Maximizing Profits Through Smarter Pricing with Brian Doyle of Holden Advisors

Speaker A: When you get to negotiation, you are playing poker with procurement. And when you understand you're in the game, it gives you a level of comfort and a level of patience that, uh, you might not otherwise have.

Speaker B: Welcome to The Leaders of B2B Podcast, a weekly show where we bring you interviews and in the weeds Expertise with today's B2B experts and thought leaders. You can see more about today's episode and guest by visiting our website at. Ah, leadersofb2b.com hey there everyone, and welcome back to another episode of leaders of B2B. Really excited today to be here with Brian Doyle of Holden Advisors. And Brian, what's the big takeaway you're going to have for the audience here today?

Speaker A: I'm going to share with everybody how to increase their pricing power, which means more revenue, more profit.

Speaker B: Awesome. I love it. I love it. Well, thanks for hopping on here. And so to give everyone a little context, uh, on who you are, why you're such an expert in pricing, and why this is so valuable today, can you just give a quick background on who you are and Holden Advisors as well?

Speaker A: Absolutely. So Brian Doyle, CEO of Holden Advisors, started my career as an Air Force pilot and flew missions, uh, around the world and decided to, after doing that and enjoying that, moving into the commercial space. I was a process improvement six Sigma master black belt at General Electric, and then moved more into sales and marketing with ge, its offspring and a couple of smaller companies. And during that time, I found that there were two huge components to the success of any business and I didn't feel like they were being addressed. And one of them was setting the right price for the value that you create. It always seemed like we were a little underpriced. And even when we closed a deal, we felt like maybe we were leaving money on the table. And number two was getting that right price. As a individual salesperson and a sales leader, I was up against procurement groups that were playing tricks on me that I couldn't handle. And I was losing out and I was discounting 20, 30% on all my deals and that just didn't feel good. And seven years ago I came across Holden Advisors and they had written a couple of books both on this price setting and on this price getting aspect later of which is negotiating with backbone. The first or former is pricing with confidence. And when I read those books, I thought, these are my people. This is exactly what I've been seeking. Joined the firm and then over the last seven years moved up. The founder stepped away and, um, my leadership team and I became leaders of the business.

Speaker B: That's incredible. Yeah, I love that story and super compelling background there as well. And definitely intrigued to uh, dive into that price setting, price getting, kind of aspects of everything as well. And so think about this. Our, uh, audience here being mostly B2B professional owners, whether that's professional services or tech or some sort of B2B business. And I mean pricing and B2B is so massive. It's not like consumer pricing or something just right off the shelf. It's often big, large, you know, six, seven figure deals. And pricing is very ambiguous. And you're also going up against other people that are submitting proposals. You don't know what the price is, what everyone else is, the budget. So you know, when you, when you come across these people in B2B that are exploring this and you're working with people on pricing, where do you start or uh, what's the first things they should be thinking about there?

Speaker A: Yeah, so first of all, Jake, we focus 100% in B2B. So these are our people. And where we start is an evaluation of that term I used before, pricing power. So at first that is what is the value that you are providing your customers. And it could be how you increase their revenue, it might be how you reduce their expenses, it could be how you minimize their risk. It's big, broad categories like that. And we're going to look at that value in the context of the market, what they're actually producing, their competition, how their customers utilize that value. And we come up with, hey, this is the value you provide, this is what the price would be independent of anything else in that context. And then from there we say, okay, but can you actually go get it? You're not going to uh, realize 100% of that value. Can you get 50%, 40%? And that depends on your go to market motion, your sales strategy, and just the skill and confidence of those salespeople. And if you're a smaller company, maybe it's a skill and confidence of you as the owner. Or it might be the handful of people who go sell on your behalf. Do they believe in that value? Can they articulate it? And then they can they stand up for themselves in the face of really sophisticated buyers?

