Is Hiding Your Prices Hurting Your Business? [Endless Customers Podcast S.1 Ep.19]

Note: This transcript has been generated by AI and has not been checked for accuracy. 

Brian
0:00:00
All right, Alex, I want to talk about cost and price today. The longer that we wait as businesses to talk about cost and price on our website, the more we're setting ourselves up for failure, and the more we put ourselves in a defensive position when we start to talk to our prospects.

Alex
0:00:16
Wow, I guess we gotta talk about cost and price.

Brian
0:00:18
Let's go.

Alex
0:00:19
Let's go.

Brian
0:00:20
Let's go.

Alex
0:00:29
Welcome back to the show. My name is Alex Winter and we are joined today by Brian Casey,

Brian
0:00:36
sales and marketing coach and trainer here at IMPACT. Brian, what's up buddy? What's up Alex? How you doing? I'm good. I'm good. How are you? Good man. It's a Thursday afternoon. Daylight savings time has happened and it means it's

Alex
0:00:48
not going to be dark when I leave work. That's right. It's 72 degrees here in Connecticut today so I'm not complaining either. But we got to get into the topic of the day today, which is talking about cost and price. And you're an expert at this. You train a lot of companies. You talk with a lot of sales folks, a lot of marketing people about the importance of cost and price. And here at IMPACT, we are very open and honest about how important it is to put cost and price on your website and why it's so critical to address it right up front. So before we get into best practices, can you just give a high level why it's important

Alex
0:01:17
to talk about cost and price?

Brian
0:01:19
Yeah, I mean, the why it's important is because the people that are gonna buy from you care about it. That is the ultimate easy answer. Whether or not you get asked about it in the sales process, we know it to be true that people care about how much they're gonna spend and for however much they're gonna spend, what they're gonna get out of it as well. And so if we choose to make a conscious decision

Brian
0:01:44
not to talk about cost and price, we're choosing to handicap the prospect's ability to buy from us, essentially. And ultimately in this world that we're in now,

Alex
0:01:56
in everything that we've seen,

Brian
0:01:58
it's like the market is moving towards less sales conversations, more self-guided paths. It's following really the model of like the SaaS world where it's like, hey, you know, you can sign up without talking to a salesperson. And not that there's probably ever gonna be that model for every single industry, but the more that the market moves in that direction,

Brian
0:02:19
the more that knowledge is power and our ability to empower a customer or prospect to make an educated decision that includes how much it costs to work with us has to be a part of how we win business.

Alex
0:02:32
I couldn't agree with you more. And nowadays with technology, where it's at with artificial intelligence, with all the tools that are coming out, people wanna be able to learn and self-discover and find the prices and find what they're looking for themselves without having to talk to somebody. I am definitely one of those people.

Alex
0:02:45
But for a lot of business leaders out there, they may not agree with this approach. Can you share some stories or have you had some examples that you could share about some resistance you've seen and reasons why maybe certain industries feel differently, but some of the resistance as to why people don't wanna talk about cost and price?

Brian
0:03:03
Yeah, so luckily I think a lot of businesses that are winning right now have recognized that this is something they need to do. I would say two years ago, one of the biggest pushbacks we got from the they ask, we answer lens was cost on our website. That is not the biggest resistance point that we're currently getting,

Brian
0:03:23
but when that does come up, generally, people get nervous that the putting price and cost on our website is us putting a price list up and us being able to say, this is exactly what it's gonna cost to work with us down to the penny, and that's not what we mean. You gotta give someone an idea of ranges. How much it might cost you to work with us,

Brian
0:03:48
how much it's going to influence the cost if you do this, or if there's certain factors that are gonna drive down the cost or up the cost of your product or service. A lot of the pushback that we have historically gotten is people have a very nuanced pricing strategy. Like it's really easy for a SaaS company or for a like a product-based company to say, yeah, we'll put price up on our site, no problem.

Brian
0:04:12
It's easy, the price is this. When you have a service-based business or when you have like the ever-dreaded word value-based business, it's more difficult for them to say, like, how could we do this in a way that doesn't handicap our ability to sell? Because there's a lot of sales organizations that have the ability to hit different margins and hit different price points within that margin.

Brian
0:04:36
And we don't want to take the ability from the sales team to, to do their job. And so that's kind of the biggest resistance we still see is if it feels like. We're handicapping the ability of the sales team to do their job. Or if it feels like we have a not as easy to understand solution where price is a little bit more nuanced and ultimately the concept doesn't change. Yeah, you're probably not like a product company going to put a direct price up on your site, but in your top navigation of your website, if someone doesn't see a menu button that says price or cost or something like that, and they have to search for it,

Brian
0:05:19
that's gonna bring a bunch of frustration. And on that page, we just talk about how much it's gonna cost broadly. We can do ranges, we can talk about factors. We just have to address the topic. We can't be blind to it.

