389 Bill Wilson

Jeffrey Feldberg: [00:00:00] Bill Wilson is the founder and CEO of Pace Pricing, a consulting and coaching firm specializing in B2B SaaS pricing. As a three time founder, Bill has navigated the complexities of consulting, agency, and SaaS businesses, celebrating successful exits, such as the acquisition of SalesRite by Fastspring.

With over 20 years of experience, he's become a trusted advisor to hundreds of SaaS teams, collaborating with accelerators and private equity firms to design profitable monetization strategies. Bill's approach emphasizes data driven confidence in pricing, helping companies stop guessing, achieve better results, and build scalable models for sustained growth.

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Deep Wealth Nation, welcome to another episode of the Deep Wealth Podcast and I've got a question for you. Are you like most entrepreneurs where you struggle with what to charge and [00:03:00] you go on the lower side instead of the higher side? Are you getting your value? Are you getting your worth? And if you're like me, particularly when I was starting out, the answer is a resounding no.

You're charging far too little, but what do you do? Where do you turn? Who can help you? Well, that's exactly what we're doing in today's episode. We have a fellow entrepreneur in the Deep Wealth Hells, very excited. So Bill, welcome to Deep Wealth Podcast, and it's an absolute pleasure to have you with us.

Bill, everyone's got a story and there's always a story behind the story. So what's your story? What got you from where you were to where you are today? 

Bill Wilson: Wow. Thanks so much, Jeffrey. Great to be here. All right. Where to start? Where I am today is not where I thought I'd end up like a lot of entrepreneurs, I think. And so for me I never, ever thought I would be in charge of monetization for so many amazing companies, given that I started off as a software developer.

my career started off as in software, I worked in enterprise, I worked in off the shelf [00:04:00] software, I worked in all these things starting, dating myself here 25 years ago but around 2007, I was 10 or years so into my career and I was tired of the corporate enterprise kind of world in software, just wasn't where I wanted to be so I figured the only way I was going to be able to do that was to build my own company.

So, I started off by just being a bum in a seat software developer for hire, And so this was my first taste of, what am I worth? And so I started off at a very low figure it sounds big when you come from salaries, right? But when you have all these other things to do, it doesn't feel so big.

So I think it was like 70 an hour or something, quickly realized that you really need to know what you're worth and charge it. Now, it's easier said than done so as I started building this company, which was just me bumming a seat consulting it was pretty good because I kind of had full time work and I was, making all kinds of money and it felt good and all these types of things.

And then I had this crazy idea. I was like, maybe you should hire some people. That's a good idea, right? Let's try and build a business. so, at that time, I had been [00:05:00] doing a lot of mobile app development work in the early days back when it wasn't cool. So Palm OS and Windows CE and all those kinds of things.

And

Jeffrey Feldberg: making me feel old back in the day. My goodness. I

Bill Wilson: in the day, yeah, back in the day with my BlackBerry in my pocket, and so the iPhone stuff had just started coming out in terms of being able to allow apps and things like that. So I said, all right, let's take a chance here and let's pivot away from just services and let's start building mobile apps for other people.

And I often used to say the fastest way to make money in the app store is to build apps for other people because it's very hard to make an app make money in the app store. And that was back in, oh, I don't, that was 2009, I think. And so, as we built that business the pricing thing crept in again, right?

What do we charge for this? How do we get there? And so, you get stuck in this world of hourly, it's probably the worst place to be in some cases for a lot of consulting businesses is they're charging by the hour. And you look at your costs and you look at your overheads and you're like, okay, all right.

And I used to tell people used to come to me and say, yeah, I'm starting a [00:06:00] business and like any advice for me? And this was like early on. And I'd be like, yeah charge a lot more than you think you need to charge. And they're like, yeah, charge double. And I'm like, that's not enough. I said, double is nothing is the way I would put it, right?

Because by the time you take everything into account you're going to be left with basically a salary. so if you want to have room to grow and add the oxygen to build your business, which is really cash, you need to charge a lot more than that. So I used to tell people at least three times, like three X was my sort of go to. Anyhow, so, as we were building MindSeed, which was my company at the time we specialized in building those mobile apps and we were just getting hammered on from clients, just hourly, everybody knows what an hour is, they can really push back on it, they can really, oh, how many hours is that really that many hours, you know, and then you end up discounting and you end up, before you know it, you're talking yourself out of tons of money, right?

And it comes down to confidence. Pricing is confidence. Know what you're worth and charge it. I said it earlier. So, to help with this, I decided to, two problems. One, I wasn't strong enough holding my ground [00:07:00] on what we were charging. And two we're charging for the wrong thing. They weren't interested in the hour. They were interested in the outcome and what they wanted. Was a really great mobile app. So I had to come up with a way, how do I start charging for the work that we do in a way that is almost flat fee and still good margin for us and still good margin for them?