Speaker B: Yeah, I love that. And super helpful to understand that. And so, you know, as someone starts to look at that or what are some of those the kind of first levers that you'll pull for someone? What are some of those like 80, 20 things to help someone start to get to that point of that Pricing confidence and getting to that point of even, I guess, just setting the price to first to getting there. Because I think the fear everyone has is I raise my price and then I lose the deal. And that, I think, is everyone's fear from raising prices. So what do you do to people who are kind of sitting in that spot and how do you think about that?

Speaker A: So you got to talk to your customers, and that's one of the services that we provide. If you're not comfortable doing it yourself, it's remarkable. You think my customers would never tell me their willingness to pay M. That could very well be true. But what your customers are willing to do is share with you how they use your product or service and the value they derive from it. And so we'll sit down with folks and ask those questions and really dig into, okay, how are you using the product? What does it mean to you? What would it mean if you weren't using it? What is the alternative like? And all of those different things. And customers are very open with that, and they'll share. This is awesome. It totally helps me do these things. I make a lot more money. It would be even better if you did X, Y, and Z. And so that gives our clients the comfort level to set the right price. You know, it might be raised price, it might be lower price. It depends. And it also depends on a variety of different things, one of which would be the segment of customer that you're dealing with. So you might be selling into three different segments of customers, and one of them is ripe for a price increase, and another one maybe is a price buyer who believes in just the bare minimum. And you can't do anything with that price. And that's okay. You don't have to raise prices uniformly. It depends on the customer segment, as one example.

Speaker B: Yeah, I love that. That's super interesting. Hearing, just kind of going and talking to the customers, making those asks, do you see people successfully do this themselves, or is it something that really almost needs an external firm? That's a question that I have is like, can people explore and try that on their own, or is it kind of an awkward conversation to have?

Speaker A: They certainly can try it on their own. My experience has been that it's better when it's somebody who's disassociated just a little bit from the actual client. In some cases, people don't want to badmouth their sales rep to a leader at the company. And so they say, uh, everything's okay. Yeah, we just, you know, we have budget concerns or we have these different things going on. We have to solve for something else first. And that's why we're not buying and having the third party get in there. One, just by virtue of being a third party, and two, by asking the right questions. And it's. I'm not this guy, Jake, but I, uh, have people on my team who they ask these questions and people open up like it's their therapist. They're just. They just start telling you everything. And I can listen to the recordings. I'm like, this is amazing. And so having a really talented person asking those questions helps a lot.

Speaker B: Yeah, I love that. And. And so, you know, outside of talking to the customers there, when you think through what are some of those other kind of. I guess this kind of transitions from the price setting to the price getting. But you talked about looking at the full value and you're trying to get as much of that value that you're actually deriving. How do you think about a customer, uh, like a B2B customer, trying to really show that value? Because I think the challenge so many people have, or what I see so much is people just commoditize. You know, they just. They're just like, ah, here's what we do. That, here's XYZ and what we do. And they're not really anchoring that against the value that's provided. So what are some of the tactics? Is this something you're incorporating through proposals? Is this kind of marketing assets that you're using in the sales process? How do you think about anchoring that higher price point against value there?

Speaker A: Yeah, so that's the magic word, is value. And it's actually before the proposal, if you're trying to show all of your value all of once, all at once in a handful of PowerPoint slides at the proposal. That's an uphill battle. Or what we're advocating for is prior to that, when you're starting to qualify. And it's, uh. I'll give you an example. So you said commoditized, and we work with lots of clients. Might be professional services, it might be software as a service, it might be data. And everybody's been taught by their customers that they're a commodity. You're like everybody else. Jake, the guy down the street is just like you, except he's 30% lower. So the way to get at it, or one technique is ask a series of cascading questions. And, uh, I'll give you an example. So we had a client who was running a quarry, so they were Literally selling dirt. Uh, you were talking a commodity. Dirt is a commodity. Okay. They were number three in their market. They were. The competition was beating them up. And so they went to their customers and they said, hey, what would make this experience better? And they said, well, the trucks are waiting in line to get the dirt all the time, and we can't start at the construction site until the dirt shows up. I said, okay. So the average salesperson says, oh, great, if I give you a faster line, would that be good? But what the savvy salesperson does is says, really? How long are you waiting in line? Oh, we're waiting, like, 45 minutes. Wow. And then how much does it cost per hour to run those trucks? Oh, you know, the driver and the truck itself. And, um, all these people waiting at the construction site. And so it's this much money. And you say, wow. Okay, so if I were to give you an express line that made that 45 minutes. Five minutes. Are you telling me you would save thousands of dollars? Whatever math that customer just gave you, you didn't come over there on your own. The customer gave you the math. Are you saying that, like, I guess you are. So these guys basically created TSA PreCheck for dump trucks, and they went to number one in the market.

