Hello, and very good day, everyone. Welcome to Let's Talk Pricing, the official podcast of the Professional Pricing Society. I'm Kevin Mitchell from PPS, and I'm very happy that you're with us for today's episode. Today we're going to be talking about equipping sales teams to build pricing power. And we all know that pricing power isn't just about the numbers, it's about execution.
Your pricing strategy is only as strong as your sales team's ability to defend value and to avoid unnecessary discounts. So how do you make sure that they have the right tools, structures, and confidence to uphold your prices effectively? And to answer that, I'm joined by Lori Riboski and travels Travis Humblebee from Holden Advisors. Lori Riboski has 15 years of experience in B to B industrials and manufacturing. She specializes in customer value research and price model design.
She has worked in pricing, marketing, analytics, and engineering. She holds an MBA and ABS in Mechanical Engineering from Northern Illinois University, and Lori got her certified Pricing Professional her CPP in 2021. Travis Umpleby has spent 25 years in sales strategy and capability development. He coaches teams on negotiation techniques and pricing confidence. He's a master facilitator for negotiating with backbone programs.
And he is an also, he also is, I'm sorry, an adjunct professor at Utah Valley University. So, Lori Travis, welcome to the show. We are very excited to have you here. Thanks for having us. Thanks, Kevin. Thanks for inviting us to also be a part of your conference coming up and to be able to teach this workshop. We'd love to be able to share ideas and to gain insights from from people that are participating in your conference.
Definitely, yes, we're very much looking forward to your workshop at the PPS conference coming up, will be in Dallas from May 6th to 9th. So thank you for the reminder there, Travis, appreciate that as well. All right, so we're going to start today by talking about the relationship between pricing teams and sales teams. And a lot of companies struggle with aligning these two functions. Sometimes we're too siloed.
Sometimes there can be, to put it politely, maybe a little healthy competition between the two. Sometimes there can be a lot of discussions about how pricing and sales can partner more effectively. So from your experience, what are some of the biggest roadblocks to getting pricing and sales on the same page? That's really a good question. And I wanted to call it something that I read in your brochure for this upcoming conference that I thought was really insightful and too often
it's overlooked you. You say on that brochure that and it's right on the front page, it says, hey, we're doing this to empower pricing and price adjacent teams to really kind of create revenue. And I just thought that's so insightful that it really is about pricing adjacent teams. You mentioned the silos and that is something that we see happens
way too often. We do things to improve our pricing capabilities and we do things to increase our sales capabilities, but we rarely do things that combine these two and improve our sellers ability to communicate and achieve pricing alignment, right. So this is something that I think the silo perspective is something that eliminates pricing power, right? It there's either pricing, you can get really good at pricing and you can get really good at
selling. But if you don't bring those two together, you don't have pricing power. You have good sales teams and good pricing teams. Absolutely, Yeah. Without that combination, without that partnership, it's really more of an academic exercise until things really get out there to your marketplace and to your customer base as well. All right, another question. Price leakage is a huge challenge for companies. What are some common causes of price leakage and how can companies structure their
pricing models to prevent this? Well, by far, discounting is the biggest contributor to price leakage. Often your sales teams are getting pressure when they're out in the field and that knee jerk reaction is just to give a discount. It's the easy answer, but it's not really addressing the underlying issue of why those customers are asking for a discount anyway. Is it because they're just used to asking it and used to getting
it? Is it just maybe you're offering them more than they need and so they don't want to pay that price because they don't need half of what you're giving them anyway? So an example from a client we worked it with before, they were an equipment manager and they found manufacturer and they found that their sales reps were offering discounts all across the country to different customers and they couldn't figure out what was going on.
So once you started evaluating what their customers needed, we were able to see that there were different needs by different segments, There were different needs in different areas of the country. So we were able to work with them to really align their offering and the pricing that went along with that for each segment and each region.
So once the sales team got equipped with that, they had all the tools they needed to go out and sell and they had the right price, the right product for the every situation. And instantly they were starting to see that reduction in the discounts that were being given. Very nice. Yeah. Thank you for the insights there, Lori. A great example of how we can get everyone essentially on the same page and working together there. So I appreciate that.
Thank you very much. And now let's talk about some of the strategies that help sales teams sell with confidence and protect margins. So Lori, I know from our dealings together and from knowing you for quite some time that you are an expert in pricing analytics and how you deliver customer value. How do you talk about that?