You'll be happy to know. I never actually made it there, but along the way I've learned some things. So one of the things we did, we productized a service at the very beginning of our projects and it was around this idea of the full design and like bringing a mobile app to life really like what is it going to feel like what's it going to look like so a lot of the design work and that was a little easier to start to put into a productized service so we decided to say okay cool it looks like this is what you get for it and it costs this much you know and people started saying yes to that and we started Losing money because again, we weren't charging enough for that thing.

There's a repeating pattern here, Jeffrey. But as we grew, we realized, I [00:08:00] think we took that initial service from 2, 500 bucks, I think at the very beginning. And I think when I left, it was around 25, 000. And of course the service grew over time, but what it led me to was this idea of productizing service to get out from underneath the consulting hour is probably the best thing most any consulting company can do.

And the largest argument I heard from that was, well, hey, we do so much, we do a varied amount of things. How can we possibly productize it? I'm like, well, you're probably doing too many things. So with productization becomes niching and niching or niching is really the key because if you can do something, once you productize a service and you get out from underneath the hours, your motivation changes to, I need to make this as efficient as possible to make the most money possible. how can I deliver this service in the most effective way? Whereas when you're charging by the hour, you're not super incentive. You're not really incentivized to charge less. You're not incentivized to do it in less time even though you do, and that's what [00:09:00] many consulting companies do, is they build out this ability to do something really well, and something that used to take them 200 hours, and they would charge their client 200 hours for, now takes them 20 hours, and they were still charging close to the same rate.

I won't say they're charging the same rate, but they're certainly not charging 10x more hour, which is what the value is. So, the Productize service was the real unlock for me. as we grew that, we realized that there was varying needs of clients. And this was the real value piece. It's like with the needs we needed to create packaging that worked for some of them.

Some people were just scrappy startups and they needed something really simple and straightforward to take to their investors. Others were enterprise companies that could not miss the mark. They had to get it right, right out of the gate. It had to be perfect because there was a lot riding on it. So those needs are very different and their willingness to pay is a lot different.

So we came up with a structure being a software guy, it was very much like B2B software as a service type software. Three tiers that we all know is good, better, best, the bronze, silver, gold kind of [00:10:00] packaging. And so we built that and then of course that introduced a bit of complexity and that led us to building a bit of a piece of software to help share that information with our clients.

that's when things got interesting. We sold our services to a lot of B2B SaaS companies, and every single one of them said to us, where did you get this tool? We had built a web tool to present our productized service. It was for them, it was just for them, it had everything we talked about on the call, they could sign right there, fill out some information, and it would be done.

It wasn't a proposal, it was just a, pick your package, and let's get started. No BS. And they were like, inside sales teams could really use this. And I heard that enough, and quite honestly, through the prodding of my then head of sales and soon to be co founder, we started company called SalesRate, which was designed to take that idea and bring it to B2B SaaS.

So that the inside sales teams could actually present pricing in a meaningful way to their customers. And without if [00:11:00] you're in sales led growth at all, you realize that, sometimes you don't have a public pricing page, but you still need to actually be able to communicate effectively your pricing.

So that's what we built.

Jeffrey Feldberg: Wow. So fascinating. Your journey in so many ways. You went through the hero's journey. You started out great. And then you had the lows, then got back to the highs, almost full circle. But with what you're sharing, I mean, Bill, you could have really gone in any direction. You're talented, you're smart, and you really expose yourself to a lot of different situations.

What was it specifically that sparked your fascination with pricing and when did you realize that was going to be the key for you, your customers, to unlock the business growth? It's so obvious on the one hand, but as entrepreneurs, it's not on the other. 

Bill Wilson: Yeah. 

Jeffrey Feldberg: what was going on with that? Mm

Bill Wilson: So fascinating. Yeah. So, we raised some money. We built this, company sales, right. and when I got into the sales conversation, cause you know, in the beginning, your sales your founder sales I'm on these sales conversations with these revenue leaders at B2B SaaS companies, [00:12:00] whether they were big or small, several repeating patterns started coming up.

Our pricing's too complicated. I don't understand it. Our customers don't understand it. We think it's priced too high. We don't sell this thing cause it's too hard to sell. We don't, all of these things that also, when I got to talk to founders that were sort of in younger companies, they were like, yeah, we don't know about our pricing, but we said it and we're not touching it.

we're scared to touch it. We can't know. Our customers will run away if we change our pricing. And I heard this over and over again, and I realized, and then the other thing that was happening was with every time I had one of these calls, we're like, well, you talk to a lot of people.

