willing to be wrong about what they’re certain about. And most training doesn’t do, in my experience, a good enough job of that. It’s very skills oriented, and that’s not what’s really sabotage and success. It’s the hidden underlying obstacles of our mindset and our fears.

[00:08:48] Lee Brumbaugh: And look, I’ve even seen at the leadership level, we do training around the sales rep, but then it comes to this big deal, all it’s like, well, no, no, I know we said this, but we still got to win this. So

[00:08:58] Casey Brown: This is always where my sympathy is with the sales team because sometimes a CEO or a sales leader will kind of talk out both sides of their mouth. They’ll insist that they want the team to hold the line on value, but the second a really big juicy opportunity comes along at a criminally low margin. Sometimes the leaders are the biggest problems. Sometimes the CEO, when A CEO is the biggest offender, I call them the CDO, the chief Discount officer, and especially in the SMB world, a lot of times the CEO is the founder of a company who built it from nothing and has a lot of old scars from growing the company from nothing and remembers how every deal was sacred, and they were writing checks from their own personal bank account to cover payroll in the early days. There’s kind of almost like a founder PTSD sometimes that can cause a leader to really struggle to let bad deals go even sometimes when their team is better at it.

[00:09:56] Lee Brumbaugh: That makes a lot of sense. I mean, again, you’ve fought tooth and nail for every deal to have a viable business, and then you still have that belief that if I don’t win this one, it all goes away. So when you think about large companies to the SMB world, obviously you would hope that there’s more sophistication with a billion dollar enterprise, but what do you see difference wise between pricing strategy and what is something tactically that an SMB company could do that wouldn’t be that hard to implement that large companies often do Well?

[00:10:25] Casey Brown: Yeah. Well, I would love to agree that large companies do this better. I’ve seen a lot of evidence of the contrary. One of the things that creeps in with size always is bureaucracy. And I think there’s a lesson for the SMB in this because I think this is where an SMB can really win. You get a giant company and they’ve got this huge sales force. They inevitably create policies and structures and rules and exception policy around minimum margin standards or deal sizes because otherwise there’s this sense that it’s just the wild, wild west if we don’t put some guardrails around our people. But that can pretty quickly deteriorate into sort of ivory tower thinking where HQ thinks they know best about what’s going on in the field and they can really hamstring their sales team into kind of almost like having to play games to win business.

[00:11:15] Casey Brown: So back when I first started in pricing, I was in corporate America, fortune, fortune 10 and Fortune 50 and fortune hundred companies, and I was in the pricing department, which all big companies have pricing departments, and the sales team called us the SPD, the sales prevention department because there was always this suspension between us and them. But again, so it can be plenty bureaucratic, but I think the seed of what’s good in that, I think an SMB can take is let’s not go all the way to bureaucracy for sure, but how do we create some rigor? How do we define clearly for our team like some swim lanes, basically, what does a good deal look like? What does good pricing look like? What does a good opportunity look like? What does a good customer look like? What are we trying to accomplish? What’s ideal, what’s acceptable?

[00:12:05] Casey Brown: And then outside of there is we don’t go there. We don’t do that kind of business. We don’t do it at that price. We don’t. So the idea of good structure is it establishes very clear swim lanes for your sales team and you say, don’t go to the left, don’t go to the right, but inside here, swim fast, swim fast, win deals, do everything you can to win deals inside this lane. And so I think what SMBs can learn from larger companies without getting bogged down by the bureaucracy that inevitably clogs up those big organizations is have a plan, have a structure, have very crystal clear understanding of what kind of business you’re after and what kind of business you’re not after, and then make sure your team knows about that with utter clarity because if they don’t, good people will close bad business and that won’t be on your head. That’ll be on yours.

[00:12:51] Lee Brumbaugh: It’s interesting you’re describing this. Your advisors work so much with companies on that ideal customer profile, and we’re going through what vertical you want to focus on the company size, just what is the geographic demographics, demographics, all that,

[00:13:04] Casey Brown: All that.

