[00:00:00] PREVIEW

[00:00:29] Welcome to Unpack Pricing, the show that deconstructs the dark arts of SaaS pricing and packaging. I'm your host, Scott Woody, co-founder and CEO of metronome. In each episode, you'll learn how the best leaders in tech are returning pricing into a key driver for revenue growth. Let's dive in.

[00:00:52] Scott: Hello everyone. Thanks for joining us today. I have Tlo who's product monetization pricing master over at Temporal and I'll let him introduce himself in a second. But I wanna start by saying congratulations. I know you guys have just went through a big fundraise moment. I'm sure everything over there is very exciting and helter skelter. But yeah, would love for you to introduce yourself to our audience. 

[00:01:15] Tlo: Appreciate it, and likewise on also recent raise. But yeah, I'm Tlo, so happy to be here. Currently heading up monetization at Temporal Technologies. So, exciting time having joined here, you know, about eight months ago.

But before this, I've been doing similar roles off Zero, kind of all the way through the Okta acquisition and before that at Digital Ocean, kind of spent my entire career working in tech strategy at the kind of intersections of data-based analysis there. So, you know, excited to chat.

[00:01:45] Scott: Very cool. Yeah. I think, on the kind of spectrum of pricing folks, you're definitely on the research-like kind of analytic end of things, and I'm super excited to talk about that. So maybe let's start by just talking a bit about you've been a part of many, many pricing changes you know, throughout your entire history. What I've noticed when I talk to companies is there's an inherent fear in changing prices. So, I would love for you to talk a little bit about how you think about the value and the fear that comes with making a pricing change, and why so many companies are kind of fundamentally afraid of making a big change?

[00:02:22] Tlo: Fear is a huge thing because pricing is not a muscle that a lot of companies are regularly exercising. It's not something that they have a lot of background and it's not something that they've explored kind of in depth. And with any muscle that you're not constantly exercising, you know, you're gonna have that hesitancy of saying, 'Well, I don't know what's gonna happen when we do these changes, when we jump off that cliff'.

And some of that fear is good, right? Like, there's pricing changes. I would like to say, it's not something that you can go and rapid fire and, you know, do pricing changes every other week. They are customer impacting and you need to be a little bit calculated in how you do that, but it's also a muscle that you need to start training.

You know, there's been pricing changes I've been part of that have had amazing, you know, 'Cool. We just grew an additional 10% in the past month because we updated our pricing and everything's great. There's been pricing changes that I've been part of that are a little bit more like, yeah, we probably should not have done that.

So it's more about, setting up those guardrails, setting up, both the process but also the confidence. And kind of the intention to say, 'Look, this is a part of our business'. It's a part of our business that we need to iterate on. If we don't, you know, it can become an existential problem at some point.

Everyone's had a competitor that comes out with a new pricing model that, you know, people prefer. So it's something that, for better or worse, you need to exercise that muscle. You need to get, you know, kind of good at that. As you grow out a business and the way that you manage through, you know, at different stages of a business are different.

A lot of startups, a lot of, series A and seed companies can do a lot of experimentation with their pricing, can do a lot of changes. And you know, if you're a public company with [00:04:00] 2 billion-plus dollars of revenue, just throwing out your pricing model and starting all over again, that's a very daunting task that definitely different approaches that you want to take at different scales and sizes.

[00:04:10] Scott: Yeah, actually, something you just said I hadn't really thought about, but it kind of makes perfect sense, which is just like in your core product, you're constantly iterating, you're constantly trying to find the right thing in a sense, you know, if you think of your pricing as part of your product, which it unequivocally is in software, I think you kind of have to take a similar approach.

Maybe talk a little bit about, you know, let's say there's a person listening and they're sitting in a company and honestly they're, they're not changing that pricing that often or maybe ever. Or it's like just not a major top of mind thing. How would you advise folks start to build that muscle?

Are they gonna go and do big bang pricing change out the gates? Or is there, are there ways of easing into the kind of, essentially the warmup reps to kind of build up the habit of, of changing pricing? 

[00:04:59] Tlo: Yeah, no, totally. So, you know, I'll say first like, big, bang pricing changes, they typically happen because you have some major strategic shift that you need to make. So ideally, and hopefully, you know, if your business is going reasonably well, , there isn't a reason to go out and just say, 'Hey, every single pricing change needs to be a big bang change'. They can be very disruptive, they can be very impactful, but you know, they need to be taken with caution, right? I think there's a lot of areas and, you know, one of the things that is oftentimes kind of underestimated with pricing is the concept of, packaging and making iterative changes. So, you know, a lot of companies, especially in your early stages, a lot of folks will say, okay, well we need to have super simple pricing.

Everyone needs to be able to understand it immediately. We're gonna have, you know, one package, we're gonna sell one thing. And customers will say that we love that. But you know, naturally, it's very limiting. And when you start looking at your packaging and saying, okay, we're introducing new features, we're introducing new capabilities, or there might be different ways to segment out this market, you can view pricing and monetization kind of as this lever to say, 'Okay, well we need to introduce new capabilities'. We have product A today, now we're gonna launch product B and product C, and they're gonna be iterations and kind of derivatives and you know, to some extent of what we might already have.

But even that allows you to start addressing new market segments, kind of introducing higher profitability, you know, higher revenue growth. And sometimes it even lets you make offerings that, you know, your product may have been capable before, but it wasn't being highlighted because you didn't have a way that was being packaged and sold.

So, you know, I think for a lot of companies, if you don't have like this big existential threat, the first motion that you could be looking at is saying like, okay, well what else can we do with our product? How... how can we better monetize it to capture, you know, some of these higher-value scenarios?

You know, some examples I can think of there is, you know, back in the day at Digital Ocean when I joined, basically it was most of the money was being made off of their virtual machines. They had one flavor of virtual machine. And then over time we're saying, okay, well let's launch more flavors.

Let's launch more specifications. If you already have product A cool, you get to keep Product A. You don't have to change that. But, if you want more capabilities, if you want more for premium offerings, like here's some new options that you know, they might have a higher price point, they might have a lower price point that you can go after.

So, it's really about kind of intertwining, you know, a little bit of that product motion along with the pricing motion when you kind of go down that road. But it allows you to do a lot more of this iteration that is not necessarily as disruptive. 

So that can be one way to go in, you know, test things out. I think it works really well in kind of like the product-led motion. Other things that, you know, I've, had some success iterating on in the past, you know, at Auth0 when we wanted to test some new pricing, especially for our higher ed segments. Like we would just do beta tests within our field.

