55: Pricing with Patrick Campbell of Profitwell (Price Intelligently)

I'm doing a little happy hour in Dublin. I'm going to be at the Clayton Hotel on Thursday, 5.30 in Leopardstown. Anybody wants to come over, grab a drink with me, by all means, we can rap about shit, give away some free stuff. Good afternoon, everybody. This is John Barrows, Jay Barrows Consulting. Thanks so much for joining us. Hopefully you all had a fantastic weekend. You treated your moms right and your wives and all that other stuff. Because it was a nice weekend. I actually had a nice little Mother's Day last minute thing for my wife where I was like, hey, the Celtics game is on tomorrow. Would that be more of a Mother's Day thing or a Father's Day thing? And she's like, no, I'd love to go to the Celtics.

So I'm like, I'm in. So it's a fantastic game for both of us, especially since the Celtics kicked some ass. But that said, I am on today with a guest, Patrick Campbell from Price Intelligently. We're going to have some very interesting discussions about pricing and how to deal with the price increases as reps. So, Patrick, do you want to give everybody a little bit of background on yourself, where you're coming from, and what Price Intelligently is all about, my friend? Yeah, definitely. Go Celtics. We're based in Boston. So it was a good night last night. We'll see if it keeps going. Well, sidebar, man. I don't know about you, but I was watching that, and so we were there, obviously, and I was keenly aware of LeBron.

And it just – this just – my gut says this was one of those games where he just didn't care, and he was just going through the motions just to kind of get a temperature level of how we were going to play against him. And then I'm just worried about the exact opposite happening thing on Tuesday where he just lays a beat down on us and drops like 50 points. So I'm not overly yay about yesterday, even though it was fantastic. That's classic. It's classic Boston, though. You're not excited until you've got the championship in your hands, right? And even then, yeah, yeah. Yeah, so I'm Patrick Campbell, CEO, founder of a company called Price Intelligently. We're changing our name to ProfitWell, but we're still Price Intelligently.

My background is in econometrics and math. I work for the Intel community and Google, and then I started Price Intelligently about six years ago. And we focus on helping subscription or SaaS companies grow through a couple of different products. One is the Price Intelligently suite, which is pricing, which we're going to talk about today. We also have a couple of products that give away free subscription financial metrics. So you can plug in your billing system and get all your MRR, your churn, all that stuff for free. And then we have some products that help with churn and a couple of other things. So all things about subscriptions and SaaS all the time, but particularly we're talking about pricing today.

And I guess the one cool fact to add a little credibility is we have about 25% of the entire market using one or more pieces of our software. So we're definitely cooking. Yeah, love it, man. So actually, because I've been very interested in having this conversation with you because, you know, I think pricing is one of those things that all reps are uncomfortable. Almost every rep I know is uncomfortable about pricing, right? Yeah. And I think a big reason of it is they just don't understand where it comes from. You know what I mean? It's like, a lot of times, and it's funny with SaaS, you know, everybody knows that, like, yeah, it took a lot to build the SaaS product or whatever it is. So they have to recoup their investment.

That's why, like, pharmaceuticals are so expensive, right? So in a lot of cases, because they put all this R&D into it, they have to price it. And they have a certain amount of time where they have non-competes and those type of things. So generic stuff can't get in. So they're going to maximize that to get their revenue back from what they spent, right? Yes. Same thing I think is obvious from a SaaS standpoint. But, you know, the perception out there in the marketplace is, why should I pay that much more for those extra units? Because I know that doesn't physically cost you anything. So help me understand, why did all of a sudden you come up with this company, first of all? And how do you help companies?

I mean, I know there's a lot more details with your tool and all that other stuff. But how do you come up with pricing that is defensible? And then we're going to talk about how to defend it. And then we're going to talk about how to raise it. So where does pricing come from? Give the general rep an understanding of, I'm a C-level executive CFO, came up with a product. How in the world do I price this thing to make it? I just copy what everybody else did. So unfortunately, where it comes from, I think most of your exec teams have done you a pretty big disservice and haven't actually put a lot of thought into pricing in particular. So it's hard to answer like, oh, where does it come from inside a company?