Alex
0:05:32
Yeah, I couldn't agree more. And I said it earlier, I'm definitely one of those people that bottom line is about price. Everyone has a budget range that they're in for whatever product or service that they're in or that They're looking for so if you can't find that It gets frustrating. It's real easy to be like screw this I'm going to another website I'm going back to Google or whatever search engine

Alex
0:05:49
I'm going to find I'm gonna find what I'm looking for and I'm gonna find a company that does provide me those answers, right?

Brian
0:05:54
Yeah, I think another thing now that we're kind of talking through this is is people don't wanna drive the price conscious people. If you're a business and you're like, if someone's big thing that they care about is price, they're not my A1 customer. That's not someone that I want to work with. Totally, that's usually a red flag for salespeople, yeah. Yeah, but ultimately, the pushback there would be,

Brian
0:06:17
are there people that are outside of the range of what it would cost to work with you that will just never be a good fit? And the answer is yeah. There's people that are never going to be able to afford what you can do if you have a high cost volume. And ultimately, like we need to make that known. We don't need to flood our sales team with bad leads, with poor quality leads that they're never going to be able to close and upsell or try to like really work into something that they'll never be able to afford because that's when you start to feel the strain as a salesperson of pushing.

Brian
0:06:52
And that's really difficult. So that's another one of those resistance points that even if you have someone that is price conscious, there's still a number that they have in their head in terms of what they're looking to accomplish from a price standpoint because they know how much they're expecting to return out of it and it's never gonna be a one-to-one ratio

Brian
0:07:11
between those two things.

Alex
0:07:11
Right, yeah, that's a good point. There's also a difference between price and value, so like providing value versus like somebody who only cares about the dollars and cents. Like real buyers, I feel like price is important and it should be considered, but they also care about the quality of the services they're going to get or the product or whatever. Like there's layers to it that's more than just the sticker price basically. So you had mentioned, you said a few things that I thought were interesting about sales teams when they're interacting with potential leads and having these conversations.

Alex
0:07:41
How can you work cost and price into the process? Or like what's a good way to address it with your sales team if you're a sales leader, a sales manager, and your sales team's struggling maybe with this conversation. What are some tips and tricks to help these people have these conversations in a meaningful way?

Brian
0:07:56
So I actually did this exercise earlier today with one of my clients. And the way that we did this is, let's ask this in the worst possible way. And then let's just break down that question and talk about all the reasons it's bad. And so the worst version of that question of bringing up cost and price is like,

Brian
0:08:14
hey, how much can you afford? Or a better version would be, what's your budget? What's your budget, I was just gonna say that, yep. Or how much are you expecting to pay? Like any of those would be really bad versions of like how do we get to the point where we even start to talk about cost and price. But it is so critical that in our early

Brian
0:08:33
like initial conversations with anybody that we're talking to, that we do have an understanding of what their budget is without having to ask them the question of what's your budget. Because most of the time when you ask someone what their budget is, they don't have like a good idea of how to come up with a budget for the thing that you offer.

Brian
0:08:52
It's weird to say that, but I can talk to multiple people that I've worked with that didn't have budget, and then when they found out the value that's provided, they're like, I need to find the money to pay for that. Right, then they're all of a sudden like amped up at finding the dollars to make it happen, because they see the value.

Alex
0:09:12
Yeah. Once it makes sense. But if I just start out with, you know, what's your budget? How much are you hoping to spend? Like, I'm gonna get a bad answer. And so, first things first, we never start there in the sales process.

Alex
0:09:24
I'm not a sales expert, but it sounds like too, as a salesperson, if you ask that question, once you do that, then the ball is in the buyer's court, and you lose control of the conversation, like immediately, because once you ask that question, what's your budget, or what are you thinking about spending, then the table turns

Alex
0:09:40
and the conversation shifts to them really leading that charge it sounds like. Is that right, saying that?

Brian
0:09:45
Then you've created a beat to the bottom, like race to the bottom style conversation. Yeah, okay. When you start with budget and they tell you what their budget is, they're probably gonna give you a lowball answer because they don't want to think that you're gonna just gouge them for everything that they can afford.

Brian
0:10:00
Two, they're probably not gonna have a good answer for it. And you could create recommendations for the things that you can provide that would be totally misaligned with what actually is gonna help them if they're working off bad information.