[00:13:05] Lee Brumbaugh: But then we do all that and then we don’t do any, the exercise should also relate to pricing, right? Casting the vision of what that good company looks like should be also casting the vision of what does that good partnership look like between the prospect and us From a pricing standpoint, you get into bad business and then you’re chasing it and those are the clients who work harder on and then you feel like, oh, I’ve got to keep them because it’s a number. It’s like they’re 50% of our time. They’re

[00:13:30] Casey Brown: Terrible. They suck up disproportionate organizational resources. They don’t value you. They can abuse your staff, they don’t pay you on time. I think of this kind of, I am a systems thinker, an engineer, so I think of how do we have a system for this, and it’s almost like a very simple system. Could be red, yellow, green, right? Green is that ICP, that ideal customer profile. You talked about the demographics, psychographics, geographics, all the things, but also that what does good partnership look like? What is the ideal customer believe about our value and how do they connect with that? That’s green, right? Of course, that’s green. Now, I don’t know a business in the world that can only do a hundred percent of their work all the time with perfectly green customers sometimes because of what we don’t know when we get into a relationship with a customer and sometimes because our revenue goals might require us to go out into the yellow from time to time.

[00:14:18] Casey Brown: I don’t think that’s even a bad. Obviously it’d be great if every single client is perfect. It generally isn’t the real world though. And sometimes you’re out there in the yellow like, well, this client is not perfect for us in terms of the value connection because what they need is X and we do X prime, but we can make this work and do great work for them and delight them. It may not be at the margins we would love, but it’s still a very acceptable margin for the work and the value connection is aligned enough. Where we really get in trouble is where we start saying yes to the reds, the ones that are not a fit, and we do it because we salivate over the revenue dollars and we lie to ourselves about how we’re going to somehow make it work in a way that isn’t going to cost us and our whole team a bunch of chaos. And then we take that work on and it does cost us and our whole teams a bunch of chaos. And we’re sorry, I don’t know me included by the way, I don’t know a single business owner on the planet that hasn’t taken work that they didn’t regret. We got to learn from that and have the discipline to say no to it.

[00:15:17] Lee Brumbaugh: Most companies don’t have the bandwidth to build a high functioning sales department to allow them to meet the revenue targets with Sales Xceleration. They don’t have to. Our experienced fractional sales leaders consult and implement your sales strategy, infrastructure management and team development, discover how we deploy these proven sales solutions to address your sales challenges. By going to our website, filling out the contact form, we’d love to hear from you. So you’ve got a client that’s in the red, the customer, you’re working with the customer and they identify these are the five clients in the red. How do you get them to jump off the cliff to fire the client to have those conversations?

[00:15:57] Casey Brown: My favorite way to fire clients is raise the heck out of their prices because I say that kind of tongue in cheek, but let’s examine what’s behind that very often. Now look, if you have a customer that is a bad fit because of a core values disconnect, it’s a different story. They’re verbally abusive to your team or something. Okay, that’s a different story. Fire people who have a core values mismatched to you, that’s separate. But if it’s just a function of how they value what we do does not fit inside our standards of the money we need to make for the work, it’s just a disconnect. They value us at X and we need to be paid x plus 10. Obviously we can take a look at the value matchup and say, is there anything we could do to help them create more value for them such that there isn’t a disconnect there?

[00:16:43] Casey Brown: Those are some easy things to look at. Sometimes the answer at the end of that is no. Here’s where we are. This is the facts. And then we need to reserve organizational capacity for people that do value us more. We’ve got more green opportunity. We need to get rid of some of these yellows. Well, generally that looks like a question I ask people when they ask about firing clients is, at what price would you be delighted to have this client? Now, some clients, the values mismatch ones at no price. There is no price. Fine let them go. But there’s lots of these yellow clients, maybe even a few reds, that if the price were at this such and such point, that would actually really work for us. We could make maybe

[00:17:21] Lee Brumbaugh: A yellow to a green right in that

[00:17:23] Casey Brown: Area right then great. Then charge ‘em that and some of them will opt out and leave because they don’t value you at x plus 10 and then they’re going to go and Great, you’ve accomplished your goal. You’ve freed up organizational capacity for the next green client. But what is shocking, well, not shocking to me, but shocking to CEOs who take this advice from me over and over again is how few of those people actually go that they actually are willing to pay a price tag that makes it viable for you and sustainable for you to serve them over time. They’ve been enjoying suppressed pricing for however long they’ve been your client. They’ve been getting away with that unspoken discount for a long time. You’re not letting ‘em get away with it anymore. And a lot of ‘em will stick around and pay it. And I’ve seen people do pretty shocking increases sometimes in those yellow customers taking them from a hundred dollars an hour to $200 an hour, I mean really big increases. And all of a sudden it’s like, yeah, the value is so extraordinary. They may not like the increase. They’re not going to like it, but the value is so extraordinary they don’t walk away.