We would go to, you know, some of the top field reps that kind of knew how to manage the process of like, okay, we might have something that's not broadly available, let's not go like spill the beans across, you know, the whole board. But, you know, we would go out and say, look, let's create a SKU. Let's see how it goes for a quarter, and, you know, compare that to previous quarters and assess if that's something that we wanna continue selling or not.

So, you know, like one of the packages we had created at Auth0 was to say, look, we're gonna sell unlimited what we called enterprise connections, instead of selling them unit by unit because we wanted to see if it was more successful and if we would actually get a higher return. Turned out the quarter that we let the sales team sell that and/or the beta test, the folks who were allowed to sell it. It was like 80% of variables and like just immediately, you knew like, okay, we have something here. It makes sense, we're gonna keep this around. 

But it was done in a way where it wasn't on our website, it wasn't necessarily public, it was kind of confined within that sales motion. So, there's definitely ways that you can test out, you know, and be a little bit more iterative with pricing impaction.

There's obviously scenarios where you can't, so you know, kind of have to assess and, you know, case-by-case basis figure out what you can do. But being iterative, I think, is a good way to build that muscle because the more success you have, the more of the experiments you go through, everyone starts getting used to that process and that's how you get rid of the fear of making changes.

As you say, like look, in the past year we did 14 pricing changes and the company didn't collapse. In fact, things constantly got better set. You know, being able to have that data, being able to have that history, I think definitely helps out. 

[00:09:28] Scott: Yeah. I can say for a fact that at Dropbox, the first few pricing changes we did, they were like pure pain because we waited like 10-plus years to do this at scale. And then as we got more, we kind of like, we literally built a system both internally like process-wise, but also technically. Like, we built a technical system that made it easier to deploy things, lower friction, et cetera. 

I would actually love for you to go... you mentioned something that I personally find very interesting, which is kind of using the field to do price testing and to do experimentation. Do you have any tips for kind of how to do that well? Because it's kind of a definitionally cross-functional thing, right? It's like you, or whoever the pricing person has an idea, maybe the field has the idea, but you have to run the experiment and how have you seen it work really well where you run an experiment that you can actually learn something from versus like, you try something and it doesn't work and you're like, well, you know, this didn't work. I'm curious if you have learnings from doing that. 

[00:10:27] Tlo: Yeah, I mean, I think it's something that it works when the scope is limited and is done in like a high-trust environment. So unlike, you know, more of like a PLG test where everyone's gonna be able to see it and, you know, you can kind of A/B test things, throw things out there.

You know, when you're working with the field, you kind of have that human element. So, you know, upsides of that is you can have, you know, the personal talks, you can get kind of more instantaneous feedback, you can see how conversations are going with customers, and all that can be really great. On the other hand, depending on, you know, the size or the level of expertise of your field, things can get outta hand very, very quickly.

So I think, you know, the first component there is like, you have to be in that high-trust environment. You have to know like, here's the customers that we're dealing with. And, you know, I think that allows you to really be able to, you know, pull off the right constraints that you have. 

Now, being able to do that on a repeatable basis, you know, and I think a key thing that you just mentioned with Dropbox is having the tooling and having the frameworks in place is also kind of critical there. There's a lot of times where, you know, folks will be like, okay, well we wanna run this experiment and then we have to remember, it's like, okay, but if someone advises us, it's gonna be on a one year contract where, you know, once it gonna go away, is this long-term thing that we have to deal with, or is this a short-term thing? So you kind of have to have that assessment and that foresight. 

So, you know, being able to find the right tooling or mechanisms of how you provide something can also be really critical. So, in some of these instances, in the case of Auth0, when we're running that test, we were okay with customers, like, hey, if we sell this to, you know, 50 or a hundred customers in a quarter and we have to live with that, that's fine. We can manage that, you know, by having the SKU available or having the SKU unavailable. You know, easy enough. But, there's other instances where you can say, you know, like right now at Temporal, one of the things that we would do would be to say, 'Cool, we'll just issue credits'. And the good thing with credits is at some point they expire, they're used and you move on.

But, there's definitely like that context of, especially in the PLG world, if you just create a bunch of fringe one-off things and now your product needs to support it and you know, you need to be able to support in the UI and your APIs, that gets a little bit more painful there. So, definitely having the framework, having a high-trust environment, I think, is kind of really key there to be able to do that iteration.

[00:12:48] Scott: Is there anything about... actually, I am curious if you've learned anything about reps who are like good in that environment versus not? Like, obviously you have to trust them. They presumably have to have some amount of success under [00:13:00] their belt, but is there anything.... I'm like actually just curious, did you compensate them differently for doing these experiments or was it more just that these are people who are fundamentally in their core, more builder, zero-to-one type people, and so they're able to roll with this new thing and kind of found excitement inherently from trying something new?

[00:13:17] Tlo: Yeah, and a lot of these experiments that I think the idea isn't to really change the compensation structure. You know, you're gonna introduce a lot of externalities if you're doing that. Like, 'hey, we'll give you a spiff if you, you know, sell with this new pricing model well'. Naturally you're biasing, you know, the feel towards that.

I think like the key there is just working with the AEs where you can have blunt conversations and you can have very direct conversations. You know, there's a lot of situations where you're chatting with AEs where you know, the focus is, 'Oh, I just need to close deals'. Typically that's, I don't think, not always a great way to think of, you know, folks to experiment with because their only responses did help me close more deals.

You wanna work with, you know, the AEs that are kind of like looking at the full spectrum, like what's the long-term value that we're gonna get out of this account? Did this actually help us move this deal in a positive direction? And you wanna do that, especially if you're working on deals where there might be more friction.

So sometimes your experiments are about like, 'Hey, let's reduce friction'. That's great, that makes things easier. Almost everyone's gonna like that. It's the scenarios where you might be potentially increasing friction where you need to work with AEs that, you know, they have high confidence, they understand why you're running the experiment and they're kind of game to work with that.

So, there's definitely that confidence like factor there where, you know, oftentimes I like working with the teams where we can have that really candid feedback and they can say, 'Look, I see your point of view, like, we're gonna try that out. We're gonna see what happens. And if it doesn't work, like that's fine, but we'll recalibrate'.

And that's part of the experimentation and kind of like that human element, which, you know, on the PLG side would be a lot harder to kind of like pull off than on a field-led motion in some of the scenarios. 

[00:14:59] Scott: Yeah. One thing that strikes me as you're talking is you're kind of taking your role in all of this as like a very interesting... you kind of have to have an idea about something you presumably have to do the math to kind of prove to yourself that if this works, it actually makes sense. And then you have to kind of translate it in a way, or work with the field to translate it in a way to a customer that kind of frames up the value. And then also think about the long-term effects of that.