Speaker B: Yeah. That's beautiful.

Speaker A: You're understanding the value that you're providing, but you got to dig in. It's not pretty. PowerPoint slide, and it may not even be. I have an express line because people don't quite have their heads around it yet, so you have to walk them through and help the customer come to that conclusion with you. Not separate. Yeah.

Speaker B: And I love that. And I think, you know, I think through even our own business, you know, I think in levels, we've kind of made ourselves as a podcast agency, one of the premiums in the space. And some of the things we started doing with QBR reports, where we would audit and look at all of their analytics and everything on a quarterly basis. We started doing ads and in depth ads and, like, really diving into LinkedIn and handling those strategies or managing studio shoots or managing the guest scheduling. And it was all these things that we candidly didn't offer at first. We were a commodity when we started, and we were just this little kind of production house. And then really everyone's like, oh, but I want this, I want this, I want this. And you slowly start to add those. And now when someone comes to us and they say, oh, what makes you different? I have a whole slew of things that I know, most customers want that can kind of set us apart and help drive that value. But I think that, I guess what you're saying is it's not really just in the marketing of the presentation. It's really almost like the service development. It's what you're actually offering and figuring, uh, out how to anchor that into the, to the value that's useful to the customer by listening to them.

Speaker A: That's right. And to take your example a step further, you do all of these things that are better than your competition. Sweet. What does that mean to your customers? How does you, do, you know, letter A, letter B, letter C different than the competition? You say, look, when we do letter A, that means that, you know, you get 50% more eyeballs on your ads and 50% more eyeballs means that you make you sell two more products. And didn't you tell me your products are 1,000 bucks, um, apiece. So every time we do one of these, you're making extra $2,000. Whatever. I'm doing the math on the fly here. But it's, that is the next step where they go, oh yeah, you guys pay for your sales 20 times over. We totally want not just your menu looks like this and the competition's menu looks like that.

Speaker B: Yeah, anchoring against the full time costs or how much labor it's going to take them if they have their team do that. I think so many times you see companies where they, they don't think about when they have someone managing a vendor and it takes a ton of their work versus having a vendor where it's little to no management at all. And it's like, well, you just freed up that person's capacity and that person's on $150,000 a year salary and just all those kind of things. I, uh, love that kind of mentality and approach there. Yeah.

Speaker A: And then it's also like soft costs versus hard costs. So if you can say I'm saving 10% of $150,000 employee, the customer may say, yeah, but I'm not going to fire them or lay them off for 10%. So you're not really saving me any money. It's sort of in ether. Whereas you work these things down and you say, hey, no kidding, this person can go do this other job now and you save $150,000. That's a real hard cost savings that people really get their heads around.

Speaker B: Yeah, I love that. And, and so when you talk about the second half of that, the price getting. So, yeah, you know, you anchor the Value out there. You start to try to put this with this like, you know, this dump truck company, they're saying, hey, here's this great thing, they anchor the value. But now hey, here's this premium price or something to get this extra service. And then that hits procurement or that hits somebody who's like, well, but this costs more who maybe isn't the first one there who saw the value or gets it. Because I think that's. To me what I see is a lot of the challenge is the price getting often comes from not the person who wants to buy, but the person who like, you know, procurement or something like that on the back end. So what do you see in terms of biggest kind of levers to pull in terms of that price getting side of things?