What do you think? What do you think of our pricing? So all of a sudden, here I'm on a sales call trying to sell a piece of software and they're asking me about their own pricing. It's not what I expected. So this was the catalyst. This was the moment. This was the moment I realized that pricing is broken in B2B SaaS, or at least it was.

And I've been spending most of my time since trying to make it better along with a lot of other great people. But, so that was the real catalyst. And talking to all those people, I decided to go a lot [00:13:00] deeper. I said, if I'm really going to help. These people, because I love to help, like one of my core values, helping.

And if I'm really going to be able to help them and change their life I need to understand this a lot more. And so I dove into it and I realized it's like half psychology and half science and right up my alley. I love, Numbers. I love crunching numbers. I love, writing code.

I love all those things. And I also love talking to people. And I also love figuring out how things work and the way people think and all those types of things. So it just became this sort of really interesting, meeting of passions, I guess, at some level that I didn't realize I had. And that's what really got me into it.

and then, we were acquired, so in 2020 and the frothiness of, COVID we were acquired by a company called FastSpring out of Santa Barbara. And after that I stayed with them for a little while. But as you know, that never really fully works out for the founders.

I was lost in the wilderness, so to speak, trying to figure out what to do. So I started. Working with other founders, [00:14:00] helping them trying to solve their pricing problems just as a, thing to do. I was involved in a coaching program for myself and there was a bunch of founders in that coaching program that needed help and it gave me a bit of a purpose.

So I was able to start coaching and working with those people. And that's, fast forward, lots more of a story to go here, but you know, fast forward, that's how I got to where I am now.

Jeffrey Feldberg: And I'm wondering, as you're going through that, so we get why the fascination was there. Bill, why SaaS? Was that just where you happened to be in those circles at the time, or is there something deliberate about that? And by the way, for the listener who's not familiar with SaaS, S A S, and usually the S's are capitalized on either end in lowercase a's.

What does that mean for the listener who doesn't know what SaaS is? And again, why SaaS

specifically? 

Bill Wilson: Yeah. So SaaS is software as a service. So, the primary means of capturing value for your software is to charge a subscription. And you usually charge a monthly fee or an annual fee. So what that brings with it is this decision point that customers get to make [00:15:00] every month.

Am I going to continue paying for this? Am I going to buy? Am I going to buy? Am I going to buy? It's always a buying decision every month or every year. There's that decision versus, you know, you buy a water bottle and you have the water bottle for life. It's just, it's not the same. So my fascination with it came from this idea that we're never done.

And that it is we're able to create something out of nothing essentially, we're able to sit down. This is why I love software in general. It's you can sit down with an idea in your head, spend a few hours behind the keyboard, even less now with the AI and come up with, A small thing that didn't exist before that solves a real problem and I don't know any other time in history when you can sit there and put in very little effort in terms of physical effort and create something, and then create something that's useful that could possibly change millions of people's lives. so that's the real fascination for me with software is that it's this amazing thing that you can do now. Why did I choose pricing for software? Well, in pricing, there's a lot of [00:16:00] different disciplines and there's a lot of different inputs that go into pricing. The nice thing about SAS is that there's a whole section of inputs that , I mean, sometimes.

Don't have to be dealt with, mostly costs, mostly like hard, there's no hard cost to manufacture the software every time we sell it. That's the beauty of SaaS. So what's built into SaaS? So, the economic principle, you know, I, build it amass a whole bunch of resources. I, figured a way to produce it really cheaply.

And I, start, make lots and lots of them make lots of money. Well guess what? In software as a service, everybody has economies of scale. I build it once, I sell it thousands of times. It is not a differentiator anymore. Like it used to be. If I owned a nail factory, I could. Expand and make more nails and make them cheaper than anybody else, and I could win in the market.

It's no longer that game. Software as a Service is a level playing field. Anybody with the right amount of money and the right ideas can come at you anytime. So that's what fascinates me about Software as a Service in terms of pricing, is like, how do [00:17:00] we now take all of that, all the things we know, and attack all the various dimensions of what drives SaaS profitability and how do we do that through monetization.

that's a mouthful, but that's, what I really love about it.

Jeffrey Feldberg: Got that. Okay. And it makes actually a lot of sense as you shared where you were, how you started to where you got to. And by the way, this is the Deep Wealth Podcast, after all, at liquidity events, business exits is our wheelhouse. Looking back, Bill, at your liquidity event, your business exit, anything that comes to mind that you'd want to share with the community, the audience, anything that stood out for you or, yeah, I would do this all over again, or, hey, you know what, I'd probably do a 180 and go in a different direction.

Bill Wilson: I learned a lot of things after that. A lot of big moments happened for me during that time. And

We were venture backed really early

And that brings with it an entire

Set of baggage that I wasn't prepared for. I thought I was. I listened to all my friends that were doing it.