So with your experience in pricing model design, customer value research, and some related things, tell us about some of the key elements that make a pricing structure effective for the sales team. Sure. It really comes down to understanding what your clients needs are and then matching the value you provide to what those customers are looking for. So another example for you, we worked with a client that offered legal documents to their
customers. The problem was they kind of offered instead of an all or none approach, it was an all or one approach. You could pay for a monthly subscription that gave you access to all of their documents or you could just buy 1 document at a time as you needed it. The problem was they had a lot of customers that didn't need everything and didn't want to pay for it, but they needed enough that buying one at a time was annoying. So they were either overpaying or having a nuisance in how to
get what they needed. So this was a great project for those of you pricers out there, the data nerds. We were able to really get into the details of their data and we started detecting patterns. So we started seeing that different segments, different users tended to buy the same types of documents and it just led to a natural fit to create different offer packages to these customers. So what we're hoping to do in our workshop that's coming up is to give attendees this same experience.
So we're going to be able to offer them a sample case that they can use, and it's going to come with their own data set so they can get in there and get their hands dirty and start detecting these same patterns to develop offerings. And then when they're done with the conference, they can go home and look at their own company's data and hopefully be able to do the same thing to start matching the value of their offering to what their clients actually need.
Yeah, excellent. That's a great example of pricing people since we have the tendency if we're doing our jobs effectively to be in the middle of everything and to be able to take elements from overall macroeconomic data from our customer responses from internal departments on what they're saying. But that's a great example of how a pricing team in conjunction with your work as well, of course was able to create new products and new
services for their team. So that's something where you're you have the ability to take all the information that comes to you as a center of a lot of facets of the business organization and use all of that essentially to move things forward. So thank you for the example there. And another question, when it comes to upselling strategies, what should pricing teams be doing differently to help sales teams align Austin, to align, I'm sorry offers with that customer value?
So being able to provide your customers with options is really important and it helps with that upsell opportunity. So we often recommend kind of a good, better, best strategy, which is allowing your customers an easy entry point, a way of experiencing your offer and your value at that base level, but it also provides options for them to move to higher value packages when they need them. So a great example people could relate to is if you think of all the streaming options out there,
you have so many choices. So first, you can choose which company fits your needs. Unfortunately for me, it tends to be almost all of them because every member of my family has a totally different need. So I may prefer watching Netflix, but my 10 year old daughter wants anything Disney. So of course we have to have Disney Plus too. But beyond that, once I choose those companies, I can choose
which package I want. So I can go in entry level and watch the commercials and deal with those things. Which for me is fine because when I grew up we had normal TV and commercials were a thing. So it doesn't bother me. However, my kids keep nagging me that we should upgrade because they want that ad free experience. But until they start contributing to that payment, we're just going to stick where we're at.
So you can see, just offering different packages gives people choices of where they want to be, and you can always upgrade later. And this concept works the exact same way with B to B as well. Everyone wants options and they want to be able to align what they need with what you're offering and what their budget is.
Yeah, absolutely. It's a great way to let your customer base help you with your own segmentation because some of your, even if you're B to B, you have some people as you mentioned, who are the equivalent of I only want Disney or I only want Netflix, Netflix or I want any and all of the above. So understood. Thank you very much, Lori. Appreciate that. And Travis, I know that some of your areas of expertise are sales negotiation, capability development, amongst other
things there. So a couple questions for you. I know that you have been a trainer for quite some time. You spent years coaching sales teams through negotiating with backbone. What are some of the biggest mistakes that sales reps make when they defend their company's price? Oh, I'm going to say something that's a little controversial. I think one of the biggest mistakes that sells people make is selling. That sounds interesting. Yeah, Well, so and, and here's
the reason. So we have research that actually backs up that customers don't engage with the sales Rep until they're almost 75% through the decision making process. And and that seems backwards because the sales guy who knows their business and their products better than the sales guy. So why are they waiting so long to engage with these people? And the answer is that they don't want the sales pitch, right?
They know that the minute I start engaging with the sales guy, I'm going to get this heavy pitch. And I don't want that. And so they wait until they've already done all the research on their own and essentially decided on the solution that they want. And then when they engage the sales Rep, it's all just about negotiating price. And then it's very hard to defend your value at that point because the customers already decided what the value is, that they want, what they care about.