So maybe I would love, you know, for you to talk a little bit about, you know, if you're in a lab trying to design the perfect pricing person, like what are the different pieces of that Frankenstein that like make the perfect pricing? 

[00:15:34] Tlo: Perfect pricing doesn't exist. If it did, we would have a book that we would all read and it would give us the answer and we would all have perfect pricing and that would never need a change.

You know, I think, naturally, like every company, every scenario is gonna be different. And I think that's one of the key learnings that most companies need to realize very early on is you can look at competitors, you can look at what other people are doing, but you need to own your own strategy, and your pricing and monetization is a key component of what your identity as a business is gonna be.

So if you're looking at, 'Hey, who's gonna be the best pricing person for my company?' I don't think it's as much as like, 'Hey, who's gonna be the best pricing person for my company? Here's the five traits that we need'. You first need to say, 'Well, what do we wanna be as a company? Are we gonna be a business that is selling primarily to large enterprises where everything is going through the field?' There's definitely a set of pricing folks out there that have a ton of expertise on how do you manage field-driven businesses and optimize deals for either velocity or value. And, how are you gonna consistently price seven figure contracts with Fortune 500 companies?

You're gonna have other folks that you know, and I would say maybe I'm more in the bucket of having worked in both PLG and sales-led organizations of how do we deal with that gray area where you wanna get these very large companies, you wanna be able to make sure that they're growing and that, you know, you're getting the reciprocal value that you know they can provide you, but also making sure that you're providing them a ton of value, but at the same time being able to sell some version of that same product into the broader market and kind of getting that land and expand motion.

So, I think the first step is like, figure out what you want to do as a company and you know what stage you're in. Early stage companies might be a little bit too reflective of, 'Hey, you know, the last business I was in did X or did Y and we need to do that', but ignore, like, what are those operating constraints?

So once you know what you wanna be at with as a company, I think you can start looking at, you know, a little bit more of those pricing traits. And if you're gonna be going down the side of, 'Hey, we wanna have a PLG motion, we wanna have this mass market motion', I think anything that incorporates that does require someone who's willing to look at a wide set of data, and is able to combine a wide set of viewpoints because you're gonna get a lot of voice, but you're also gonna get, people in the field, people in marketing who are talking to customers, where you get these great anecdotes and it's very easy to have very powerful anecdotes that you then project onto your entire customer base. But you wouldn't be able to kind of pair that out and balance that out with, 'Okay, well we also, you know, did some market research on a thousand prospects and we're taking these anecdotes and now we can size them out as to what they actually mean in terms of our customer base'.

And we can start having a conversation of, 'Cool, are these the customers that we wanna go after? Is this kind of our ideal customer profile that we wanna target?' And, kind of going back, experienced this both definitely at Digital Ocean, at Auth0 to an extent, you know, at Temporal, these very like, developer-oriented businesses, one of the key questions that you're always gonna have is, are you selling to the individual developers or are you selling to the businesses that they work for? And the cost profile and the pricing sensitivity there is vastly different. If you go and talk to individual developers, a lot of times they'll be like, 'I just wanna try your product for free. I don't wanna pay you for it. I just wanna see what it is. And I might want like a low-cost offering'. And it makes sense if you're doing a hobby project, most people don't wanna spend $50 a month on a solution, but then you'll go and talk to a business and they're like, 'This is only a hundred dollars a month? Like, that's cheap. You're providing a ton more value'. 

So, you have to be able to, you know, as a pricing individual, you're trying to deal with those mass markets is like contextualize that and turn that into the story. So I think, being able to do that mass market research, being able to understand the financials and the impacts and combine it into strategy that you wanna go after, I think, is, you know, our characteristics of an individual that you want in that type of role.

But then especially if you are going after the upper portion of the market, your large enterprises, which let's be honest, most SaaS businesses over 50% of IT spend is coming from companies that have more than 500 employees, even though they only make up like 0.1% of businesses in the world.

So you have this really concentrated buying power and that's where the pricing person also needs to know like, 'Okay, how do you deal with your individual kind of salespeople and these individual companies that inevitably are gonna want something special? You know, you're gonna go out there and very few seven figure deals are gonna be sold on a list price, on a very standardized mechanism, unless you have a ton of pricing power as a company.

So you have to be able to kind of merge those soft elements with the very realistic anecdotes at the same time. So kind of like bring that full circle. You have to ask yourself, 'Okay, what kind of company do we wanna be? What is our strategy?' And then start building up from there. And I think that starts really informing that profile.

[00:20:35] Scott: So I talk to a lot of companies that are I think start developer-led, but they almost all terminate in needing to service also the really large enterprises just 'cause of the economics... Either they're attracted to it or growth necessitates them. I'm actually not sure if it's required, but in most cases it ends up happening. 

You've worked in a number of companies that, you know, balanced both, or in the process of balancing both, do you have any like, specific advice for folks in that, maybe they got started in a developer-centric thing, but they've started to have, you know, like maybe an enterprise sales team.

How, and as the pricing kind of bridge, do you have any advice for kind of either techniques or ways of making that a tenable process? Yeah, like, I'm just curious advice for companies going through that transition? 

[00:21:24] Tlo: Yeah, I think, some of the things I've seen that work well is like, first you really need to have kind of a scalable, value metric and pricing and packaging that kind of makes sense to customers.

Going back on the packaging side, it's very easy to say like, 'Hey, we're just gonna put in a bunch of feature gates and that's the only reason why people are gonna scale up and pay us more'. It kind of works and a ton of companies do it. It's also where you're gonna get a ton of smaller companies that are like, 'Oh, I only need one feature. Why do I need to pay five times more?' Which is never a fun conversation. We can stop pretending that like, you know, good, better, best is a thing, but like, it's also not universally loved. So, having a value metric, having pricing that kind of scales like that is ideal, if you can pull that off.

But I think the other components is having a holistic kind of go-to-market plan on how do you make sure that you don't treat these as like two different channels that all of a sudden have arbitrary rules between them. And that's something that you know, you'll very frequently see is you go onto a pricing page and you have that contact sales button, and then all the times, you know, whoever's buying that, especially in the developer-led motions, they're like, ah, now I have to go talk to someone in sales.

They're gonna try to explain to me why I need to purchase the 60,000 or a hundred thousand dollars per year software. Even though on the website it looks like it starts at $20 a month. And, I think part of the monetization motion there is making sure like, 'Okay, if we're gonna have these packages available, like shouldn't they be universally available?'