Because for a lot of companies, they're just terrible at it, for lack of a better – that's exactly what I should say. But for a lot of folks, if we step back a second and think about your price, your price is the exchange rate on the value that you're providing. So what I mean by that is if you have a prospect that comes in and they know your brand and they got a referral and they love the H1 on your website and the six things that you said in the sales process, that person is obviously willing to pay more than the person who has never heard of you, isn't the right customer, doesn't need the product, et cetera, right? Because there's that delta in value, essentially. And so normally what I can say to the answer to that particular question is that the best thing when it comes to pricing, especially as you're a sales rep, is you want to understand what are the things that that customer thinks about that are really important or really valuable versus the things that they don't necessarily care about or that they don't necessarily find that valuable.

So put another way, you want to understand the value propositions and the features that are actually going to drive value because those are the things that you should talk about to basically defend the price point that you're putting out there. And the best sales reps kind of know this intuitively, either through guess and checking or doing their research. And your team should be set up for success from the rest of your company. But oftentimes that's not what actually happens. Yeah. And I actually think it's funny because I wrote a blog post on this and I referenced this a couple of times, which is, you know, I called it sell to the 20%. Yeah, I love that. Right. Which is my fundamental belief that regardless, like pick a product or service that you own.

Right. Anybody. And I almost guarantee you only use about 10 to 20% of functionality, whatever that product or service is. Right. Your iPhone, Excel, like name it. Right. Your car. I mean, your car, people drive, people. That's why the future of autonomous vehicles driving is actually so such a real thing because it becomes a revenue maker. Right. Because all you do is you have this big asset that you drive to your office and home, which is about maybe 10 to 20% of the life of that of that car. And so I have it as a automatic where it'll drive me to work and then leave work and then go do a bunch of Uber trips for people and generate money for me. Right. So because I believe most of us only use 10 to 20% of the functionality of whatever we buy, that's how I believe people buy.

Right. They only buy on that 20 to 20%. The rest of it is kind of interesting, but I don't give a real shit about it. I only care about this stuff. Right. Yeah. So how do you recommend management help reps understand the – because, again, how do I understand it? How do I present it? And then how do I raise it? How do you recommend executives help their reps get a better understanding of where that price comes? Right. Because there is finance – I mean, there is obviously margins in there for R&D. There is stuff for commissions, obviously. But there's got to be something more to it so that when somebody says, why should I pay that extra dollar figure for one extra license that doesn't take you any more than one thing to put it on, that I can actually have something to go to bat that is tangible, that isn't just, well, ROI calculator oriented, that is defensible on concrete levels.

Is there anything a manager should do or an executive team should do with their teams? Everyone listening to this who are mainly sales folks, right? Like every single person listening to this should go to their manager, their execs, either on the product side, the marketing side, or even your VP or head of sales, and you should ask, who are our buyer personas? Who do we sell to? And the reason for that is because like a classic spray and pray of like, let's just email a bunch of people and see who's interested. Obviously, that doesn't work for a lot of reasons. But when it comes to pricing in particular, it's really, really tough because you want to understand like, who is that target? Who is that 20% that you're talking about that you are focused on?

And exec teams can basically support their sales teams by understanding and being able to answer that question with some level of certainty. So to give you an example here, your execs and your team as a whole should know, hey, our three buyer personas are salespeople between one and five sales team members, sales teams with six to 15 team members, and then sales teams with 16 to 24 members, right? If I'm selling a CRM or something like that. And then I should know that each of those buyers, buyer A, buyer B, buyer C, buyer A cares about these things, buyer B cares about these things, buyer B, C cares about these things. And then the willingness to pay looks like this across A, B, and C. And that's really where if you start challenging your exec team on those concepts, they'll at least start to like, one, put that stuff together and actually do the legwork and the research that they should be doing, which I'm certainly happy to go into.

But also they know that you're like on your game because you're like, I don't want to play this like send a thousand emails bullshit game. I want to go and I want to like make sure I'm sending and I'm talking to the right people so I can defend those price points and not have to discount myself to hell in order to get my quota. Yeah. And I think that's the problem, right? Is that like reps cave on pricing because they get beat up hard to much. But it's also because they don't truly understand the real value of what they're bringing to the table because they haven't really been under, you know, based on that persona, they don't understand what that persona does on a day-to-day basis to make their lives.