Speaker A: Exactly. You're exactly right. And procurement's getting better and better. And whether you call them M procurement or sourcing or buyers, the same thing, they're. While the average salesperson is learning how to be a salesperson and a little bit of negotiating procurement, that's all they're learning is negotiation. So they're much better at it. We think of buyers in one of four categories. So we think that there are price buyers who no kidding, only care about lower price. And our experience and our uh, research has shown that's no more than 15,1 5% of buyers are really price buyers. There's value buyers who have done the math, understand exactly what you're doing, have some savvy with it. Buying on value. There's relationship buyers who just want you to hold their hand and God, can you just make this easy? I don't know what I'm doing. Can you bring this together? And then this fourth category we call the poker player and that is a relationship buyer or a value buyer who, who's pretending to be a price buyer. That is procurement sourcing. That is the uh, sometimes a contractor who steps in at the end of the process and says that's great Jake, that you've had all these conversations with decision maker but you're dealing with me now. And I hate to break it to you, but you're a commodity guy down the street's 30% cheaper. I like you and if you can just drop your price 20%, I think we could get this done right away. And really they have like, they have a whole playbook. We have a top 10 of procurement techniques that is their go to that you see all the time. And so in that environment, what do you do? One of our biggest tools is what we call gift gets and that is, say when somebody asks for a lower price, somebody's asking for these marketing services that you provide. You say, sure, I could give you a lower price. Here's what we'll do. We'll take these different pieces of value out of the equation. You don't have to worry about those. You used to have, uh, 100% assigned account manager. We won't do that. We'll put you in the pool with everybody and you get who you get when you call in. And that way we can lower the price. And if they're a no kidding price buyer, they're going to say, sounds great, we just want the cheapest thing. But in most cases, when they're playing poker with you, they're going to say, well, wait a minute, no, uh, I wanted the assigned account manager, I wanted the platinum service, I wanted the placements, I wanted whatever it is you were doing. And at that time, you now realize that you're having a value conversation, not a price conversation anymore. And you can leverage that to continue to say, okay, so wait, you told me these things are important, so we're not a commodity anymore. Let's talk about bringing this whole package and what you can make from it and those sorts of things.

Speaker B: Yeah, I, uh, love that approach. Yeah, just kind of when they make the ask, when they do that, just pull something back and say, yeah, we'll drop the price, we'll meet you there, but pull back the value. And that's a phenomenal approach there. Just to really.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: Snuff out if they do. Yeah. Like you said, if they go for it, then they just wanted the cheapest thing and they really did want to do that. But, yeah, I think in a lot of those cases, you pull back something, as long as it's meaningful, you're going to really test the waters quickly. Yeah, well, that. Do you typically try to get procurement some sort of win? How hard do you negotiate? I always go into the mentality of, like, you got to give them something because, like, they just need to feel like they win. But what are your typical thoughts there on that?

Speaker A: So that's often the case. So when you think about procurement, most of them are good human beings that are just in an unlikable job, at least from my perspective. And so they are getting measured, just like you suggested. They're getting measured on how much they saved off of whatever the original deal was. And that's what they're going to put in their end of year, uh, self appraisal, and that's what they're Going to get their bonus on and so on. So one of the things that you can do is you can think through these different give gets and you're going to have a handful of these given your scenario and some of them are going to be very important to you. That look, I'm not, if I'm uh, not lowering my price, I'm pulling this stuff off because that costs me a ton of money. There's other things that maybe matter a little bit less and so you can play with those to see if maybe there's something that is important to the customer, less important to you. And uh, that's a good place to have that trade off. Not a big fan of just discounting to discount. Like, great, I'll give you five, you know, you ask for 20%, I'll give you 5% then you can have the win. Because when you talk in those terms, the 5% becomes the new baseline and it's just like, oh, uh, Well I got 5% without doing anything, so now I'm asking for 20 again. And it's like, oh shoot. Now I can't come off of that because I didn't have anything associated with it, I just gave it up. So there are trade offs for sure. But I'm not a big fan of discounting just for the sake of discounting trains them to be poker players because they're like, I'm uh, getting messed with because you lowered your price so fast, then you're trying to mess with me and now I'm at the regular price is what they feel.