[00:18:24] Lee Brumbaugh: And I’ve also seen some of the same clients that walk away, then they realize your value and they come back to you. So that’s a hundred

[00:18:29] Casey Brown: Percent. I always say they’ve been looking for cheaper and they found cheap. It’s never as good of news to have that happen as if they’d just stayed in the first place in a lot of ways. But in other ways, once they’ve left and come back, they’re a lot more loyal generally. I mean, they’re still price sensitive. Nobody wants to overpay for anything, but they tend to have a better sense of how valuable that relationship is once they’ve been out there dabbling around realizing that your competition can’t do it. You can do the way you can do it.

[00:18:56] Lee Brumbaugh: And I love how you’ve mapped. It really is, like you said, swim lanes at a roadmap. Because I’ve worked with business owners so many times and they hear something like this. It’s like, well, we got to fire half our customers. No, there’s a strategy. We’ve got X amount in the green. How do we get X amount from yellow to green? How do we take, there’s a process here that can be beneficial, not disruptive to your business because ultimately you’re trying to drive the bottom line. So I think that makes a lot of sense of how you map to that.

[00:19:22] Casey Brown: Jim Collins, who wrote Good to great talks about bullets before cannons, and it’s sort of like this kind of aim, small, Ms. Small thing. So how I apply that in the pricing world is where can you take the least risk and put in the least effort and get the biggest return? And so it’s like if we’re happy enough to fire these 10 clients because we aren’t making any money anywhere anyway, then the risk of taking some pricing action there is quite low because if they walk away, well fine, that was your plan anyway. But if you take a pretty bold pricing action there and seven out of 10 of those clients stay and pay you more and three of them leave, now you’re making piles more money, but there’s also some market intel for you there and you’ve got it in a low risk, low effort way.

[00:20:03] Casey Brown: Now you say, okay, how do we take that? Okay, we’ve tried to fire 10 of our red customers, but instead we fired three and turned seven into yellow. What are the next 10 we’re going to look at or what are the, now let’s start to move into the yellow a little bit and see what we can do. By the way, there’s almost always still opportunity even in the green, but we build confidence and awareness and strength and skill from the weakest area into the strongest area such that we’re taking low risk. And I think that can be really helpful for A CEO who’s like maybe suspects that there’s pricing opportunity in their business but doesn’t know where to start and gets kind of overwhelmed that like you said, oh my gosh, we have to fire half our customers now. Start small, start easy and pick up steam.

[00:20:44] Lee Brumbaugh: So I’m getting into the weeds in this question. I’ve seen companies do it differently. So this is more of a selfish question. So you’re this company out there, you’re working with a hundred companies, you identify these are the 15 in the red, we’re going to get ‘em the yellow, this is the plan, it’s an 8% increase. It makes perfect sense. What’s the best way to do those conversations? Is that a black and white? This is what we’re doing. It’s an email that, is it a conversation? Is that different from company to company? What’s the logistics of the best way to do

[00:21:10] Casey Brown: That? I have a book I’ve started writing in my brain. The next book say the first book is Fearless Pricing, but which you mentioned in my intro. But the next book is going to be about how to do price increase as well. Because this and many other questions about how to do price increases I think are an area of opportunity for people to get better at. And I wrote a blog post about this. If you have show notes, I can send you it. You can put it in, that’d be great. It’s brief. I mean this question alone could probably be its own book, but the short answer is generally it’s two things. One is communicate as little as possible that’s still commercially responsible. So if you sell 3 billion a year of product to Walmart, you don’t shoot ‘em an email, right? That’s not commercially responsible.