The analogy that I like to use is you go to a grocery store, you get to choose if you do self-check out or if you go to the register. You're not getting charged [00:23:00] 50% more if you go down one path or the other. And I think a lot of customers kind of expect that experience of like, 'Hey, if you can put the AE into, or you know, the sales team into a position so that when they're talking to the customer, they're both encouraged to give them what will actually need and what actually suits their purposes and not just like a blown-up charge, then you're gonna be typically in a fairly decent position. So, you know, definitely kind of a balancing act there of making sure that you can bridge that gap. So having that scalability but also having the right incentives and the right go-to-market motion, I think, is super key as you go up market.

But then the other thing I would say is, you know, as you go up market where you start burning is like you can't be afraid to charge. It's very easy going back to the anecdotes. If you introduce a new feature and you're like, well, this is something that's targeting enterprises and we need to sell it at, you know, six figures, maybe even seven figures.

Naturally, you're gonna get some smaller companies that come in and say, 'Oh, I want that feature. I want that shiny new thing, but I can't afford it to make it cheaper'. And you'll probably hear that eight times or nine times for every single time that you actually sell it. But from a pure economics standpoint and from building that feature out, sometimes those are things that you know, you're building to really, you know, support that enterprise segment.

And you need to have a hard line there. Otherwise, you're just gonna be kind of eroding your value. You're gonna be dropping price all the time, and you know, chances are you're probably gonna always find 10 people to ask you for something cheaper than what it's actually worth. You know, there's that last component of just having very clear intentions and being confident in your decision like some things need to be expensive and that's okay.

[00:24:39] Scott: Yeah, actually that kind of dovetails into another topic that I think you have talked about, which is kind of in a way that analogy, there's like an expensive part of your product that you know is like a six-, seven- is what justifies a six-, seven-figure deal. You're gonna get a lot of people who can't afford that, don't wanna pay that much, who also want that shiny thing.

And it's a strategic question of like, well, you know, are we building this for the low-end and therefore gonna erode this bigger part of the value? Or is it actually strategically better for us to own this up red? And so I think kind of tells the story of how important pricing is to your overall strategy for winning the entire market, whatever submarket you want. 

Maybe talk a little bit about, as a person who's very deeply in the pricing world, what have you learned about how to have those strategic conversations with other executives and kind of like, what are the types of questions and conversations that a great pricing person should be having with their executive team to kind of force those hard decisions?

'Cause what I find personally when I talk to people is like, I think it's really easy as a CEO or whatever to kind of think, I want to build a product for everyone. And it's just like, I want it to be universally available and for these ones, I wanna charge them a lot. And for them I wanna charge them a little and blah, blah, blah.

But in practice, like, it doesn't seem to work that way. So what is the way that a pricing person can have that conversation with their executive leadership team to kind of force the strategic clarity and thinking in order for you to be able to do your job well? 

[00:26:12] Tlo: Yeah, I mean, I think on one side you have like the textbook answer, which is, 'Yeah, we need to work on having a clear and consistent strategy. We need to do these things with intention'. We need to say this is the market that we're going after and we're not gonna get distracted with these other things. And when we make a pricing recommendation, and, you know, I'll make a joke on myself here. Like, there's a thing with my previous coworkers that's known as a Tlo deck, which as you open up the deck, it has 12 slides of the main presentation and then it has another 90 slides of charts of things I found interesting that half the time I know I'm gonna end up in because there's gonna be a random question about, 'Well, have we considered this angle? Have we considered that angle? Have we considered this data set?' I think all of that's great and good and is useful in making decisions once you have a consistent leadership team that is making those pricing decisions. What I've also found, and you know, maybe this is skewed a little bit working in startups where like, let's be honest, in startups you have a lot of personalities, probably including myself, and that's where you have that human element.

In the areas where I've been able, you know, especially like, I think, you know, in the earlier days at Auth0 when I was there, like we were able to build a relatively high-trust environment between, you know, the field product and marketing teams. And we were able to have very honest conversations and we were able to iterate on pricing as a result of that.

And we were able to make, you know, I think really powerful and strong and sometimes difficult decisions. The same thing that I'm trying to do like right now at Temporal is, you know, start building those relationships and figure out what do individuals care about?

What makes these actual individuals tick, what's their actual focus. And sometimes that just requires very direct conversations. So there's definitely some executives I'll go to before you're trying to make a pricing meeting and be like, 'Okay, like you're not gonna like this. I know you're not gonna like this, but like, let's have an honest conversation about it'. 

Because what we're asking for might not be tenable or we might need to go in this direction or that direction. And sometimes it's worth doing a lot of those kind of pre-alignments and trying to get everyone on the same page.

So I guess for broader context, I'm an individual who's always a fan of having a framework and a pricing council where you can make decisions and get everyone to sing kumbaya, and like move forward and have alignment. But, what goes on behind the scenes is typically before you ever wanna have everyone sit down at the pressing council lets you have everyone agreeing, and singing the same song, and making sure that you've gone through, you know, all their concerns and you know, all of that.

So, I would say, that's kind of the main component there of actually being able to make those decisions is on top of all the textbook stuff. Yes, you need a strategy. Yes, you need the data. Yes, you need to do things with intention, but you need to build trust with those individuals and know what individuals care about and kind of how to move forward and go in those areas.

Like, there's definitely spots and a ton of interesting conversations at Okta and there's at least one executive that always go into meetings with being like, yeah, I know he's gonna hate everything that I'm gonna say. But you know, like at least they were a fairly direct individual and I could be fairly direct and we could sit down and be like, 'Okay, let's start with meeting. You're gonna hate everything that I'm gonna say, but like, let's get through it and let's figure out why we're talking about this so that we don't get hung up on, you know, the point of like, yeah, this isn't what you would naturally kind of gravitate towards, but there's a reason why we're looking at it'.

[00:29:35] Scott: That's very interesting. Actually, I'm curious like for you to talk a little bit about kind of how to construct an effective pricing council. I think almost all companies have them. Everyone has them, no one's happy with them. And so like, I'm curious if that's a solvable problem or you know, maybe what you've seen being the kinda like elements of a great pricing council inside of a business that is trying to like move generally faster.

[00:30:03] Tlo: 100%. I mean, no one likes them. The reality is, is if you don't have a pricing council, then all of a sudden you have this question of like, who's actually owning the pricing? And, you'll have these scenarios where all of a sudden new pricing shows up, no one in the field's been informed, you don't have order forms in place.

You know, and it turns out like, oh, someone's just running an experiment. Or like one executive just made a unilateral call. Sometimes it's mischievous. Most of the time it's not. But it just happens and like ultimately result in bad customer experiences and all that. So for better or worse, we might not love them, but they're necessary.

The way I like to get the council set up is like first get everyone on the same page of the pricing council is there to make decisions. It's to make yes or no decisions. And ideally, when things are being brought to the pricing council, like, yeah, you might have a couple things that you need to iron out, but you should have done those pre-reads.