Alex
0:10:13
Yeah, that makes sense. So for salespeople, right, instead of asking the what is the budget question, you know, it almost plays a little bit into the assignment selling piece. So I'm bringing the ask and answer into this conversation a little bit here about how can you get ahead of these conversations,

Alex
0:10:29
how can you demonstrate the value and ask the questions and have the right conversations that lead to cost and price in a good way and not in a negative way?

Brian
0:10:38
Yeah, so at some point in your sales process, whether it be before your first call or maybe after your first call or before your second call, you should be sending them a piece of content that details what it's gonna cost to work with you because that is a qualifier or disqualifier piece of information that is never going to be untrue. If there are legitimate budgets in which you can work with

Brian
0:11:03
that have a small point and a big point, they need to know that to say like, are we even in the range? Because if they're not, the ideal situation is they kick themselves out of our sales process and we don't have to spend time trying to convince them of something. Now I know that's going to have a very visceral reaction for sales team members because you're

Brian
0:11:24
going to say, but if I just have the conversation with them, I think they're going to be able to say, I can't afford it.

Alex
0:11:31
They're going to feel like they can push there but what I'm talking about- I'm so good at sales, I can turn them, I can change the conversation. Maybe some people can and there are a lot of great sales folks out there, so maybe that is possible, but it seems like it's an uphill battle versus you trying to find a path of least resistance.

Brian
0:11:48
Yeah, so that's why I think it's so critical, instead of asking what's your budget in the first call, is that you have them state what they want to be true. And so like a version of that would be, if you look forward a year or so, and this problem that you have, whatever the problem may be, is completely solved and it is aligning with and exceeding your expectations. Talk to me about everything that's happening in your business. Talk

Brian
0:12:17
to me about everything that's true from a sales and marketing standpoint and they're gonna tell you where they want to be, you can talk into the financial aspect of it at that point. Okay, so you said you wanted to be here, here, here. If that was all happening, from a Rev standpoint, where would you be at? How does that compare to where you're at now? And so then there's this gap.

Brian
0:12:42
And once we have a gap, that's when we can actually position a solution to cover up the gap.

Alex
0:12:49
That makes sense, yeah.

5
0:12:49
But we're different part with that.

Brian
0:12:51
What's your budget? We're having a bad conversation from the get.

Alex
0:12:56
That's a great way to provide value is to establish the gap. What are your goals? Where do you see this going? What does success look like? Establishing that and then reverse engineering from there. That makes a lot of sense to me. This is cool for sales teams that are talking to prospects or that are having conversations either through email or the phone, Zoom, whatever the case is,

Alex
0:13:14
what can sales teams do to leverage their CRM or on their website to also have these conversations where the users can just self-discover? So are there calculators or are there tips and tricks for that as well where you can set up some of these tools

Brian
0:13:27
that these businesses have to their advantage?

Alex
0:13:30
Yeah, like we talked about,

Brian
0:13:31
the world is moving towards this, let me do it on my own. I'm shopping at Target and you come up to me and say, can I give you any, is there anything I can help you with? And you say, no, I'm just browsing. That is the way of the world right now, right? And it's going to continue moving in that fashion, just browsing. And if we can create tools that allow someone

Brian
0:13:53
to input certain details about their business and get an idea based on those factors of what they might expect to pay, and that's a self-guided approach, that is so helpful for the user. There's not a lot of companies, depending on your industry, I'll use that as a kind of a caveat statement,

Brian
0:14:14
depending on your industry, there might not be a lot of people that have the ability to tell you what you're gonna expect to pay with a tool online, whether it be a cost calculator or a ROI calculator that really helps you take the self-guided approach.

Alex
0:14:30
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And that also means that there's opportunity there. Because if a lot of people in your industry, what specific industry you're in, if they're not doing that, there's an opportunity for you to own that before anyone else does. Which is, there's huge potential for growth there.

Alex
0:14:44
So talk to me too a little bit about the symbiosis of marketing and sales and how marketing teams can help sales teams come up with calculators or come up with ways to position this and to educate buyers so that they go from just browsing to actually interested in making a purchase.

Brian
0:15:01
Yeah, step one would be you should have an article and a video on your site that detail the cost of your service or your product on a broad and general basis. So, here at IMPACT, how much do sales and marketing training cost? It's a video and article on our site. That is step one. Everybody can do that today because it's not about your company.

