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SHOW SUMMARY: In his third appearance on The Soul of Enterprise, pricing expert Mark Stiving, Ph.D., returns to share new insights on maximizing profitability through value-based pricing strategies. As the founder and CEO of Impact Pricing, Mark guides businesses toward understanding and articulating their value, so they can stop leaving money on the table. Join Ron and Ed as they dive deep into Mark’s expertise on aligning organizations around value creation, optimizing pricing structures, and tackling the nuances of customer willingness to pay.

ABOUT MARK STIVING
Mark helps companies discover how buyers perceive value and how to price offerings to capture more of the value they create. For over 25 years he has studied, led and coached businesses through the lens of pricing, a radically different approach from other business experts. He knows that every person inside your company affects the price a buyer is willing to pay. The prices you achieve ultimately indicate how well the entirety of your company operates. Mark has driven a company-wide pricing initiatives worth hundreds of millions of dollars in incremental profit. He started and sold three companies, improving his championship pricing skills in each one. Mark will change the way you and your audience think about pricing and business as a whole.

SHOW NOTES

Segment one

So why is Mark joining us for a 3rd time on the show? He is still driven by changing the way you think about pricing and customers. And he’s written another book about it. https://impactpricing.com/instant-profits-book/
Mark’s new book is called Instant Profits and Mark starts right up front with, “this book is about 1/10 the number of words in my other books, yet it's priced five times higher.”
“Don't go raise all your prices to all your customers. The whole premise of the book is choose the right customers, the right products, the right situations." —Mark Stiving, author of Instant Profits https://impactpricing.com/instant-profits-book/
“So if we could actually articulate what we do and the value we're going to deliver to our customers, we have room to raise prices.” —Mark Stiving

Segment two

“If you haven't raised your prices over the last four years you have given your customers a 23% discount and gotten zero credit for it.” —Mark Stiving
There are three profit drivers: price, sales volume, and cost. Two of those are negatively impacted by inflation… If that sounds interesting to you, check out Hermann Simon’s book Beating Inflation https://www.amazon.com/Beating-Inflation-Concrete-Effective-Corporate/dp/3031200926
From Mark today: Consumers are less size sensitive than they are price sensitive. In the B2B world, find features that only a few of your customers are using. Take that feature out of the product, and leave the price the same. Then create a new tier.
Did you know that Mark Stiving publishes a Monday newsletter on LinkedIn? Link is here: https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/mark-stiving-s-newsletter-6929460546874355712/

Segment three

Regarding ChatGPT Pro at $200 per month: ”I thought it was brilliant because what it says to me is that there's a group of people out there that are getting so much value out of ChatGPT and they've they figured out who they are and what they're doing.” —Mark Stiving
“How much value do I think that specific customer is going to get from this specific product and this specific application? As AI is able to help me figure that out then I'm able to do pricing better.” —Mark Stiving
What does Mark think is going to be the continuing impact of behavioral economics on pricing? “Behavioral economics has probably reached its peak in terms of how much is going to influence pricing.”
What are your thoughts on, on freemium options? I think you've got to have a really clear business case to say freemium makes sense. Freemium is really a marketing tactic. It's not a pricing tactic.” —Mark Stiving

Segment four

Does pricing follow strategy or vice versa? “We need a corporate strategy and, once we have that strategy, we can figure out what pricing model fits best with that strategy.” —Mark Stiving
“When we start thinking about price and stop thinking about value then we stop thinking about how we serve our customers. Buyers trade money for value.” —Mark Stiving
A big THANK YOU to Mark Stiving for joining us today. Please check out his new book, Instant Profits (it’s a quick, fun read). You can find it at this link https://impactpricing.com/instant-profits-book/

Bonus Content is Available As Well

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