You should have gotten alignment with everyone beforehand. So one, just get everyone on the same page. This is about making decisions. Second is who's actually the decision-maker. So there's a lot of people who wanna have opinions. There's a lot of people who are entitled to those opinions, but not everyone gets to make the decisions.

Sometimes there's hard decisions that need to be made and it's always good to have either the CEO or a very clearly chosen executive that gets to make the final call when there's something that you do need to make a call on to move forward. Ideally, you get consensus from everyone.

That's always the nicest scenario to be in. But sometimes you need to have a little bit more of a push to say, 'Okay, look, we need a path to move forward here'. So, you know, definitely kind of some key components there. And then maybe the last thing that I like to call out is I actually don't like pricing count.

Like a lot of times people will be like, 'Oh, we need a sub of pricing. Council needs to meet every month or needs to meet every quarter'. And oftentimes I feel like that turns into status updates and more of like a QBR-type scenario because monetization pricing and how many customers you're getting, how much revenue you're getting is are all very like tightly intertwined.

I always kind of prefer to say no, have a pricing council when you need to have a pricing council. If you have someone who's working on pricing, you should have enough topics that are coming up throughout the year where you need to call those things through. But, don't preschedule it if you're not gonna have something to talk about.

So, that kind of keeps everyone focused when they go into this meetings to say, okay, we know that we're going in here, that we're gonna make decisions, that there's gonna be important things that we're gonna talk about. And yeah, so like I think, you know, couple really core ideas there in terms of the velocity statement that you mentioned, there's always gonna be folks that are peeved about the velocity of the analogy that I like to make as people think of pricing. Like, the analogy that I make that apparently not everyone shares, is the way that I think of pricing is you look at a gas station sign and you have a guy there changing the number of like how much the press per gallon is gonna be in it.

It sounds easy, I think everyone also just needs to acknowledge that a lot of times the pricing changes. Both have a law of decision-making that need to go into them- a law of alignment, which takes time. And if you wanna do it well, and if you wanna be intentional, you have to take that time.

But, you know, law of pricing changes also take a surprising amount of actual engineering work and product work to put into place. It's not just writing down a new number and saying, okay, we're selling at this price point. So there just needs to be kind of like that broader company education.

Sometimes when there's impatience of being like, no, you gotta do the right thing. Sometimes, you gotta move slow to go fast because in the long term it'll help out. 

[00:33:29] Scott: Actually I'm curious, in your experience, is the pricing council kind of setting quality bar for what a pricing change is, or does that live somewhere else?

Because what you're saying, I think I strongly agree with where you're like, let's say you're changing a gas station price. Okay, cool. It's like changing a price, not that hard, but changing a product. We're launching a new feature, and maybe you're changing slightly the commercial model, or maybe you're changing just only the price.

There's just like a fair amount of things that have to be updated in your product and kind of maybe your field needs to be retrained in some major or minor way. How does quality of the execution of pricing change, like, who owns that? And is that a pricing council kind of sub-task, or is it more of federated out to individual teams?

[00:34:17] Tlo: So, the way that I've kind of viewed it, typically, I always treat a pricing council as that's where you make the strategic decisions. I don't like to bore executives with a bunch of the like details of like, 'Hey, here's the like 50 systems we need to go and update and like, why this is going to, you know, take a couple of months to launch'.

One of my favorite things is, you go into a pricing council and everyone's like, 'Okay, we've agreed we're gonna do X'. And then inevitably someone asks like, 'So, when's this gonna be available like next week, right? Like, we can just start with this'. Now we're like, there's a process to this.

You know, this is, again, probably very company by company, but if you have a pricing person, in my role a lot of times, I go through my strategic phase of like, 'Hey, let's make a strategic decision' and then you move into your implementation phase, which is how do we rally the troops?

I've been in scenarios where I have to write and all the enablement materials and do all the enablement. I've had scenarios where we have enablement teams. Either way, I get involved with them to coordinate that change. I've gone to the point of like you know, rewrite order forms and going and working with your engineering team and writing the really like specific details.

Working with your design team and your marketing team to update your pricing page properly your user experience, there's a whole host, especially if you're on the PLG side of the house. Your pricing is typically deeply reflected in your product and how your product is being used.

So, you need to think of, you know, how do you show alerts for gated features or how do you make people aware of, you know, the amount of use picture that they have and what their billing's gonna be so they don't get surprised. And I think all of that is really just an area that needs to be built out.

So, if there's a pricing person or a pricing team, I think they should be a core part of that. But it's definitely a cross-functional effort. If you don't have a pricing team, have them on the program or a project manager because all that I can say is when I look at my Slack and who I'm engaged with in any particular week, you know, I'll have engagements from every single department coming at me.

And yeah, depending on the size of the company, I might have, you know, 50, 60, a hundred people that I'm talking to in any given week to make sure I have like all these details coming together and, you know, having calm comprehension there. Very cool. 

[00:36:28] Scott: Maybe slightly adjacent topic, but one that I've heard you talk about is kind of using pricing and packaging as a segmentation tool or as a tool for validating a segmentation of a market.

So maybe talk a little bit about the intersection between a market segmentation and, specifically the packaging part of pricing and packaging, and how you've seen companies effectively combine those two things to either learn about a market or create a new market from one that looked like monolithic and they use packaging to actually show actually there's two subsegments and they buy in slightly different ways.

[00:37:03] Tlo: No, totally. 100%. You know, maybe starting with like an example where I don't actually think I did this particularly well, but I still find it to be very interesting. One of the earlier packaging things that we worked on at Auth0 was we have this authentication product and we had some customers that were using it for very like B2C-type scenarios.

And we had some customers that were using it for very B2B-type scenarios. There was some feature differentiation, when I joined, it was just kind of like one lineup of products. It's like you kind of just got access to everything, or you only got access to one thing. And you know, at that time we had a free tier and then we had two other kind of packages in our self-service offering, and then we had an enterprise offering. For better or worse when we're redoing that pricing, kind of enhancing it one time, we have like this idea and we're just like, should we just have an entry point and a middle tier point for the B2C portion of the product, and then have an enhanced product for B2B that also had an entry point and a middle tier point.

And the concern that we always had was like, wow, we're gonna have like five self-service plans on our website. Is that too much? Is that can be like super complicated for folks to look at? And we tested it out. And for better or worse, it's like we would get feedback every once in a while from customers of like, 'Oh yeah, this is really complicated'.

But customers self-selected and they figured out what they needed. And especially if you have a good product in product experience, they can self-select through that and, It was not probably the most common, like the most common, you know, pricing structure is gonna be your good, better, best.