So, and I tell reps when I'd be interested in your take on this, you know, one of the things I tell reps to do is ask questions throughout the qualification process that seem relatively obvious, but are almost kind of like a throwaway question, but you do for a reason. And so here's an example, like one of mine obviously is selling sales training is, hey, what's your average contract value? Like what's your ACV, right? And if you say anything over 10, 20, $30,000, right? We're not having the conversation when it comes to price. Like I straight up don't discount anymore. And, you know, I always tell everybody the reason, you know, I think the number one most important thing at any stage of the sales process is a big fat pipeline because a big fat pipeline solves all problems, right?

Because you can be terrible at so many things and still be fine. Exactly. Like, well, fine. Because like when somebody tries to negotiate with me, I'm like, no, it's okay. Like, you know, because I'm booked out through August and a rate card, so if that's the case, I'm like, look, I don't need your business. I want it, but I don't need it, right? Yeah. You're a dog guy. Yeah, she, sorry. I'm sorry. She's like, if I let her out the door, then she's going to bug everyone else. That's all right. Bring her in. Come here, Sloan. Come here. Come here. What's her name? It's Sloan. Well, hey, Sloan. I don't know if you can see her. The screen's a little off. Relax, you're fine. Sorry. It's the only thing in the world where I become like a puddle of emotion and I'm like, oh, my little dog, you know, that kind of thing.

I get it, man. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So what I do is, yeah, obviously a big fat pipeline, but one of the things I say is like, look, I'll ask you what's your ACV, right? Yeah. And if you take 20, 30 grand and say my training is going to cost 20 grand and it's prospecting. Yeah. When it comes to negotiation, I'm like, look, what's your average ACV? 20 grand. How many people do you want to put in this training? 20 people? Like, I'm going to set a low bar here and let you know that each person is going to get one extra technique that drives one piece of business to the pipeline and it'll close. 20 times 20, that's 400 Gs worth of revenue, man. Like, stop talking to me about 20,000. We're having the wrong conversation.

Yeah, yeah. So are there things, like, do you recommend that for reps is to really find that kind of the things that you can use to combat? I think to me, it's like, so that's a really good one. I like that because it puts it in the context, right? It puts it in an ROI context because at the end of the day, the perfect pricing model is ROI in some capacity, but we all don't have the luxury of how we've built our product to really like measure that, you know, just because not all of us are going to be able to actually price based on that. I think some other things that you can do, one, I'd recommend just not discounting beyond 15% in general and always using the classic, which I'm sure you talked about.

I've actually seen you guys talk about this a little bit, like the gives and gets, right? Like, sure, I'm going to give you a discount, but you're not going to get this thing. And it might be something that you don't care about, right? You're like, ah, they're not going to, you know, they don't need that anyways, but like at least you're like giving that like quid pro quo situation kind of going on. But I think in addition to that, the one big thing to kind of think about is you're discounting typically sets you up for failure down the road. So as a sales rep, you might not necessarily care, but you're going to literally destroy your customer success team because all of a sudden you're setting up the wrong customer for the business.

And you might miss out on basically a clawback because all of a sudden that person churns within six months or whatever your contractual kind of clawback looks like. The other thing that I would mention, it's a little bit more tactical. I love in the discovery questions on a phone call, like you're going through, you're like, hey, what's the biggest problem with this? Who like, tell me about this? Who's the buyer? Blah, blah, blah. All these different things. I love going like, cool. So if we solve this problem tomorrow, at what point would that solution be way too expensive that you'd never consider purchasing it? And then like getting like, they're not always going to give you an answer, but then I follow it up with, all right, cool.

At what point is it just such a good deal? You're going to sign the contract today. And you can keep it really casual in that first call. Like you can diffuse them and be like, listen, like obviously we're going to tell you what we do. We're going to give you the pricing, but just out of curiosity, like how big of a pain point is this? At what point is it way too expensive to get this solution? Because then like one, you get if they're legit or not, right? Because in your case, if they're like, oh, I was only going to pay 500 bucks for my entire team to come to this training. You're like, we are so far apart that I have a lot of work to do, but you also have a lot of work to do to come down.