I thought that was the case, but no, I wasn't. So one of the things I would change for sure in [00:18:00] my journey was I'd probably, bootstrap it as much as I possibly could before I took any kind of VC money. So that was a big one. I like to think everybody's on your side. Like I like to think that, people are just good natured in general. people aren't. And I learned that along this journey, I had a particular set of investors that were not interested in what I had to as I was going through the exit, they were not interested in the exit at all and they were doing everything they possibly could to thwart it.

So it was very interesting. So I won't go to too many details there, but At the end of the day, though the thing that came up for us, we were a co founding team of three. I had the majority portion of this company and the others were part time, so to speak. And I had a team, we had four or five employees and we were doing the work.

I owned a very large portion of the company still. So when this offer came along, very attractive. So my accountant and I slash co founder my friend We sat down and we figured out all the numbers and we're like, if we hit all of our targets for the next five years. Our dilution will happen, all the things, and we'll sell for the big number that we want to [00:19:00] sell for.

We will all walk away with around the same amount of money as we would right now if we sold. And that was the decision point. The other thing I realized was, is that the problem I was trying to solve was massive, much bigger than I had realized, because it was just the tip of the iceberg. And I was going to need tens of millions of dollars to, to even, get going on the things I really wanted to do in pricing for B2B SaaS.

And I didn't know, it wasn't it wasn't what I wanted to do right at that moment. And so when we were approached by Fastspring and by approached, I mean, I was selling to their, I was trying to sell to them and their VP of sales put me in touch with their head of product. And those conversations quickly turned from hey, we want to invest to, hey, we want to buy you. What I learned during that, through that process was, is that, yeah, I would probably do it again. I would absolutely do it again. It wasn't the world's largest exit, but it was meaningful. And it changed my life, and it changed a lot of other people's lives. And I think that was fantastic.

But, if I were to ever do it [00:20:00] again Bootstrap all the way until I needed it, until I knew I had something that I could go pour the fuel on the fire. And the other piece is that I would, for anyone who's been through it, they know you have to have a plan for what's next. Because you know, you go through the rollercoaster of trying to, the acquisition may not happen, but you spend three, four months trying to make it happen. And at the same time, you need to keep growing your business because if you don't, and it falls apart, what are you left with? So once you keep going up that rollercoaster up that, that tick, tick tick, you're going up to the top.

And if you actually tip over, it's too late, it's over. If you decided, no, we have to sell, like we absolutely have to sell. If this doesn't go forward, I don't know what I'm going to do. If you get to that point, you are in a world of hurt. I fight with myself. Did I get to that point?

And I think I did, but that stress level at the end, when you're done at least for me, I just didn't know what to do. was, had so much identity wrapped up in, in being a SaaS founder. And also I had, I still had my agency. I still owned MindSee. It was still [00:21:00] going strong and doing its thing and just, complicate the story.

Within a year I had sold that company to, I sold it to the person I had put in charge. He really wanted to do it. He was doing great. He like added way more revenue than I would have ever been able to add in the two years that I was gone. And so, he bought the company. So here I am no longer. I don't have my first company, which I grew for 13 years, and I don't have this startup, which is gone, and now I don't know what to do with myself.

I was literally miserable. I had a friend of mine sit down and say to me, he goes, I don't know what's happened to you. You are not the bill I know what's going on? And so I always tell people have an exit plan, plan what you're going to do. What's day one look like? What's day two look like? What's six months look like?

What are you going to do? Are you going to take up a hobby? Are you going to do a thing? You got to do something. Everybody in life needs an occupation. That doesn't mean you need a job, but you need to have meaning through work. I feel you need to do something. We like, humans live in the struggle.

So we need to have something to struggle against, I feel and that's an occupation, whether it's a, we call them hobbies [00:22:00] sometimes, but you know, those are also struggles. I want to get really good at X, Y, Z, and so I think you need to have those things planned out ahead of time. That's how I feel about it.

Jeffrey Feldberg: We don't find the happily ever after. It's an issue. It's a big issue. The world around doesn't understand what's going on with Bill. He just sold his company. He's doing well. Don't get it. If I can only have his problems, let that be my worst case scenario. And yeah, it's something that really took to heart, in fact, at Deep Wealth and our Mastery Program.

We take the post exit life, that's where we actually begin, and then everything else follows from there. So we start at the end. Put that at the beginning and off we go with that. So for a lot of our listeners, they want to get to that liquidity event and nudge, nudge, wink, wink. They're going to go through the Deep Wealth Mastery Program, our 90 day scale for ultimate sales system, right?