And there you're really just trying to set them in between large and small companies and very valid reasons to do that from, you know, spend perspective. But you know, you definitely get some more interesting models out there. Like, I was quickly perusing before our call, like, who else does this? Or does, you know, similar things.

And, one of the products I'll inevitably use from company to company that I go to is like SurveyMonkey. And on SurveyMonkey you'll have your key packages and you'll have your individual packages. They have overlapping features for targeting different spend segments and different growth paths. DocuSign does very similar things. They'll have like, 'Hey, here's your packages for realtors. Here's your API packages for developers. Here's your more standard, good, better, best. OpenAI is actually doing the same thing. You know, if you talk to a developer, they're talking about how much does OpenAI cost in terms of tokens, but they also have individual plans.

They have team plans and I'm sure that they're gonna expand this into a whole like multi-product suite over time. Webflow, you know, is doing very similar things where they'll have, 'Here's your website plans, here's your plans for marketing agencies, and here's your plans for e-commerce sites'. So, let's have some different features, some different segments that we can break out based off of use case where we can see, you know, additional value there as well.

So, there's definitely various levels of segmentation that you can do either based off of use case, based off company size, like company size is, I think just a very recurring metric that's gonna indicate willingness to pay. But then, different industries, different nuances in the solutions can definitely yield that as well.

I think what's also a very valid question though is, at what point do you hit that consumer saturation of confusion of like, you go onto a website and if you're not directed to the right channel in the right way, you're gonna just see a smorgasbord of options and is that what you really wanna see and what you really want to, you know, choose between? I think that's kind of a valid question to experiment with and test with.

And the other thing that you have to be very careful with in these scenarios, like there's at least one of, you know, one company that I talked to in the past where they had done this level of segmentation and, but it was almost to a point where I'll call it like microsegmentation, where you try to get too specific, and now all of a sudden you have arbitrage opportunities between your packages.

So, you still need to have that balance of intention of okay, at Auth0 the B2B plans were pretty clear. Like, that's what you were purchasing if you needed, you know, the concept of enterprise connections or SSO SAML will stick. That makes a lot of sense, in my opinion at least. But if you just go down this path of oh, depending on what website you click on and if you talk to a partner or if you talk to an AE, you can purchase the same exact thing, but there are gonna be different price points, I think that's where subs getting both too complicated, but also a little bit insulting to customers because they'll be like, what do you mean this price is X over here and it's Y over here, or why are they different? And it gets a little bit too retail-y and cross-shopping, you know, different retailers or something like that.

[00:41:35] Scott: Yeah. I'm curious if you have advice or thoughts on, you know, as companies are thinking this through, should we segment, should we not? What are the kind of common key questions that, or indicators that maybe you do have a segmentation problem and like, if I'm a product manager owning one of these products today, what could I ask myself or what could I ask the data to kind of detect, actually I might have a segmentation... a packaging segmentation or a segmentation problem that could be solved with packaging.

I would be curious to hear how you think about that. 

[00:42:10] Tlo: Yeah, so I mean you, you know, I think segmentation is almost inevitable in most like B2B products. Like you're just... it's not a question of do we need segments? Do we need more than one product offering? You know, I think the reality is is B2B products have a wide swath of users. They have a wide swath of value that they're providing, and they have a wide swath of capabilities that they need to be able to provide under the hood to meet customer needs. And if you only have one price point, and if you just go very classical economics and say, we need to maximize revenue, or we need to maximize customers, you are leaving a ton of value on the table by having one price point.

So you need to have some level of segmentation there. For me, it's, you know, not even a question. The real question is what is that level of granularity and how much complexity can you absorb? And that's gonna be, I think, at least in part, dictated by your go-to market motion.

If you have a field team, especially if you have one field team that's supposed to be selling everything, and you give them 35 packages, well, that's a law of education that you need to potentially teach to dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of people. You know, and I've been on field enablement calls with 2000 people kind of listening like, 'Hey, how do we sell X, Y, Z?'

And, typically going over for like four or five things, you're starting to get into a level of complexity where it's gonna be difficult both for, you know, a large group of people to understand that knowledge, but also for the customers that they're talking to, to kind of absorb that in a call.

There can be scenarios where you have in-product experiences that can better guide customers where that might allow you to have a little bit more nuanced segmentation because there it's more about, 'Oh, you land in a singular spot and you grow off of there'. And then as you use more and more things, you kind of get guided into what package you need.

I think like SurveyMonkey's a great example of that. They'll let you build whatever survey and then they'll say, 'Oh, here's the features that [00:44:00] you're using that are actually included in X plan'. So you'll need to upgrade to that plan before you can go into, you know, whatever... launch whatever survey you wanna launch.

And that can be a good experience from the standpoint that you're not really comparing plans at that point. You like, you're going into the product showing from your usage what you actually need, and then you're being told what you need to buy. And you can also have, like, other approaches to segmentation, like setting up a framework that's useful.

One that I like to call out is, now you grow as a business, you're gonna have more and more products, inevitably things will get more and more complex. And really the way that you achieve simplicity or coherence, there is consistency. You know, you go on AWS, they have thousands of products, but generally, they're all gonna be usage based. They're all gonna have very consistent tiering system. And that gives you kind of, you know, a little bit of peace of mind, of like, 'Okay, I don't need to learn something completely new. Like, yes, I need to go look at the price point. I need to find what the unit is. But I don't need to figure out like, 'Oh, this is a completely different contractual scheme'.

And there's a lot of areas where you see like that simplicity through consistency. I was going off on a little bit of a tangent that I found to be like super interesting is that car manufacturers have segmentations while they make different models, they make different trims.

And you see a lot of actual nuance there. Like, Toyota in the American market, I think has over 35 SUVs. If you're counting like individual models, and if you think of it from like a segmentation standpoint, you'd be like, 'Wow!' I don't think anyone who looks at that dealership is like, you have 35 SUVs.

They're like, 'Oh, you have RAV4s and you have 4Runner and you have a Highlander'. But there's definitely that approach of like, yes, if you're gonna be a B2B company, at some point you'll need a segment and you'll probably wanna do a crawl, walk, run into it. You don't wanna immediately go into a hundred segments, but the more complexity you add, you need to think of what's that underlying framework? What's that underlying foundation that's gonna let people make decisions? Is that gonna be very consistent pricing across the product so people can immediately pick it up, and immediately know which product they need to self-select into? Is it gonna be a lot of in-product queues so that as people use the product, they get told kind of which package they need to self-select into?