[00:21:54] Casey Brown: But you also don’t have a sit down meeting with that customer that bought $10 worth of product from you four years ago. Why I say this is especially in the SMB world and especially the kinds of clients we work with, and I’m sure the kind of clients you and your advisors work with is they tend to be good companies. They might be best in class or at least better in class. They’re generally good values, they’re very high integrity companies. And because of integrity and because of our desire to be good partners, we over communicate. And I would say do not confuse partnership with transparency. You can be a good partner without being overly communicative and overly transparent. There is a right amount of detail to give and any more is hurting you, not helping you. And by the way, not helping your customer either. And if you don’t tell everything that’s not duplicity, that’s like what is the right amount of information to communicate in the right way.

[00:22:49] Casey Brown: So again, as little as possible, that’s still commercially responsible. So don’t have a meeting when a phone call will do. Don’t have a phone call when a letter will do. Don’t send a letter when an email will do. Don’t send an email when a little notice slipped in. The invoice will do. And don’t do that when nothing is necessary at all. If I bought the same pair of headphones on Amazon today that I bought a year ago, I don’t get a price increase letter. I don’t get any notice at all. Right? So that’s step piece one to the answer. Piece two to the answer is that there’s generally not a one size fits all strategy that makes sense in most businesses. And the reason is what is commercially responsible for your biggest customer is probably pretty different than what’s commercially responsible for one of your smallest customers or from somebody who doesn’t buy from you that often or who buys a product or service that by nature of which is not particularly important to them.

[00:23:36] Casey Brown: So I think generally this results a well done price increase strategy has some segmentation around what we communicate and how, as you can tell, I’m pretty big on simple systems. You could do a red, yellow, green thing around pricing price increases like around risk. Red is like, boy, these are our biggest customers, our most profitable customers or our customers that are the biggest flight risk because of some service challenges or whatever. We got to be really, really, really careful with them. You make decisions not only about how you communicate, but possibly even what kind of increase they get. They might get a different increase than somebody in the yellow or the green. And certainly the communication plan might vary. Now that all takes some time. And so if somebody’s listening to this daunted like, oh my gosh, we have 5,000 customers, we can’t do that. Start small. Just like I said before, you don’t have to have the ultimate intricate system to start to make some moves in this direction. Even then just slice your customer base in half and say, these guys get a letter and these guys get an email.

[00:24:33] Lee Brumbaugh: Yeah, I love that. Moving back to a quote you said, because I actually loved it in the presentation. I’m going to take a different lens on though and I’ll butcher it, but you said one size fits all fits no one I think is kind of the

[00:24:43] Lee Brumbaugh: Just where you’re going. You talked about it from increased standpoint. Talk to me about an s and b company where there’s sales team member out there and you’re trying to land that first deal. How does creativity in the closing of the initial deal, how does that one size fits all fits no one in our model, you look at something, we’ve done it the same way for 10 years and that was a big takeaway from our summit of how do we tie the value to the customer as they get to know us and build trust and as we’re able to execute delivery. So talk to me about how that strategy fits into that initial pricing discussion.

[00:25:16] Casey Brown: One pitfall I see for brand new opportunities, we’re trying to win new business, maybe win it from an incumbent. There is a tendency to try to use price as a lure, as bait, right? We’re going to give them a deal. And it comes from the underlying reality that new prospects tend to be more price sensitive than existing customers because they haven’t experienced your value yet. Existing customers who know what your now they don’t want to overpay. They’ll always tell you they want it cheaper, but the reality is that once they’ve experienced your value, they’re less price sensitive than they were when they were just shopping you. That is true. But what people do with that truth is say, well then the answer that I have to employ is a discount to a new prospect because that’s what I’m going to get ’em to do to try me out.

[00:26:00] Casey Brown: But there are a lot of ways to induce trial that don’t involve a discount. And the problem with using this sort of land and expand foot in the door pricing approach is you’ve established an entitlement in the mind of the customer that this is what this is worth. If you take a $10,000 service and you do it for 7,500, it takes a long time. It is really, really hard to get that price tag back up to 10,000 over time. And a lot of times it can actually end up leaving the customer feeling worse because now you’re, once they got working with you and they love you and they love what you’re doing, now all of a sudden you’re jacking the price on them. It have been better for everyone. Had you done a better job of helping them understand why $10,000 is a deal of a lifetime for all this value they’re going to get right out of the gate. And so this is not me saying it’s never the right thing to do to use pricing concessions at the opening of a relationship, but almost never. It creates a lot more problems than it solves. And I think, I don’t mean to be overly harsh here, it’s a little bit of a lazy way of selling. If you’re winning business on price, you’re not selling taking orders. If you want to win on value, then don’t use price as the tool.