Or at the very least, you basically get into a world where it's like, okay, cool. Like we're on the same page. Here's our pricing. Here's everything that's going on. And at the very least you start to figure out, okay, interesting. They really care about this thing or that thing in this context of this pricing. So that actually brings up an interesting point about, I think I get it as far as your approach to pricing early, right? Yeah. Because I mean, a couple of the caveats here, pricing early, usually, you know, most reps get stuck because they're dealing with people below the power line, right? People who are non-decision makers. And when that, I always say people below the power line are focused on today or yesterday, which is usually pain.

People above the power line, it's usually focused pleasure. You know, below the power line, you're almost always out of the gate going to get how much does this cost? Whatever. Because they're being told what to do. Whereas I almost never get budget early on when it's an executive, right? Yep. But the philosophy on pricing, right? Some have the philosophy of don't talk pricing at all. Even like, for instance, take it out. Don't even make it. Don't even make your SDRs allowed to talk about pricing, period. And the goal there is to show value, show value, show value, and then talk about price so you can defend it. The other approach is talk pricing early so that you don't waste your time, basically.

But then, obviously, that frustrates me from a pure BANT qualification, budget, authority. You know, they say budget. Oh, we don't have. But, oh, click. That could have been an opportunity, right? But I think that the thing with budget, though, is like it's the budget dance all the time, right? Like, I don't know how many, I mean, obviously, you're, you know, in the thick of sales more than I am besides, and we just have one company as a sample size. But, like, most of the time, people don't want to give up the budget anyways, right? Like, oh, so, like, for us especially, people don't budget for pricing, like, software. Like, they don't normally budget for it. And so, for us, it's like, what's the pain?

Like, what is the pain? And at the very least, you start to figure out, like, the classic, like, what's the process? What is this? Who do we talk to next? Like, all that kind of stuff. And there are some deals where they come in real low versus what we are. And we know we have to go up if we really want that deal. Yeah, it's, you know, there's different ways to do it depending on the sales model. But I think, like, talking about pricing, at least for us up front, it really helps just given what we do. Yeah. I always like kind of giving. I like the middle ground. So, for instance, going back to the give-get stuff in the sense that when you say, all right, John, how much is this going to cost me?

Look, I'm happy to share you what, you know, give you a ballpark here. Help me understand. How many sales reps do you have? Like, what's your growth projections this year? You know, are you looking for online or on-site or a mix of the two? Yeah. And if they're like, well, I got 50 sales reps, I got two locations, and we're going to be adding 20 more and probably going to have to do a little bit of both, on-site and online. Okay. Well, you know, give or take, you're probably in the range of $40,000 to $60,000, right? Yeah. What do you think about that, right? And the goal there is to kind of say, are we even, like, to your point, are we even remotely close to that? Because if we're not, if you thought it was going to be $500, let's stop the madness here.

Let's get off the phone. Let me send you a couple blog posts. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Or I am obviously talking to the wrong person, right? This is not a decision maker or somebody who's going to even be close to making this decision, so I got to figure out a different approach. But if we're even in the ballpark, then, okay, now let's move up, and then I'll give you a much more defined price as we figure out the parameters here, right? Yeah. My other favorite there, we have one that I think has worked out really well, because with the Price Intelligently stuff, it's a very customizable, so, like, scopes look very different depending on the software implementation. For other software, it's kind of, like, pure, like, touchless SaaS, theoretically, right?

Yeah. But the one thing I'd love to say on, like, the multiscope is 80% of our deals are between X and Y. And X, I give an actual number, like, $20,000 and $50,000 or whatever, because that gives me a little bit of a ripcord where I can say, you know, there's some deals that are smaller than that, there's some deals that are much larger than that, but, you know, this is kind of 80%, and as we learn more, I'll be able to get you on, because it gives us that opportunity where, you know, if they're the wrong person, or if they're the right person, and they aren't prepared for sticker shock, I want that sticker shock up front, so I can talk to it, rather than, like, oh, crap, now I just put a scope in front of them, and we were all on board until they saw this, like, 5 to 10x what they were willing to pay, so, yeah, it's something that works pretty well.