I think those are like the frameworks they need to think about. And one that I actually like to reference in almost all the companies I work at and like point folks to, I don't know if they still do this, but love of the older, like HubSpot investor relations decks, they would have a very clear framework that says.

We're gonna have all these different hubs of products, they're all gonna have a starting point where you know it's free. And then you're gonna have two or three tiers that go above that. And here's what they're targeting and what they're for. And I think, you know, from a pricing for simplicity standpoint, that gives you both a lost segmentation through the different product lines.

But it gives you consistency that says, okay, if you're on this like middle tier of one product, you probably need to be on the middle tier across most of the products because it's designed for the same kind of growth pattern in like group of folks. That can help eliminate, you know, some of that noise.

[00:46:57] Scott: That makes a lot of sense. I'm actually curious, hearing you talk, there's a lot of... like I, I'm curious on the spectrum of art to science for packaging. Like, where do you think it is? It sounds like it's a lot of both to be honest. There's like definitely data that backs the stuff, but there's also a lot of judgment that goes into it.

So, how do you balance those kind of competing forces and, you know, is it appropriate ever to be like pure science on this stuff? Or is it appropriate ever to be purely, you know, kind of like, okay, I'm gonna... I'm gonna read the tea leaves and here's what I'm gonna do. Like, I'm curious like how you balance these things.

[00:47:33] Tlo: Yeah, I mean there's definitely a component of intuition to it. You know, when on the pure science side, there's maybe some areas where there's pure science, but you have to remember when you're dealing with economics, it's a social science, not a physical science. So, you know, the most dynamic price-related area, you can look at the stock market, look at airlines and how they set ticket prices. And you can say, okay, well that's science, but there's emotions to it, [00:48:00] right? If there was a science to, you know, how the stock market work, then again, everyone would be very, very wealthy and it kind of wouldn't work.

But the sheer fact that people have emotions and people respond to things in different ways, it means there's always gonna be a little bit of art in what's going on. At least for myself, like the approach that I like to take is, you know, building world views. So constantly doing research, constantly questioning your research.

So one of the like called it a lecture, you know, that I pulled together at one of the previous companies for an offsite was examining the bias of the research that you do and kind of understanding how do you combine anecdotes, how do you combine surveys but at the same time understand like, hey, if you're sending a survey to your customers, you might get a thousand responses, but it's reflecting what your customers think. So, there might be an entire market out out there that has a completely different perspective and likes to think of things differently. 

So there's definitely, you know, this aspect of you wanna be doing this continuous kind of world-building in your head of what does the market think, what do different segments think?

But also combining that with like the approach of, Hey, we might be doing something new. We might be, you know, changing how we wanna approach into that market. And that's where you need to do a little bit more of the art kind of basis. And sometimes that's also, you know, just brought in both through intuition, but also like previous experience.

So, Temporal is, I think a great example of that, you know. Join Temporal. It's a relatively new space. It's unlike at Digital Ocean where I had a customer pull at the time of like 300,000 customers where you could send out a survey, you'd get a thousand responses, and you could be like, 'Okay, this is like statistically significant'.

You know, we're now in a market where it's growing super rapidly. It's super exciting. People are learning about it. But what that also means is like you can't immediately just go to anyone off the street and be like, 'Hey, so what do you think about Temporal and how we should be priced and what other features should we be building?

You know, you're not gonna get necessarily the best responses to the all the time. So sometimes you have to temper your expectations with like, okay, well what have I learned in the past? How do you bring in like the broader market perspectives into like very specific company perspectives? And how do you blend that in with your strategy and, with the opinions of all the other folks in leadership that you're working with? And I think that's where, you know, the art comes in. 

But you know, at the same time, you're trying to ground yourself in market data and your experiences. You wanna validate your concepts with customers where you can. You wanna validate it with the field if you can't directly validate with customers.

It’s a little bit of both. But, you know, you definitely wanna be as grounded in the data as possible. Like, you wanna have a good understanding of, you know, what are your operating dynamics, what are your customer usage patterns? And you just always want to be bringing in those perspectives because you might learn something that you didn't know or that you know, surprised you. 

Or other times, I've done research where the results that you get are exactly what you think they are, but it's really nice to be able to put that on a piece of paper. And, a lot of times people wanna be like very data driven, but another great Auth0 example was, you know, one time we ran a survey that said, ''Why are you using whatever package you're using'? And we looked at the results and most of the things that we had included in there were things like, 'Oh, the price point is right', or 'I need X, Y, Z features'. We had one answer choice that ended up being like the number two or three reason that wasn't mentioned anywhere on our website. It wasn't a feature. It was just a feeling from customers that are like, we just feel like, it's a more production-ready, you know, product.

And on our side we're like, that's super interesting because nothing says that it's a more production-ready product. It's just an assumption that's made. So like, there's always, you know, even in whatever data you're collecting, there's always kind of that art, you know, abstract component of it, of you can't change the fact that humans are responding to something and you might want them to respond in a particular or logical way, but you know, humans sometimes don't do that.

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[00:52:03] Scott: Totally. Actually, I'm curious, one of the things that strikes me as you're talking is you're mentioning research a lot, and I know that you are very engaged in kind of understanding, you know, Temporal, Auth0, their role in a market which has a lot of other players and substitute goods and kind of complimentary things.

How do you do research? Break down a little bit like what are the key things that you do when you're doing research? Are you calling up the big, you know, pricing and packaging firms who kind of do the research for you? Or, are you doing it yourself? Do you have a team, like literally, what does research look like for you in your current 

[00:52:40] Tlo: role?

I mean, a variety of things in my current role, you know, it is very much a solo endeavor, you know, at this point. Which is fine, like at small companies, I don't think you need necessarily overly large pricing teams, but you know, you wanna collaborate, you know, with other folks in your company that might also be doing research.

So, from the research perspective, I think you always have to take a couple of different angles. There's reports out there. I think it's always good to kind of stay in line with anything that's relevant to your market. So, you know, in the developer space, I'm always excited when like the state of developers from Stack Overflow comes out because you get this survey where you can download the CSV of 50,000 to a hundred thousand individual responses.

And, you know, there's been plenty of times where I'll dig into the data and like do my own cuts and maybe run some modeling on it. Your general market research, your Gartners, your IDCs, all of those folks. It's good to keep tabs on how relevant it might be to a more specific company, like open to interpretation, but, you know, good to have that macro lens view.

So, you know, I'll say that there's definitely those like third party set of data to pull in and bring in perspective. Another source that I really like, especially if I'm being asked to build out a TAM for a market is going to, you know, World Bank and going to the OECD data sets where we get a lot of granular information on different geographies. So, all great to build like market-based worldviews. 