[00:27:09] Lee Brumbaugh: Well, and I think the one thing too that stood out to me is there’s so many different areas of value getting back to what is the root cause issue? Do they really have, do they not trust you enough or are they worried about you’re trying to do a year long deal and they’re not going to see that ROI? So there’s different ways to peel back to the onion, and I think that the natural inclination is just, well, it’s just the price. We got to take it down 10% and you’re missing the fundamental root cause

[00:27:31] Casey Brown: For sure. Yeah, because what they say is, this is too expensive or That’s outside my budget. Yeah, it’s 10,000. I don’t have 10,000 in the budget. Can you do it for 7,500? We hear them launch a price objection at us and we take it as a price objection. But usually what that means is it’s too expensive for the value that I perceive that I’m going to get from you. It’s too expensive for what I’ll get in exchange. It’s too expensive for what I perceive I will get in exchange. So you as the salesperson, when you’re getting this kind of pressure, it often means you haven’t done a good enough job yet of uncovering those pain points and connecting them to your solution so profoundly in the customer’s mind that they don’t perceive a disconnect in the value for the price. They perceive a bounty in the value for the price.

[00:28:15] Lee Brumbaugh: So much of that is true with Sales Xceleration. I mean, we’ve worked with over 8,000 companies in the SMB space and we know because we do data surveys at the beginning that we see a 32% increase in revenue in year one. Well, if you’re a $10 million company and you can say 32% and then you’re worried about this price point, what does an extra 3 million do? The company, this should be the quickest check you want to write. But if we don’t have that connection, if they don’t see the aspirations and infl, right? Here’s the good things that will happen when you bring on a Sales Xceleration advisor, and the negative is if what doesn’t happen if you don’t do it, if you don’t have that connection, then you’re again back to this monthly number that seems high and you’re like, we up. Remember the whole conversation about the $3 million more you’re going to make it. So it is, you’re

[00:29:02] Casey Brown: Bringing up something really important about the role of context in pricing. It’s like, okay, if you’re going to charge $10,000 a month for a service, it’s like 120 grand. If we have that conversation, even if we’ve had a conversation about value and now we move into, okay, what’s it going to cost me? And I say, it’s going to cost $10,000 a month, but you’re asking a CEO, do you want write $120,000 check this year? The answer is no, I don’t. I could spend zero or I could spend 120 K. Well, I’d rather spend zero, but that is entirely the wrong math. You’re not asking them to write $120,000 check. You’re asking them to make $320,000 of extra profit or 3.2 million of extra profit or 32 million of extra profit, and it’s only going to cost them this. So what they’re saying is, I don’t believe you can get me 32% increase.

[00:29:51] Casey Brown: I don’t believe you can help me in the ways you say. And so jumping into price negotiations at that point entirely misses the boat because what’s wrong is your customer, your prospect doesn’t trust that you can help them. They don’t believe the outcomes you’re promising. And so when you start now saying, well, I can do it for 9,000 a month, or I can do it for 8,000, you’ve done absolutely nothing to address the real issue, which is they don’t really trust the outcome and you’re killing your profit in the process. By the way, it can also really hurt trust because now it gets real transactional and horse tradey and feels kind of icky because the customer’s like, well, geez, I wish I’d have told ’em I had a $5,000 budget. I wonder what I could have gotten away with.

[00:30:30] Lee Brumbaugh: Absolutely. Yeah. Look, they’re investing in the opportunity to grow and look in driving scarcity too. It looks, this man may not be ready for this type of growth. I only have so much time and just like any other company, I only have so many customers I can work with. If it’s not the right fit and the value, see then that’s okay. And then they see the value. You believe in what you’re selling. There are the ROIs there, so I think’s very powerful. Anything last that we’ve missed? Again, a lot of SB companies on today. Any kind of last takeaway? You’re that $5 million company, you’re stuck this, you’re doing 5 million in revenue, but you’re only making $250,000 on it. You didn’t sign up for the amount of work and stress that goes into that. Any last takeaway for an SMB company that they should be looking at for 2026?