Yeah. Here's something interesting I thought, I don't know if you've ever tried this, a good friend of mine, do you know Richard Harris, by any chance, from the Harris Consulting Group? Yeah, yeah, it sounds familiar, I don't know him personally, but yeah. So, I'm a big fan of Richard, and, you know, one of the things he started to play around with, which I think is kind of cool, and I've started to do it, is when you deliver your price, you actually end with, how do you feel about that? So, the idea there is to present price, and then, look, I don't, but, and literally give it, so how do you feel about that, and get them to say, right there, because, you know, everybody knows, it's like, oh, it's $10,000, and then the rep hums and haws and errs and ahs, and, but, you know, we could get, you know, if we need to, we could maybe der-der-der-der-der-der, right?

Yeah. So, they, because, and they're automatically giving that client an objection before they have it, right? Because my whole thing is, look, if the price is $10,000, or whatever it is, the price should be, when somebody says, John, what is the price? The answer should be $10,000, and then I should wait for you to go, holy shit, that's way more expensive than I was expecting, right? But a rep automatically puts in the discount, because they're like, well, it's $10,000, but it really depends on, and now, all of a sudden, look, I might have heard $20,000, $30,000, $40,000 from your competitors, and I heard $10,000 from you, and I was like, holy shit, that's actually reasonable. But then, as soon as I hear the word, butt, come out of your mouth, I ain't paying $10,000 anymore.

You know what I mean? So, what he does is, he gives the price, and then he says, how do you feel about that? So, trying to immediately get that response from them, to see, is this ridiculous, or is this uncomfortable, but doable, type of thing? What are your thoughts on that deal? I like that a lot, because I think the, it's not ideal, because ideally, you would put it out there, and obviously, someone would react, and you would wait, and just, like, sit there, like, the classic, like, whoever talks first, you know, that kind of thing. But I think, oftentimes, there's a lot of confusion with that, where, like, especially with Zoom, and everything, it's like, hello, are you there? Like, you know what I mean?

Like, that kind of thing. And that's why I really like that, because I think it, it puts the, it puts the onus on them immediately, and it's like, okay, so here, here's our scope, here's what's going on, and here's our price. Maybe beat, beat, how do you feel about that? I think that works out really well, because it, it gets in front of the emotional inclination of every, most sales reps out there, who want to go, ah, like, tell me something, tell me something, I'm insecure, like, that kind of thing, and I think that works out really well. Yeah, I've started to do it, just, you know, just because it, it's, it's weird, it's a little weird to do, but, like, the first few times, I kind of felt weird doing it myself, but now I'm kind of getting into the groove of just, oh, so how, so how do you feel?

And again, a lot of it has to do with how you deliver it, right? A hundred percent. I mean, for you, for your standpoint, what's your take on the, the impact of how you deliver pricing, like, literally, the, the, the tonality and the confidence that you have, how much of an impact that has on the, the client's response to it? Like, how much do you think that has an impact? Well, remember what we talked about, like, like, price is the exchange rate and the value that you're providing. And there's everything that goes into that, the product, the value propositions, the marketing, the brand, all of these different things. But you as a salesperson have probably the most power, right? Because even if it's the right packaging, the right buyer, all these things, if you deliver it half ass, then like, they're going to be like, oh, I guess this isn't great.

Right. But if you deliver like a terrible product in a really, really good way, you know, you could still sell it. You know, you don't want to be in that position, but you know, all of us have probably sold something that we were like, oh, this could be so much better. But I think what you're getting at is exactly what you were already alluding to, which is having the confidence. And I love the, you know, it's the assumptive type close, right? Which is basically like, yep. And so we're going to go through this, this and this, and it's $10,000 and just, you know, almost, almost roll through it, but still provide some opportunity for them to respond. And I don't know. I think if you know your customer, then it shouldn't, it shouldn't be an uncomfortable conversation because you should know like, yep, it's $10,000.

And if you're the right person who wants this, you know, that, that, that value is there. And it's my job to basically transmit that value to you by going through the right features, going through the ROI, going through those types of things and kind of going from there. And I think most sales pitches that I see, they're so feature focused and so functionality focused. They're not very customer focused. And again, with your pricing, your customer, they care about the features. There's probably like 20% that they're going to like, I want that one, want that one. I just want to make sure you have it. But most of the time, they just want to make sure that you're just going to help them. You're going to take away some sort of pain or add to some sort of, you know, pleasure of some sort.