Then you get more into your internal research, which says, Okay, can you do either broader surveys on your internal customer base, whether that's through emails, whether it's by getting AEs to go and talk to customers and doing interviews, doing interviews yourself'?

And the more product-aligned that you can get, you know, the better those interviews are gonna be. So, especially in those areas you do have to be careful at, you know, how you talk about pricing, like as you're talking to your existing customers, then you might get a hit or miss on like the actual value components of questions. 

So, you try to send out a survey to you know, fortune 500 enterprise and say 'How much money are you willing to give us?' Yeah, no one's filling that out, honestly. So you kind of have to be, again, aware of those biases. But I think they're really, what you're looking at is what features, what capabilities in your product are people really impressed with? What do they like, what's driving them to use your product? And you have to start inferring from there. 

If you're in a market like B2B SaaS, then yeah, that's kind of also the area where if you wanna learn about non-users or if you wanna do kind of like a more of a double blind test, you're gonna go out, pay a lot of money for someone to source executive responses for you, or you can go and pay one of the large consultancies to go and do that additional research.

I have found that you do have to be very picky with how they're sourcing responses in those areas. There's definitely had a lot of instances where you're getting spotty kind of data or like spotty segmentation. So you do wanna be careful with like, 'Okay, who did you talk to, you know, if you can tell me?'

And making sure that you get the right perspectives there and that you get a holistic view. Especially working in the developer market, I find that most developer and like engineering executives don't respond to this panel. So you do have to be careful with that. 

And you know, then you wanna also just combine that with any internal data sets that you can get. So, usage-based information's always great. Product-based information's great. And then any, you know, just feedback that you can get from the field, from customer support, and talking about like, 'hey, how did these situations go?' 

So, one of the other things I love doing is, you know, sitting down like once a week or once every other week and I go in a Gong and I search for every single pricing conversations and 'okay, how did this go?'

And you know, you don't just listen to it, you watch the video. Because especially if you're doing like a pricing change or if someone's being shown pricing, like you wanna see their reaction and kind of like read that gut reaction. So, you know, kind of going through that research process, it's more about, you know, building that worldview kind of consistently being engaged and pulling in as much information as you want.

So again, it's another kind of like nexus point where you wanna constantly be smarter than you were the day before and more intelligent, but also being very open and skeptical for the information that you're getting because you might develop a new worldview or you might be looking at a hundred variables and you know, initially you are over indexing one or two of them and then you look at it from a different perspective and you kind of get a different outcome.

So, a lot of it is just kind of going across the board there. But yeah, you know, being able to get as much information as possible is great. Sometimes when you can't get that, that's where you have to kind of go a little bit more on like your own research a little bit, skew a little bit more towards the interviews and try to balance out those anecdotes.

And that's one area where, you know, a lot of times people will say, don't base your pricing on like competitors or contemporaries. And I know I've probably said that earlier in our conversation, but you know, it's still good to be grounded of like, 'Hey, if you go look at a bunch of companies and no one's doing this thing that you're thinking about, there might be a reason for that'.

Where, you know, a lot of times I get asked by like you know, around like a regional expansion. Like, 'Oh, should we deploy to a new region?' I'll be like, 'Well, if Mongo isn't there and Confluent isn't there and Elastic isn't there, I start getting the subtle feeling that there might be a reason for that. There's always, you know, these balances that you can kind of get from like these external market cues of what should you be looking at.

And I guess one last resource that I always like to throw out that, for better or worse that all people don't always look into is investor relations decks from a lot of these public companies. A lot of times they have a lot of additional information that can be like, very interesting in terms of shaping your go-to-market strategy. So... 

[00:58:24] Scott: yeah, that's definitely an underutilized resource. There's definitely a ton of gold there in terms of what they're thinking about and where they're seeing the world going, and yeah, I definitely have learned a lot from those. Awesome. 

Well, I have one last question, just because I know you've stepped recently, past eight months in your new role. What is one piece of advice you have for someone who's kind of stepping into a new company as a pricing person for the first time? Like, what's really important to do early in your tenure in order to set you up for success in the long term at that company? 

[00:59:00] Tlo: Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, some keys, when you step into, you know, a new company is one, gauge your alignment with leadership. So as we chatted about earlier, like there's gonna be different styles, different approaches, and if you can't establish those relationships early on and start getting on the same page of figuring out how to work with that team. It's gonna very much limit the success that you're gonna be able to make and the success that you're gonna be able to have.

And especially if it's a new role outta the company. So, most of the businesses I've joined, I'm the first official, like pricing, you know, owner for that's kind of always just been distributed. You know, having quick wins is... is a good thing. Like, you wanna be able to come in and show that, like, 'Look, this role is both about guiding decisions' and you can say maybe this is a little bit of a cop out, but if I jump into a business and they've already been discussing this going, 'Hey, we should do this change'.

If there isn't like massive red flags, like chances are, the people who are pushing for that may have been in that business much longer, they might already understand it. And showing that like, hey, part of that pricing function is making sure that we actually get things done and that we move things forward, that we make decisions, I think, is huge.

If you get in and, you know, you're six months in, 12 months in, and all you're doing is research, research, research, at some point, you know, everyone's gonna be like, 'Well, when are we gonna do changes? What's the output? What's the impact that we're gonna have?' So I think that's always, you know, a great thing.

It's like if you can come in and quickly say like, 'Okay, here's one or two, three things that we need to do'. You get alignment with leadership to figure out, you know, how you move those things forward, figure out what your low-hanging fruit is. It might not be the most impactful, but it shows that intention of like, 'Look, we're here to move forward. We're here to make decisions'.

Because I've definitely been in companies that they'll go through phases and they don't know how to make decisions anymore. And, it starts making everyone question the entire function. So, really being decisive and having that direction and kind of starting to march in that direction, even if it's small steps, I think is really key.

[01:01:01] Scott: Yeah, this idea kind of ties back to what you were saying earlier about building up that iterative muscle. Like, presumably you're getting brought in to kind of make some kind of change or enable something and like, you know, in the early days it's like kind of start to build it up.

Now, it's a new muscle. Like, again, they're hiring you for a reason. They didn't hire you to, because everything was working perfectly before. So I think that's like a good place to end on. Tlo, thank you so much. I think there's a million different subtopics in there that I think everyone can learn a ton from.

And I just wanna say thank you for joining us. 

[01:01:33] Tlo: Yeah, likewise. Enjoyed it.

[01:01:35] OUTRO: Thanks for tuning into this episode of Unpack Pricing. If you enjoyed it, we really appreciate you sharing it with a friend. We'd also love to hear from you. Feel free to email me@scottatmetronome.com with feedback and suggestions for who you'd like to see on the Future Podcast.

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