This SalesCast is brought to you by, well, SalesQualia. Check out the Startup Selling Program, a 90-day program focused on finding customers, growing revenue and building your sales process.

In this episode, our special guest Patrick Campbell, Co-Founder and CEO at Price Intelligently, discusses the hardest parts of pricing products for startup CEOS, the fears associated with not making a sales because of price, his survey method for identifying the price prospects are willing to pay for your product, and how to deal with raising a product’s price and the associated retention drop off. Key areas covered:

• Understanding that pricing is a process that needs to be revisited regularly and how to avoid common mistakes startups make when pricing their products.
• Establishing value metrics for your product to help make clear to current clients and future prospects the worth of your product and potential price increases as you continue to develop your product.
• How to survey clients and prospects with four simple questions to discover what your product is actually worth to your market.
• Methods of retaining customers and avoiding harmful churn when raising your product price points as you build out your product.

Subscribe to the podcast on iTunes!

We hope you enjoy the podcast and would greatly appreciate feedback! Any suggestions on future topics you would like to hear covered and/or podcast guests you’d like to hear would be great! Enjoy!

Podcast Notes

03:26 – The hardest thing for companies to learn about pricing their products.

08:50 - How does an entrepreneur deal with the fear of not wanting to blow a deal?

11:56 – Always make sure that your price increase is worth it.

14:50 – Guidepost suggestions to try.

16:10 – Four main questions recommended to ask.

24:00 – Finding the value metric and making sure reinforce value with your price.

25:10 – How to handle customers who are used to pay per user and how to overcome that bureaucratic barrier.

31:20 – How would you recommend handling that price question when it’s too early to actually give a price?

39:30 – Recognizing the problem children.

42:00 – Handling a price range that’s large.

43:20 – When you’re better off charging more than trying to charge less.

48:30 – Should your price be exactly 100 or can it be 99?

Resources mentioned or related to this podcast

• Price Intelligently: Price Optimization Software.

• Price Intelligently, Blog

• Aytm.com Ask Your Target Market, Online market research.

• A No Bull, Straightforward Guide to Value Based Pricing Strategy by Eric Yu.

• Profitwell, Financial metrics for your subscription business.

• Wildbit – We create web products to help business

This SalesCast is brought to you by, well, SalesQualia. Check out the Startup Selling Program, a 90-day program focused on finding customers, growing revenue and building your sales process.

In this episode, our special guest Trish Bertuzzi, President and Chief Strategist for The Bridge Group, Inc., gives advice on hiring Sales Development Reps for startup CEOS, discusses the importance of hiring veterans and how beneficial they are to young companies, as well as a plethora of other great tactics and tips. Key areas covered are:

• Defining what sales development really means and how the process of forming this definition was a trigger event for Trish to write her new book, The Sales Development Playbook, a purely tactical look at sales development.
• Advice for startup CEOs when hiring SDRs on practices that hurt their company and alternatives to help make the most of these early hires.
• Reasons to outsource your company’s sales development functions and how to properly filter good outsource partners from the bad ones.
• How to properly use numbers to strengthen your value proposition and understanding the different variables of said proposition (#VariablesMatter).

Subscribe to the podcast on iTunes!

We hope you enjoy the podcast and would greatly appreciate feedback! Any suggestions on future topics you would like to hear covered and/or podcast guests you’d like to hear would be great! Enjoy!

Podcast Notes

02:15 – The Trigger event for Trish to write the book “The Sales Development Playbook.”

04:13 – How do you define Sales Development for people?

05:20 – The Five Whys. Why listen? Why Care? Why change? Why you? Why now?

06:45 – What advice would you give a team to stop doing now and start doing right away relating to sales development.

07:55 – What is the one thing startup CEOs should do that they’re not already doing?

10:00 – What’s the first thing startup CEOs should do where they misstep early in the process of setting up the sales development process?

12:56 – Why a 50/50 breakdown making a good hire.

13:30 – If you can’t afford to hire more than one, should you hire one?

14:15 – Reasons why outsourcing Sales Development Rep functions to a vendor fails.

16:05 – Why don’t startup CEOs spend more effort on the time piece of the investment?

18:15 – Why military to civilian transitions and job shifters are good targets for potential SDRs? 

20:00 – The one question to immediately ask to vet out if a candidate is worth pursuing in a formal interview process.

25:03 – After passing the 40 second interview, what’s the next part of that call that makes for a good SDR call. 

26:45 – How do you use numbers if you don’t know those could actually apply?

32:00 – How do you vet out whether or not somebody has budget early on?

34:28 – Why to choose a scale of 1 to 4.

36:05 – A skeleton key question to make a person not guarded or have their armor on to open up.

40:00 – Shutouts to make sure people hear the message.

41:02 – How to reach Trish.

Resources mentioned or related to this podcast

• The Sales Development Playbook, by Trish Bertuzzi.

• From Impossible To Inevitable: How Hyper-Growth Companies Create Predictable Revenue, by Aaron Ross, Jason Lemkin.

• Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling High-Tech Products to Mainstream Customers by Geoffrey A. Moore.

• Sales Hacker: The Leading B2B SaaS Sales Community.