Deep Wealth Nation, of course. But let me ask you this, when you're brought in to work with a company and you've worked with some terrific companies that the Deep Wealth Nation would know of and companies that perhaps they wouldn't, I'm going to take a guess that You're probably [00:23:00] seeing some trends and patterns, and my favorite question with this kind of scenario, is it the good old Pareto's Law, the 80 20 principle, that 20 percent of the same issues that keep on coming up again and again are creating 80 percent of the so called challenges that these businesses are going through?

And if they are, what are you seeing? What's going on there?

Bill Wilson: Absolutely. I always say pricing is about confidence

And the biggest thing I see in every single company. is straight fear. And I mean it. People are scared of pricing. And here's my theory on why. The, in business, we're there to serve people. We're in there to make money and we're there to solve a problem.

So we solve a problem, we get paid. We solve a problem, we get paid. There's this really interesting relationship between, you and your customer. It's not only just the value delivery and you've got great support and you have this really great, high level relationship. You have a contractual, monetary relationship,

And if you said to any business person, he's Hey, I'm going to totally change the contracts with your customers. Their first reaction is absolutely not. Do not mess with my [00:24:00] relationship with my cause. That's the only, that's the thing I got. It took so long to get there. Don't touch it. Leave it alone.

It's like a house of cards. Do not mess with the relationship between me and my customers. So that fear drives people into inaction.

They kick the can down the road. So the biggest problem I see in B2B SaaS is people who are scared to death of their own pricing model. They don't, they know maybe something's not quite right.

They don't know exactly what it is. Am I leaving money on the table? Are we charging too little? Are we charging too much? Are we capturing value? Are we capturing all of it? All of those questions, but I can't find out. I can't do it. It's too hard. 

Jeffrey Feldberg: Mm 

Bill Wilson: too scary. I can't, oh, I can't increase prices.

Everybody will churn. Oh, I can't increase prices. My sales team won't be able to close deals. Oh, I can't increase prices. Our competition is going to take advantage of us. All of these things are absolute nonsense at the end of the day, but because they're driven from a fear and why, where do fears come from?

They come from the lack of knowledge. We're scared of stuff we don't understand. [00:25:00] So the antidote to that is to really dig in and understand pricing. So my job is to install good pricing practice in these businesses so that they think about their products and their services through the lens of monetization all of the time.

If you're going to build a feature into your product, The first question you're going to ask is yes, it's going to add value. Yes, it's going to do those things, but how are we going to capture value?

Does it live in our value capture stack? Is it part of a package? Is it an add on? Is it, can we claim more money?

Can we raise the price of it? Like, how are we going to charge for this thing? And everybody's like, oh no, no, we'll deal with that. I'm like, no, you deal with it now. And it drives the rest of the decisions,

And so the biggest problem is that lack of, fear. And the flip side of that is Confidence.

So how do we get to confidence? We get through confidence through data. And so my job is to make it very obvious to people how to look at their data, how to synthesize it in a way that they can understand what's going to happen and model things out and, just basically build confidence through data.

And then of [00:26:00] course the psychology side of it, the repackaging, how to capture value, all the really soft, side of what we do is, really trying to figure out all those things. So that's the common problem I see in every single SaaS business I work with is that there's someone important who is scared to death to change pricing.

And it's even worse, the longer they wait, the worse it gets. Most companies I work with, I swear it's been years since they've done a pricing change. Years. And it's not uncommon to hear 10, 10 years.

Jeffrey Feldberg: Yeah, it's so interesting as you're saying that, Bill, I'm actually thinking of a guest who will remain nameless, came on the show, and we're just talking about the business journey and they were sharing the guest, you know, Jeffrey, it was interesting, we thought we were hitting it out of the park, we were winning every bid, every contract we put out there we were winning, and then I just got curious, I said, let's benchmark us to other similar companies, I mean, we're unique, but there's others that are close enough, and the guest said, what do you know, Jeffrey, we were Fundamentally lower by magnitudes across the [00:27:00] board.

So we weren't winning it because we were the best. We were the lowest and that's not where we wanted to be. Change that and the profits shot up and yeah, we're losing some business, but we were more profitable. It was more enjoyable. So, Bill, let me ask you this, and with the question that I'm going to ask, you would be completely correct to say, well, Jeffrey, it really depends on the company, what they're offering, what it looks like, the space that they're in.

That said, for a listener in the Deep Wealth Nation who's hearing us talk, and they're now thinking of their business model, is there a particular formula or methodology of how you approach the business model when you're walking in to take it from zero to hero?

And if there is, what would that be?

Bill Wilson: Yeah, absolutely. One of the very first things we do when we talk to customers about this is often surprising to them. It's not where, they figured we'd start with, what's your margin and all these types of things and getting into demand curves, but really it's about how do your customers get value today?