And so it is really about delivering that in that context. That's really, really important. Definitely. And what's your take on this one? I, I've always said, you know, when I would, so when I sold at Xerox, right, Xerox was the premium product in the marketplace, whatever. And so, but I, there was something to back it up in a sense. We were the only company that had all of our own procure, you know, we did everything as a company, right? We didn't outsource anything. We didn't outsource. So I can, I can say, Hey, one throat to choke. We're one company. We don't outsource all these different things. Right. But I always. My gut check number here. Yeah. 30% premium. I could always justify, right?

Apples to apples compared to anybody else out there. Any other copier Xerox 30, you know, you got to expand the conversation somehow because that 50% premium is just not realistic. I think that, I think in, in, in an ideal world, you're a hundred percent right. And I think that if you, if you know your market and your market is somewhat competitive, you're still a hundred percent right. I think the problem is, is that what we found particularly in like the software space. And even if we expand it to generalized subscriptions, we're terrible at identifying our true competitors. Right. So it's, it's, it's, it's a bigger problem for me when it's like, oh, we're a CRM. So we're competing with Salesforce.

It's like, nah, like probably not. Right. You might be the CRM for healthcare providers or the CRM for chiropractors. And then all of a sudden your pricing might be a hell of a lot higher than Salesforce's because you're offering all this like niche functionality. Right. So I would say like in a true apples to apples comparison, 30% is, is probably like a good kind of Delta for brand equity, all that kind of stuff. You can push that to 50%, a hundred percent. And even if you find the right features and functionality, like, oh, we're going to provide HIPAA compliance or something like that for this particular type of customer. But I would say most of us, we think we can only demand 30% or we need to be on par.

And in actuality, we don't have our competitors. Right. And I think that most of our markets, like when we look at the actual data, most of our markets aren't as commoditized as we think. But again, apples to apples, I think you're a hundred percent. Right. Yeah. I just use that as kind of a gut check. And, and I think you're, uh, my product is X amount of percentage. I mean, yours is free. So it's a billion times percent more than yours does 75% of the functionality. And I keep telling them, you're talking to the wrong people. If you're having that conversation. Well, the one litmus for this is you kind of brought this up. Um, the one litmus for this is if you're on the phone and you're getting past like the initial discovery call and you keep here, like if you're selling HubSpot and you keep hearing about Marketo, you keep hearing about Marketo and every single call you have, let's say more than five out of 10 of the calls, you keep hearing about that competitor.

Then you're in a competitive market. That's a good litmus test. If it's something where, you know, you notice power BI out there and you notice that, but you don't hear it on the phone from your, your prospects, then you're, you're worrying about the wrong thing. And maybe you're going to hear about it, you know, in the future and you should worry about it now, but probably not from like, uh, on the line sales sales side. All right. So I think we could have this conversation for a while. I got one, but I got one more question. We cut it off at half hour just because, uh, I got ADD just like everybody else. But, um, but I do have one more question for you as far as price increases. So sales reps who are, and let's talk about not the must have stuff, the nice to have stuff, right?

Because there's, there's the must have stuff. And then like, look, Salesforce, like I'm going to raise my prices on you. Cause you've run your whole business off of this shit and I can't, you know what I mean? And yeah, that might force, as long as you don't increase it that much, like me, me making that change is brutal. Right. But nice to have stuff. Sales training is nice to have, you know, like these types of things. How do you suggest a sales rep going in for renewal, for instance, um, you know, a customer success manager goes into, Oh shit, I, we got to raise prices on this client. I know this isn't necessarily a must have, you know, how do I approach that just from the start? Like, you know, do I come out of 90 days early?

Do I address it in one of my QBRs? Do I wait until the end and spring it on them? Like, what's your thoughts on addressing a price increase? I think it happens. So, so we wrote a really good book and a couple of articles on this. It's free and I can share it for like the show notes, but it really comes down to it's, it's one, you should, you should know that you can justify it. Meaning your pipeline, you've tested it on your net new, or you've, because theoretically your existing customers should always be willing to pay more than your prospects because they've felt the brand, they've done all these different things. And so in that particular case, you should, you should feel that momentum towards an increased price.