And so one of the things that we spend a lot of time doing is how do we engage with our customers in a different way to uncover value, to uncover the needs of the customers. We know that really what they're trying to do is make money. So we need to understand what's the hurdles that's standing in their way of making money and how do we uniquely solve that problem. And then it becomes a very easy process when we get to the cell stages at the end.
Understood. So really you are coaching teams so much not don't be necessarily a salesperson where you think kind of inside out here are my benefits, here's what we can do for you, but you're kind of reversing that and saying what are the issues that would work best for my customer and how can I be the solution there. So it's really kind of a solution standpoint instead of a sales standpoint, if I'm understanding that correctly. That's right, you need to be.
You need to be more exploratory. You need to be more discovery with your customer. Understood. All right. And another question how can organizations improve the collaboration between pricing and sales teams so that pricing fences aren't seen as barriers, but instead they could be seen as a strategic tool or an initiative? Yeah. So This is why I brought up that sellers need to do less selling
and more discovery. Just think about from A and like, let's be honest, we're talking to pricing people. That's who's here listening to this and they look at me and say, sellers, they just cause me problems, right? What would a pricer do if the salesperson came back to them and said, hey, this is the problem that our customers are having and this is the solution that we have. Can you help me figure out how our solution is impacting their business? How are we creating more revenue
for this? And my experience has been that pricing people love to do that. They love to solve these problems. They like to get in with the data and wrap the numbers around it and come up with solutions. To be honest with you, they like to do it more than the salespeople do. That's why the salespeople bring it to them. And then the sellers love it when the pricing people go to them and say, hey, here is a solution and here's some alternatives if this isn't exactly what they're looking for.
It helps really improve the conversation that customers are having with their their sellers, that buyer seller relationship. And so by doing this value discovery, we we're bringing what sellers can bring more insights into the organization that pricers can use to create better solutions and options. And really to Laura, to Laurie's point, it's the tools. They can create more tools. So we're not sending them out with a hammer and telling them fix all construction issues with
a hammer. Sometimes what you need is a screwdriver. You need to just tweak this one a little bit. You don't need to just keep bludgeoning it over the head. And the tools that pricers can create with the diversity that Lori was talking about really makes that powerful. Absolutely. Yeah. Thank you so much.
And I know from my experience, you know, even going back to a certain Mr. Reed Holden and negotiating with Backbone and the books that he and Jeet Mukherjee and others in your organization have written, that value discovery and how you handle that is such a big part of the process.
And it really gives us a way to be more outside in, to think about this from our customers perspective, to use a little game theory there to think if I were in their shoes, what would be the things that my organization offers that would be really, really value valuable to them.
So value discovery, as you mentioned is such a big part of it. And that's something that pricing people and revenue managers, that's something that we can be really attuned to with our broader notions and our broader knowledge of what's going on with the customer base at all instead of what's just, instead of just what's going on in one particular geography or sales territory or something
like that. It's a case where we have to be more universal and say, hey, I heard something in Rhode Island where this group of customers really valued AB and CI. Wonder if in larger organizations in Texas and California if that would work as well. So understood. And another question for you, please. In your experience, what role does sales training and capability development play in strengthening a company's overall pricing power?
So this is a good point you had called out earlier that you know, I have all these years of working with sales team and helping them do negotiating with backbone and, and and other sales programs. The irony is, is that I started especially with Holden as a pricing analyst, kind of like Lori, just not as good. And so I started off in the space. So when I do sales training, when I'm working with sales training, I'm doing it from a pricer's perspective because that's what's going to help
create more pricing power. If they understand what's behind these numbers, how to defend these numbers, and as we've talked about already, how to bring insights into the organization that allows pricers to give you the tool that you want, we're going to them and say, sharpen your pencil, right? That's what you're hearing. You hate hearing it. How do you think your pricing team feels about hearing that right? It keeps them up late at night
and they're working on stuff. They want this business to grow just as much as the sellers do, pricers do. And, and sellers, they all want this business to grow. And so we need to give them more information. Sharpen your pencil Where, why? Why do they care about it? Why is this important to them? What do they not care about that we can maybe take out? What do they really care about that we need to leverage and say, hey, we're defending this value. It's worth it.
And how can we show them that what we're doing and the value that we're creating for them is, is helping them make more money? I, I do this all the time with different sales guys. I asked them this question if I were to give you and I'll, So I'll ask you, Kevin, if I were to tell you, hey, you give me a dollar, I'll give you 5. How often would you make that trade? 100% of the time and I would reach for as many dollars as I can find that's.