Brian
0:15:24
It's about the industry as a broad statement. Second step is do it for your services as well. So create the article, create the video, make it a little bit more specific to you and the certain factors that will drive up and down cost. That would be step two. Step three is get a pricing page up. You get a pricing page up that has that same information, but instead of people having to find it on their own

Brian
0:15:48
by poking around on your website, they can see it in the top navigation of your website. Step four would be you take that pricing page that you created and you put a cost calculator or an ROI calculator on that page. So not only do people see an idea of how much they might expect to pay, but they can do a calculation to say how much am I gonna spend or what's my potential

Brian
0:16:11
expected return if I were to use these guys. So everybody can do step one, everybody should be able to do step two, step three and step four is like what not a lot of companies are doing right now, it's a real opportunity.

Alex
0:16:27
Yeah, the calculators, I love them. Even on some sites where I know I can't afford some of the things I want to purchase, I still love just messing around and seeing what's possible and at least giving me a better sense of what it's actually gonna cost or what it could be. So with that, again, you work with a lot of clients. Do you have an example or a story you could share with us

Alex
0:16:46
of a client that maybe wasn't doing this very well or was hiding their cost and price, didn't really want to disclose that stuff and has since changed their, you know, the mindset and now it's just working really well for them.

Brian
0:16:59
Yeah, so there's a lot of different industries. Ultimately, I think to one of the ones that we're actually doing right now. So I got a client that is in the captive insurance space. And for those unaware, which I was as well, like this is self insurance for businesses. Instead of paying the traditional insurance market and having rising premiums each year,

Brian
0:17:24
you have the ability to control how much you pay based on how safe and secure of a company you are and if you're a good company. Very cool, I didn't know that. I'm learning that too. So I was gonna ask you what that meant, so very interesting.

Alex
0:17:40
Yeah.

Alex
0:17:40
Yeah.

Brian
0:17:41
And they're now building two calculators that are gonna just totally shock that entire industry. So some of the most common questions that he gets asked are like, how much do I have to put in? What's my risk? What would I be making if I did own my own insurance company? And he's creating two self-assessment tools right now. One is a ROI calculator, essentially.

Brian
0:18:06
And Warren, if you're hearing this, sorry that I called it an ROI calculator. But this is basically a, how much have I paid in premiums over the last five years? How many claims have I made and the dollar value of those claims? And how profitable am I to the insurance industry? Because if I'm as a company profitable

Brian
0:18:27
to the insurance industry, I could be making money as my own insurance company and not sending money out to the insurance world, to my insurance carrier. So he's doing that. And it may be the first one in the captive insurance space that will be created, which is gonna be just a total landscape shifting

Brian
0:18:50
type of tool for that space.

Alex
0:18:52
That's enormous, because that's a huge bone of contention for a lot of businesses, and everyone knows how much insurance costs these days for individuals and especially for corporations and for businesses, so to be able to not leave money on the table, that could be a game changer.

Brian
0:19:07
Yeah, and I think about all of these, so if we talk about the power of these tools and talking about cost and price on your website. Captive insurance has like a bad rep. There's like some bad characters in the captive insurance space that have done like some shady things. Um, and so there's a lot of fear and doubt about this, like breaking the traditional mold.

Brian
0:19:27
You're going from paying, you know, someone who's tried and true as a, as a business insurance carrier and you're your own company now with your own risk and liability as an insurance company, even if you're not an insurance company. And if they don't have that information about how profitable am I to the insurance industry, that nobody's telling them. No insurance company is saying,

Brian
0:19:52
hey, this is how profitable you are for us. But if they're shining a light on that and they're able to say, this is how much money you're making for the insurance industry, do you prefer that you take on some risk and make profit off of your insurance, or do you want to continue down the path that you're on?

Brian
0:20:10
Unless someone sees that for themselves, they're never gonna break the traditional thing that they've done, because it's so safe. Like sticking with rising insurance premiums on the business side, it's a really safe thing to do.

Alex
0:20:21
No, it totally is, it's safe, and the psychology behind it is it makes sense to want to play the safer route. But you're also leaving a lot of money on the table that could be going towards good things to help scale your business versus throwing it to these insurance companies. But the big piece for me is there's self-discovery there.

Alex
0:20:39
You can tell somebody this until you're blue in the face. But if they can do a calculator, see the real numbers, they can understand it for themselves and not feel pressured, that's how you shift the mindset, in my opinion. That's a game changer.

Brian
0:20:53
Just imagine this guy reaching out to you and being like, hey, did you know that instead of paying the insurance company, you could actually be making money and own your own insurance company? You're gonna feel like he's in a dark alley and he's just opened up a trench coat and he's showing you some watches. Check out all my watches.

Brian
0:21:06
Yeah, totally, dude.

Alex
0:21:07
It's sketched right off the get-go.