So one of the very first things we do is product value and we look at that through multiple lenses. We use survey techniques and a bunch of other things, but [00:28:00] more importantly, we actually interview customers and we talk to them. Why do you love this product? What is it? How do you get the value? Where do you get the value?

What do you, the classic product management kind of questions. But I try and get people monetization in SaaS at least.

Through the lens of jobs to be done.

So the Clayton Christensen framework or Andy Olbeck both of them are attributed to being involved with jobs to be done.

But it's the idea that what is the core job agnostic of technology that someone is actually trying to accomplish? What are all those stages? What can they do? And so what we try and do is establish what that initial job to be done is that companies are really out there looking for a software for. What is that core job that you solve?

What is that core job? And if you can start thinking in terms of like, what are all the things you need? And that point of first demand, that very first thing that people need when they arrive at your doorstep as a company if you can capture that in terms of like packaging and things [00:29:00] like this, you no longer start thinking about, well, we just need a good package.

We need a better package. We need the best package. Okay. We're going to put this feature here. We're going to put this feature there. No, we're going to go, what is the absolute minimum we need to solve this one job? Like I said before, the job is agnostic of technology. It's something you're trying to do anyway. they're not trying to do it anyway, you probably don't have a real product, there needs to be some core thing that someone's trying to solve. Now after that, so if I can, if that's one of the first things we do is try and get people I mean, after we do all the data analysis and we get into architecture, that's really the piece.

It's like, how do we restructure all these things in such a way that it's around the core jobs to be done, and it's less so about good, better, best, and it's more about, and I mean, there's so many different packaging options when you get into B2B SaaS. But then I would say, the next thing is that there's only three real levers we can pull.

In B2B SaaS or any SaaS company, we've got acquisition, we've got expansion, and we've got retention. how long can I hold on to my customers? How much can, how much more money can they spend with me in [00:30:00] terms of XO expansion is how much more money can you spend from me? And acquisition is of course acquisition, sales and, trials and all that kind of stuff.

So those are the only three levers we have. So if I get a customer in and they sit in my base package all the time. I basically make what I make from them and that's it. I don't make anything else. So more and more people like, oh yeah, we got to get them to move left to I'm going to get them to go from the good to the better to the best, but not everybody's on that journey.

If they're getting the problem solved, why do they need to move? So what we need to introduce is intra package expansion. We need to be able to claim more value from the customers. And what this necessarily leads to is pricing models that are essentially hybrids. We charge for access or participation. So Salesforce charges for seats and things like this.

And then we also charge for usage or outcomes, some kind of element that goes up and down over time. And so ultimately that's the thing we want to get to is we want to get to a model that captures not only inter package expansion, but intra package expansion. And if we do that well, retention follows.

Retention is higher because [00:31:00] people are getting more value and they feel like they're paying for what they get as opposed to paying for things they don't need and all these types of things. So those are the big pieces. And then of course, if we do it right, that point of first demand is carved out just right, that acquisition.

happens. People do get into those plans. So that's my theory on current B2B SaaS pricing. I believe a hybrid models are here to stay. And I've never really thought of any other way about it, to be honest. Like I know people will talk about, Oh, usage is all the way and feature based is all the way.

No, it's, why does it have to be all or nothing? It's hybrid is the answer.

Jeffrey Feldberg: So let me ask you this, Bill. Throw some things out there and see where it goes. So I'm hearing you. It's interesting you're saying, and really no surprise, okay, number of seats or number of licenses and then usage, let's come up with some kind of variant from there too. Come up with the business model. If we look to companies that most of the listeners would have heard of, and I'm a little bit reluctant to name names because things change and companies come, companies go.

But as an example, if I were to say movie streaming [00:32:00] and regardless of the logo, it tends to be a monthly fee, more or less for all you can eat. And they have different variations, ads, no ads, but. That's basically it. Is that sustainable? As you look at where the market's heading, what's going on with consumers and our preferences, and how it's just exploding in terms of the number of contents, channels, and streaming services that are coming out there, what do you think?

Bill Wilson: Yeah, I mean, it's, it's very B2C, which is a little bit outside my wheelhouse, but I will say that their approach to making more money off existing customers, for example, their whole expansion play is, multiple screens or ads, like you said, getting rid of ads and those types of things.

So they are trying to capture more revenue from their existing customers like everybody else. But I'm also seeing more and more ads pop up in these services and they need other ways to generate revenue and it's turning into television, like it's turning into cable TV, right? So I don't know. I don't really know if it's sustainable.

I know that I will say that I don't believe it's a race to the bottom. That's not what I'm seeing happening. I'm seeing definitely [00:33:00] people are holding their ground with their pricing and raising it, which I think is excellent. Those companies could very easily collapse under the pressure of not raising prices.