[00:31:14] Casey Brown: Well, I just think through that example. You say if you’re a $5 million company, and I do, and this because you’ve been in my keynote, but in every keynote audience I speak to, I pull them at the beginning of the presentation and ask them questions. And one of them is, how much sales volume would you lose with a 1% price increase? And I ask other questions too, but let’s just start there and say, okay, if you’re a $5 million business and you get a 1% price increase, that is $50,000 and almost no one in any industry, even the most price sensitive, highly competitive and commoditized industries, almost always they will say that they will lose virtually no sales volume at a 1% increase. So now our 5 million went to 5 million and 50,000, we took our a thousand dollars skew and took it to $1,001, lost no customers, and now we have an extra 50 k, but when we take two 50 and add another 50 to it, that’s a 20% increase.

[00:32:09] Casey Brown: So you just got a 20% increase on the bottom line from a 1% increase on the top line. And so kind of back to some things we talked about throughout, it’s like start small. Don’t let the magnitude of all the things that could go wrong or all the complexity of making all these changes stop you from taking small actions on the very next quote that goes out the door. Add 1%, here’s a great exercise. Sit down with your sales team and ask ’em to bring the last 10 deals that they want. Everybody brings their 10 deals and you have ’em in a stack and then you say, okay, I want you to take five minutes and go through the stack and sort them into two piles. One pile is, do you think you could have still won this deal? Even if the price had been 1% higher, your best guess would you have still won it 1% higher?

[00:32:53] Casey Brown: Yes or no? And they sort the deals and it oftentimes, a hundred percent of the deals are in the yes, but let’s say it’s only seven or eight deals out of 10 and you’ve got two that you say, no. Okay, fine. Then you take those seven and you calculate the dollars on that and you add it up across all the sales team members, and you look at the numbers and it’s like all of a sudden that’s $283,000. And it’s like, well, can you think of anything to spend 283? This is about confidence building. And so you can say you don’t have to go do a 10 or 20 or 30% price increase or even five. Where can you do one? Where can you do a half get started today please, CEO of an SMB, listening to this get started and make some moves. There is a pile of money on the other side of this action.

[00:33:34] Lee Brumbaugh: Well, especially for those industries that are so much of like your margin, it’s one thing if you’re an 80% margin type company, those companies aren’t out there anymore. So you see all these companies are battling, oh, 22, 20 3% margins to the bottom line is the difference Like, oh, it’s to the top line? No, that’s directly to your profit.

[00:33:51] Casey Brown: And most of ‘em are very focused on volume growth. And I’m here for volume growth. I’m all about it. Yeah, sell more stuff for sure. But it takes zero extra hiring, zero extra cost, zero extra complexity, zero extra invoices going out, zero extra projects work, zero extra product manufactured to do a price increase. And so where is the fastest way to make more money? And for most businesses, the easiest and least risky way to take it, and it’s getting the least focus and attention while we’re out there bashing our head against the wall, trying to grow new customers and win more business with existing customers. Now keep on bashing, but for goodness sakes, give yourself an hour a week or an hour a month at least to think about how to be more smart with your pricing and you’ll make a pile of money.

[00:34:33] Lee Brumbaugh: Yeah, love that. Well, Casey, this has been great. I think, again, very tangible and tactical areas that business owners can take today. And for everybody, again, check out her book Fearless Pricing. I know it’s got a lot of good nuggets that you can take away. Thank you everyone for joining us. Has been another episode of Sales Against The Odds. Tune in Next in two weeks where we’ll have another business leader that helps us challenge how we grow our company. Thanks, Casey.

[00:34:56] Casey Brown: Thanks, Lee.

[00:34:57] Lee Brumbaugh: You’ve been listening to Sales Against the Odds. Be sure to hit that follow button so you never miss an episode. And if you want more resources on scaling sales, check out our [email protected].