Brian
0:21:09
Versus there's a tool that can mathematically back up the fact that you're profitable in the insurance industry and what you could be making, and you can say, oh, I did this tool. I didn't even have to talk to a sales guy, but they told me how profitable I am and what we would have made if we were in our own captive insurance company

Brian
0:21:29
over the last three years. Yeah, wow, very cool. So thank you for sharing that,

Alex
0:21:34
and Warren, thanks for letting us in on the insights of the back end of how all that works, but are there any other examples, maybe it is Warren and his company, but like sales reps that have set up a calculator or that have started to put this into practice and they get sales calls that are just like, hey, I'm ready to go, I know exactly

Alex
0:21:56
how much this is gonna cost, where do I sign? Like how do we just close this thing and get it going? Have you had experiences with that that has shifted the mindset?

Brian
0:22:03
Yeah, so there's a flooring company that we worked with about a year ago. And they put price up on their website. A lot of their competitors did e-commerce style pricing. But it was really incumbent upon the user to figure out how much it was gonna cost them. And ultimately the cost that you're gonna find in like Home Depot or something like that

Brian
0:22:25
is never what it's gonna cost to actually put a new floor in your home. And so they put together a lot of pricing articles. They didn't actually even build a tool. They just started about pricing a different way than they ever have. And they are a Costco authorized reseller. So if you're to walk into Costco

Brian
0:22:43
and you see the big like banners on your way out, if you buy Costco flooring, they'll install it. And it's actually all done through them in their area. So this was about six months into working with us. Costco had approached them and said, hey, what are you guys doing?

Alex
0:23:00
And they were like, what do you mean?

Brian
0:23:02
And they were like, we're looking at our regions across the country. And you guys have had the most growth of anybody in this very short time frame, and we don't know why. No kidding, wow.

Alex
0:23:14
So they have corporate, Costco corporate, which is a gigantic corporation, asking a local, regional, Loring company. Wow.

Brian
0:23:23
Wow, that's impressive.

Alex
0:23:23
So what happened?

Brian
0:23:25
Where did that conversation lead? Like, what were they doing differently that made them stand out so much more compared to everybody else? Yes, I mean, transparently talking about cost and price on their website was one of the big things. They also started doing assignment selling. They also started doing more education

Brian
0:23:41
throughout the entire sales process and really helping people to take a self-guided, self-qualification path to their sales process. But it's a lot of things that came together. It's not like one direct thing, but in that time frame, they really started talking about cost and price in a much different way than they ever have before.

Alex
0:24:00
Fascinating. So, it really does work. Whether you want to talk about it or not, the ones that are talking about it clearly are having some serious positive gains from doing so and from implementing it. Wow, I'm impressed, man. Is there anything else that we haven't covered today

Alex
0:24:14
that we should talk about for businesses out there that are thinking about cost and price or that maybe are not sure what to do for next steps?

Brian
0:24:21
I would say if we, in our initial conversations with people, are steering away from understanding what they're looking to do, and getting an idea of how much it's going to cost, we're probably setting ourselves up for much tougher conversations later. So as odd as it feels like to talk about price and cost early in sales conversations,

Brian
0:24:44
seems to be one of those things that we wanna hold close to the vest until we feel like we've checked all the boxes. We're really putting ourselves in a defensive position, in a position where we're gonna have to justify cost later, unless we just come out and just say, hey, have you seen our cost article? Have you used any of our pricing tools?

Brian
0:25:06
Just to make sure you have a good idea before we even jump too deep into this, that we could be a good fit for each other. Yeah, that's a really excellent point too

Alex
0:25:13
that I hadn't thought about until you just said where like a lot of salespeople, in my experiences too, will keep it close to the chest. They'll have multiple conversations, which equates to how much time are you spending with this prospect only to get to that final, like hey, here's the price, and then they don't wanna buy because they weren't expecting that price.

Alex
0:25:29
And then all that time that you wasted on somebody that really wasn't qualified or that could have been approached differently. So that's definitely something for salespeople to keep in mind, that time is money, and you gotta be mindful of that. Brian, it's always awesome having you on the show. Thanks for all your insights and your expertise.

Alex
0:25:45
For people listening and for people watching, if they have follow-up questions, how can they get in touch with you if they wanna pick your brand?

Brian
0:25:50
Yeah, connect with me on LinkedIn, send me an email, bcasey@impactplus.com, or you can even find me through the team page on our site. Excellent, all right, everybody,

Alex
0:26:01
thanks for tuning in, thanks for thanks for tuning in, thanks for listening. We'll see you on the next episode.

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