Or if you're, you know, a business of this kind of sort, your volume just might be going up that you can start to raise your price just to like, you know, control that volume if you have a fixed, fixed amount. But once you know that the process should really start as, as far ahead as you can, I would say three to six months, because in that three to six months, probably three months in most businesses case, because you don't necessarily know that far in advance, you should start really communicating, Hey, this new feature is really helpful. Hey, I don't know if you know this, but we just won a bunch of business for you. Hey, we did this. Hey, we did that. Like start pointing those things out and you can actually measure this through NPS or whatever you're using for customer satisfaction.

And then once you see that go up and up and assuming you haven't had any major bugs or any major issues, that's when you can kind of go out and in the price increase conversation, what I normally like to do is I'd like to do what's called a grandfather discount, which basically means you go, Hey, you know, we've added all this functionality, all the stuff that you've reminded them about in the past few months. And you say, listen, we're going to increase your price, but we're going to give you your existing price for the next three, six, 12 months. And then you're going to go up to the increased price because you've been so loyal because you've been such a great customer. And that gives you a little bit of a ripcord where they can piss and moan about it if they need to.

And there's going to be some individual people that like you just weren't great to, or had bigger bugs with that you might need to like not communicate that price increase. But if you communicate the value and you've shown that for the previous three months, it actually goes over really, really well. And most people aren't like, Oh my God, thank you so much for raising my prices. Most people are kind of like, okay, that makes sense. And a lot of reps, especially in the sales side, because of some of the problems we talked about at the top of the half hour, they don't have the mindset to really understand that businesses know things cost money. Consumers know things cost money and they know if you add value and you increase the value, that things should cost more money.

And so it's a great conversation to have as long as you've done the legwork the three months before. Love it. Cool. Then just to summarize here, right? I think a lot of this has to do with confidence and how you present, right? Confidence in knowing you're buying personas, confidence in your price and knowing what goes into that price. And that's on leadership to help the sales reps. But if the sales reps don't know that, go seek it out. You know, and again, to your point, it'll actually show your executive team that like, oh, wow, this kid is a rep that cares, right? And wants to be good at this. Be, you know, figure out the value, that 20%, where it really makes a difference and really just hone in on that.

And then be as proactive as possible about reaching out. Last one on that. Do you proactively, like that's a give, right? Do you proactively give them that 30 day or that three, six, nine month, like grandfather thing? Or do you wait until they object to it and then give it to them? I normally would proactively do it. There's this weird thing where people, it's psychological that people have studied for a while. You're more likely to accept a price increase if it's a discount that's dropping off rather than if you're just straight up increasing it. So if you're a high ACV business, it probably won't matter that much. But if you're like a lower ACV, like below a thousand bucks a month, people typically answer or realize it and it'll go pretty well.

Like Netflix is a really good example. Netflix, they, it wasn't a grandfathering situation. They just were like, Hey, in two years, we're raising the price. And they were, they were pretty really upfront about it. And then it, most people kind of accepted it and were like, Oh, whatever. Okay. Love it. Cool. And will Patrick tell everybody else how they can find out more information? Oh, you got some great content from a blog standpoint. Where can people find you, follow you, all that stuff? Yeah, absolutely. Best thing to do is connect with me on LinkedIn. We do just a ton of stuff on LinkedIn. But I'm also at PC at ProfitWell.com. If you have any specific questions, it might take me a little bit while to get back to you if you're looking for free advice, but I will get back to you.

Even if you're looking for free advice, it's one of those things. We're really big on the community and educating the market. So yeah, just hit me up. Love it. And we'll put all your contact info in the post here as well as from the podcast standpoint. We'll make sure everybody gets access to that. And just from my standpoint on my end, just to let everybody know, I am out in London and Dublin this week. And I'm doing a little happy hour in Dublin. I'm going to be at the Clayton Hotel on Thursday, 530 in Leopardstown. Anybody who wants to come over and grab a drink with me, by all means, we can rap about shit, give away some free stuff. But if you want to join me there also, and also just a little plug to a good friend of mine, Treats Happen.

You got a dog there. I got to throw it out there. My guy, Lucas, who's actually on this, he runs a company called Treats Happen, which is all about like really good dog food and treats and everything for dogs. Take a look at them. All right. Cool. Awesome. Thanks, Patrick, for everything. And let's keep in touch. All right. All right. See you guys. Thanks for time. Make it happen. Have a good week. Later. Bye. Bye. Thank you.