Speaker B: Yeah, I love that mentality. Yeah, I think the win I typically give them as payment terms, the company's in a spot to cash flow. That's like an easy one where it's like, well it's not going to kill me to get it 30 days later if I got the cash flow to hold it in most cases. And that's the win. I typically also try to do to avoid that as well. But honestly I love your give get strategy. Like that's great mentality. Don't reduce the price without pulling back value. That's it's a huge insightful, helpful nugget there. So thank you for that. So I guess the only other question I have is any other like final kind of key tactics or any other key levels, levers that you would recommend people pull as we kind of wrap up here, any other one final nugget you'd want to share with people in terms of just driving that pricing power?

Speaker A: I think it all comes down to Understanding that you're in a game, when you get to negotiation, you are playing poker with procurement. And when you understand you're in the game, it gives you a level of comfort and a level of patience that you might not otherwise have. And so as an example, a lot of the sourcing procurement technique is around. They'll ghost you. And, uh, if they're not replying for three weeks, oh, shoot, I better lower my price. They'll wait until quarter or year end, oh, shoot, I better lower my price. They'll say things like, I'm disappointed in you, Jake. I thought we were partners and I'm disappointed. And when you get wound up around those things, it's easy to not be thinking clearly. But if you can say, hey, he's doing his job, I'm, uh, doing my job, I'm going to be patient with this. We're going to end at the price that I want to end at, then that's where it plays out for the best. And it's frankly, it's a little bit more civil too, which typically works a little bit better as well.

Speaker B: Yeah, love that. I had the, uh, opportunity in past, past life to go and work to procurement conference and fascinating thing to just sit there among a room of those people who are like the other side of the fence and just see them trained on the tactics to, to do all these things and you just, and you realize there's nothing personal against them. Everyone gets frustrated, annoyed with procurement, but it's just like that's their job. That's what they're trained to do and that's how they drive value. And you know, when you see that, it makes it not personal, not something about yourself too. And yeah. Not getting wound up about it. And just, you know, when someone, when procurement calls and of course they're gonna, you just gotta know they're gonna ask for something that's like what their job is. And then it's. I think if you're not expecting it, a lot of people get frustrated. But I think when you can see that and you just know it's coming, you expect. No, this is just, yeah. Part of the game. I love, I love that way to phrase it. It's like it's the game that you're taking a part of.

Speaker A: That's right. And that, that's what we do is we listen to the podcast, read the books, you know, go to the conferences just like you said, and you can you hear them talking about their techniques and their playbooks. And if for those who are listening out there, if you don't believe what we're saying, if you haven't seen it a lot, ask your own procurement group, ask your own buyers in your own company and they'll tell you, oh yeah, here's how we do it. And it's the same stuff.

Speaker B: Yep. Yeah, 100%. Awesome. Well, um, Brian, thanks again for taking the time to come on here. If anyone wants to learn more about you or more about Holden Advisors, what's the best place to find you?

Speaker A: Online? Yeah, so for me in particular on uh, LinkedIn, Brian Doyle Holden Advisors is great. We are Holden Advisors with an S.com it is our website. It's another great place to learn and hopefully uh, it comes across. I love doing this and, and I love talking about negotiations and getting the upper hand on procurement. So if anybody has just a question like, hey, I'm sort of in the middle of this, what do you think? And reach out, I'd love to have a conversation and just see how we can help you out. Awesome.

Speaker B: Uh, well, thank you again for taking the time to come on here, Brian. This was amazing.

Speaker A: Absolutely. Thanks for having me.

Speaker B: Thank you for listening and we hope you enjoyed this episode of the leaders of uh, B2B podcast. And as always, you can see more information about this episode and all the resources mentioned@ah, leadersofb2b.com. If you enjoyed the show, please give us a five star rating. This episode is brought to you by Content allies. We help B2B companies launch revenue generating podcasts. We schedule interviews between you and your ideal prospects and strategic partners. You show up for engaging conversations. We handle everything else. Ready to build a podcast that grows your business in just one hour per week? Reach out to us at, uh, Content allies dot com.