But yeah, I do think those types of things are are sustainable to a point. I think there was a bit of a, how do you say, amalgamation of some of this stuff early on, actually, and it sort of, it unbundled over time, right? Some of the big ones that were very early that everybody knows had lots of different, movie houses on them and slowly those were removed and they became their own streaming services.

So the unbundling of services is what we see. We see it in airlines. It's no longer the case that you just sort of buy, there's two tickets, there's business class and economy. No, you buy the things you want. And that's the unbundling of those things. And people get irritated with it, but it's true.

Like you want to meet people where they are on their willingness to pay curve. So it's We want to claim as much value as we can at the right places. So I think that's what's happening in the streaming. I know a lot of people that just use like an Android box and use something [00:34:00] else.

I know a lot of people that subscribe to every single one. So there's a willingness to pay out there for all of these. Whether it's sustainable or not, I don't know. That's a different question. There's so many things that play there, but. From a pricing perspective, I think it is.

Jeffrey Feldberg: of sustainable, as we're going through this, and I hear you, I agree with what you're saying. I know, though, in the Deep Wealth community and also my own experiences both with my companies or as a success coach or an advisor with other companies. When you share with them, okay, let's revisit the pricing model, the business model, we're undercharging, we're really the best out there, let's look at increasing, and this is, I don't think I'm alone in this, Bill, you can say it's Jeff from your on base or off base, There's tremendous pushback.

Yeah, Jeffrey, sure. Yeah, we could increase the pricing, but we're going to lose our long term customers. We're going to price ourselves out of the marketplace. We will go from a tremendous growth rate that we've been having, and it's just going to stop because we're going to be too expensive. They're going to go to the competition.

They're not as good as [00:35:00] us. But for a lot of our customers, a lot of the future customers, good is good enough. And I hear that time and time again, Deep Wealth Nation is ringing a bell. And if it is, I'm sure you're nodding your heads. Yes, it is. Bill, what would you say to that? Is there some truth to that?

What's the real goods? What's going on here?

Bill Wilson: Yeah, I will say that, you're basically describing that fear again, right? The fear of changing prices, but but yeah, there is the pushback. And this is why monetization sits at the crossroads of SaaS, right? Sales, product, marketing, customer success, engineering, finance, C suite. It sits right in the center of it.

And so everybody has a fear around it, their own fear, right? So sales is worried about compensation. They're worried about close rates. They're worried about quota. They're worried about all these things. Product is worried about, am I delivering value, all this stuff. So what I would say to that is that the antidote to all of that is is the data and showing that it can be done.

Now, the reason it doesn't get done is because everybody has an opinion [00:36:00] about what the pricing should be based on their bias, and that's fine and you can torture data into just telling you whatever you want, but given the enough of it in a statistically relevant manner, you can actually start to draw some real conclusions, and one of the things that we do to help solve this problem.

Is we validate in market, so whatever we come up with as a team, between us and company we're working with we take it to market and actually validate that it's going to work because otherwise it is a very big bet, right? The stakes are really high changing pricing.

Jeffrey Feldberg: Yes,

Bill Wilson: Stakes are really high.

I can try a new sales tactic tomorrow. Some guy comes along and sells me a new way to sell. Sure. I can try that. It's not that disruptive. If it doesn't work, we go back to the old way. If I change my pricing wholesale and I put it out there for the market to see, that's a big move.

That's a big risk. Everybody sees it. Competitors see it. Everybody sees it. So you need to make sure at some level that it's going to work. And you do that, again, through data, right? So you [00:37:00] do, my favorite is purchase simulation. We do purchase simulation interviews with actual customers. We show them the new packaging, get them to pick where they are, we measure willingness to pay, we do all that in person, and then we also back it up with a quantitative survey as well.

So what that gives us is a real insight into the psychology of how they're making their decision. And then it also gives us, then the quantitative gives us the straight willingness to pay. Are we charging the right amount? And that usually does the trick for most people who have pushback. It's like, here's the model.

Here's what it's going to, here's the lift that you can get. That's the other thing I'll say. This is that when you show people a new model, And the data to back it up and then also show them that, oh, by the way, this is a 39 percent increase in revenue. A lot of fears go away. A lot of people are willing to, when you're presented with, several, tens of millions of dollars in lift on your top line people tend to get a little excited.

Now, is it always realized that's a go to market problem and is very complicated, but I would say that's how I usually. Work with [00:38:00] teams around their individual objections is to find out where. it's coming from and use the data to help explain where it's going to be, but until you actually try it, it doesn't actually alleviate all of the fears and that's what comes from it.

Jeffrey Feldberg: And so, Bill, your secret sauce, I mean, every one of the steps could easily be an episode of itself. And you really come at it from different angles. You have your Pace pricing system. I know you have a strategy review. You also do coaching. That said, if I were to show up today, okay, Bill, here's our company, we're a B2B SaaS company.