Right. I would be like as fast as I could be giving you dollars, I would be doing that, right? That's what selling is, right? We are showing them when we do good value discovery and good conversations. All we're doing, and this is what Lori is really great at helping us understand, is going to really call out in the workshop that we come together with.
How do we show that the value we create is meaning that you spend 100,000 with us or you spend whatever with us and you're going to make 2X that in the long run, right? Then it makes the sales process very easy. The challenge is how much confidence do they have in your ability to deliver that value? And that confidence comes from bringing that sales and pricing team together to understand and discover that messaging together.
Definitely, yeah. In a case like that, my credit card number is 1234 and my opinion 5678. Yeah. So you have much more confidence in my ability to give you $5 than what I actually have. Understood. Thank you for that. I appreciate that we are beginning to come up on our time allotment, but I do want to have a section for some final thoughts here. So we've covered a lot of great insights today. So Lori Travis, thank you so
much. But I do want to ask both of you before we sign off, if there's one piece of advice you can give the companies looking to strengthen their pricing power through sales and enablement, what would it be? And Lori, why don't we start with you? Sure. I know when it comes to pricing power, the key to remember is this is a team sport. It's not US versus them, sales versus pricing.
You're on the same team, you're not competitors and you have to even look at those other adjacent functions. You need each other for this to work in its best way. Sure, the pricing team may be like your playmakers and they're coming up with all the strategies in the plays, but you still need the sales team to execute. And then if you back up, how does pricing determine what those plays are anyway? Well, they need to understand what the customer's needs are and what they value.
Well, where are they going to get that? Well, they're going to get it from their sales team. It could come from customer service, your tech support, it could be your quality department. Anyone who's interacting with a customer is someone who could be giving you that valuable insight into what your customers needs are. So you need to get that from them in order to create the right offerings, the right
pricing. Then you have to come back around and make sure they all understand what that offering is and what value you provide so they can be prepared to go out there and sell it. All right. Thank you very much. Appreciate that, Lori. And for Travis, Sir, for you the same question. One piece of advice for companies looking to strengthen their pricing power through sales enablement through sales initiatives, please. Hey, I'm not going to argue with Lori. She's a lot smarter than I am.
It it really is that same piece. It's that, it's that collaboration and that it's that coming together which she iterated so well. You know, we think about this, you know, if pricing were the head, right, the head doesn't go anywhere if you don't have arms and legs to carry it somewhere. And the teams that figure this out and start to align these together, they're running races like these people are
accomplishing great things. These organizations are doing well because they're aligning this. And it's, it's baffling how much organizations still don't coordinate this pricing sales effort. And they're, they're like, to carry on the analogy, they're like toddlers, like falling all over the place trying to figure out how to walk because they don't have their head and their arms and legs all working together.
So if you want to make true strides and, and really grow exponentially, you need pricing power. And that takes a holistic pricing sells operational. There are lots of people that play into this, this piece of true pricing power. Definitely. Yes, that's great advice. And so I want to thank you so much. But also I'm going to take one second and talk about Lori and Travis here.
A couple interesting things. And Lori, first of all, you first started coming to PPS conferences as a pricing practitioner and just wanted to say that it's great someone who came to us as a pricing practitioner is now leading workshops. So thank you very much for your long time partnership for being with us and for doing that.
And Travis also you as well with your experience, you know, not only being a professor at a university, but also the work that you do with sales teams, with negotiating, with pricing, with confidence and your history there. I think that the two of you together coming from somewhat different parts of the business world, but coming together have some great insights. So we are looking forward to some wonderful information there.
Lori, Travis, thank you so much and make sure to join us at PPS Profitable in Dallas coming up in May. If you want to dive deeper into these strategies, make sure to join the great Wednesday, May 7th workshop that we have with Lori and Travis entitled Equipping Sales team to build pricing power. And of course, you can check our
website to register for that. Or if you want, you can just reach out to me and we can happily connect you with Lori and with Travis for any other information that you need there. And also make sure to subscribe to us on the Let's Talk Pricing podcast on either Apple or Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Make sure you never miss an update. And Lori and Travis, thank you so much. Thanks also to Alex behind the scenes for working with us as well.
And thanks for joining us and until next time, we will sign off for now, but looking forward to seeing everyone again real soon.