How C-Suite Executives Perceive Value with Brian Doyle

Impact Pricing

Brian Doyle is the President at Holden Advisors. In his role, Brian improves his client’s revenue and profitability by building cross-functional, strategic relationships. He then leads his team to deliver results and drive positive change across client organizations. Under Brian’s leadership, his clients and business units have earned $2B, doubled their market share, and reduced commercial expenses by 20%.

In this episode, Brian shares about understanding and being able to articulate your value.

Why you have to check out today’s podcast:

• Learn how to play out the risk for your clients, letting them discover the losses they would most probably incur and letting them find out their own solutions
• Find out how to turn a sales pitch into a conversation of value instead
• Learn how to start the conversation not with a tone of selling but of adding value

“In the vast majority of the time, it's about your value. It's about what you're doing for your customers. And when you get that in your brain, that's when you can price appropriately.”

- Brian Doyle

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Topics Covered:

01:18 - How his Pricing career started

02:45 - Thoughts on him taking the present role with another guy’s name on the door

03:42 - The important things that come to mind when talking about value in the C-suite

05:13 - Justifying competing priorities

06:34 - How to turn the conversation into ‘working together’ rather than ‘selling’

07:43 - How to add value the moment you start the conversation

09:02 - How to turn a sales pitch into a conversation

11:14 - Why do C-suite often is not immersed in the details of capturing value

15:04 - How to let customers calculate their value and own their solution

17:50 - The negative connotation of ROI calculator

18:49 - The need for a conversation between two sides to figure out the value they give and get from each other

20:24 - How do conversations go when you are talking to an executive about a product that is along the line of risk

21:42 - How to plat out risk in the B2B space

23:19 - How to overcome the ‘procurement buzzsaw’

25:45 - How to bring down the scale of keeping pricing and value-aligned

26:55 - His pricing advice that can have a big impact on one’s business

Key Takeaways:

“When it feels more like a partnership, ’Hey, I can totally help you guys do what you want to do, and help you make more money at it or help you serve your customers better so that they make more money on it or both.’ That's when the pieces come together.” - Brian Doyle

“When you think of value in C-suite, it's three things - increasing revenue, reducing cost, and, or minimizing risk. And what I found in my experience is that all C-suites care about one or more of those things. And the challenge that we often have is that we sell into middle managers, we sell too low in the organization.” - Brian Doyle

“The thing that keeps everything aligned and doesn't feel like you have competing priorities is that if you're really trying to do the best thing for the C-suite, which in turn is the best thing to help them serve their customers, then everything aligns.” - Brian Doyle

“Probably ten years ago, we all learned to ask this wonderful question, 'Hey, what keeps you up at night?' I would say, in this age of so much more information. It's not really a question. It's more of a statement, which is, ‘This is what should be keeping you up at night.’” - Brian Doyle

“When we are walking into a customer and doing the homework, we are thinking about the value that they provide, and whether or not they're getting paid for the value that they provide.” - Brian Doyle

“More times than not, clients of ours are stuck in the feature and benefit side of things. And they don't spend enough time thinking about the impact and the value. When I walk in, I am talking about the impact and the value that they provide to the market, where I see the market going and where I see the opportunity for them to get paid for that value that they provide.” - Brian Doyle

“When you're talking about value, it's not necessarily just the product, it might be the service, it might be the support.” - Brian Doyle

“When you talk about revenue, that Math and cost is the same sort of way, that Math is sometimes a little bit easier. But when it comes to risk, you have to think through it with the client like, how would this work?” - Brian Doyle

Resources / People Mentioned:

• Ed Kless
• Negotiating with Backbone: Eight Sales Strategies to Defend Your Price and Value by Reed Holden
• Prospect Theory by Daniel Kahneman

Connect with Brian Doyle:

• HoldenAdvisors.com
• LinkedIn

Connect with Mark Stiving:

• Email: [e-mail]
• LinkedIn