We could be doing better. Really don't know where to start or what to do. We want to get a lift in our growth, not necessarily with more customers, but actually fewer customers. We want And, boost our profits while we're at it. Big picture, 50, 000 foot in the air overview. What does it look like in terms of how long does it take and big picture wise, what are you doing in that process?

Bill Wilson: Yeah. So, the length of time varies depending on how quickly we can move and how quickly we can get data usually, but think 90 days, right? That's the typical, what we aim [00:39:00] for. We break it down into four phases. And funnily enough, it's the acronym PACE. So the very first phase is profiling. So profiling, we really dig into, we really want to understand your customer.

We really want to understand your product and we really want to understand how you generate revenue. So that means we look at all of your subscription data. We talk to all of your customers and we really go deep on the product because the company is made up of entirely of product people. We are all product people that turn to this.

And then once we do that, it really uncovers, we shine flashlights in corners that people don't want to shine flashlights in. We look at sales data, we look at how much they're discounting, how much we're leaving on the table, how many incentivized discounts we're doing, we're over discounting usually all of these things in an effort to win deals, and it's not really helping us.

So we do all of that. And then there's the next three phases, which are architecture, where we actually do full package redesign, we're finding the right value metric, we're doing all the jobs to be done, we're figuring out how close to value we can actually [00:40:00] get to charge our customers and we come up with a new model. In the next phase, which we call calibrate, is really when we're digging into competitors and figuring out what the envelope looks like and we're setting initial prices and we're doing initial impact analysis of hey, if we applied this model today to your existing customers, what does it look like? And finally, and I think, and a lot of companies stopped there. To be frank, they do the packaging design after the data that you have pretty good sense of willingness to pay from the things and they package it up and they go, here you go. I want to take it a step further. And that's what I was talking about around the execution phase, which is this idea of validation.

I want to take it to market before they take it to market because we can learn so much. Even with just a few customer interviews, we can learn so much about how people think. And how they're going to make that decision. and then of course, with more surveys and then we also do big projections.

We look at if your acquisition motion looks like this, the same as it does today. If your churn situation looks like this, what's it going to, and then we can project two, three years out in the future of what your [00:41:00] potential revenue could look like and how you would grow. Cause most companies that we work with are bumping up against that growth ceiling.

They can't really grow anymore. They're, that is it. Not charging enough. They're losing as many customers as they're adding kind of thing. So they get flat. And that's that's where it ends up.

Jeffrey Feldberg: Wow. As you're going through that, my head is spinning. So really, my takeaway here, it's part science, it's part art. listen, the data, the facts, the science behind that, fairly straightforward. Most people could do it. Tell me on base, off base, because where the magic happens, it would seem, is really knowing how to approach it.

Firstly, the questions to ask, where to look, what to do, and then it's not as though you're taking a dart and throwing it at a dart board. Okay, that's going to be the pricing we're going at. You are saying, okay, based on the data, but oh yeah, I remember that situation back then and this one that we had over there.

Put the two of those together, and here's what we're going to come up with. Yeah, it's not showing up in the formulas, this is really where we need to go. And it sounds like it's a combination of the two to eventually get to a place where, yeah, this is going to work. Okay, no guarantees, but when [00:42:00] executed well, here's where it's going to take you, and perhaps one standard deviation, up or down, this is where you're likely going to land.

How am I doing with that?

Bill Wilson: Yeah that's very close. I would say the thing I tell people the most, because a lot of people will come to us and say, how much are we charging for this? How should we change the price to? And when I tell people, I say the price is less important. How you charge is far more important than how much you charge and getting that right is the real secret.

And so, yes, I would say all of the things you said, plus that is, is sort of the really the secret around all of it. It's just being able to look at your entire business through a different lens that nobody really does. I, my dream is to have every single B2B SaaS company should have a pricing team, right?

They should just have a pricing team. They're responsible for pricing across the organization or across the products, depending how big they are. And yeah, have good pricing hygiene where they're looking at their pricing every quarter. They're monitoring things, especially around usage and as markets change and they're changing their pricing at least once a year.

At some level, changes doesn't mean increases, [00:43:00] changes just means, you can move features from here to here, you can change entitlements, you can do limits, lots of different things you can do around pricing. So that's my dream, is to have everybody with, able to work me out of a job, but I think that's fantastic, no better compliment, right?

Jeffrey Feldberg: Let me ask you something, Bill, because you're saying something really interesting. You're saying it's not so much the pricing itself, it's the how. So when you say it's the how, what do you mean by that?

Bill Wilson: I mean the model, what are you actually going to charge for? Why are you charging for it? And. Of course, there's the how much, but it's really around how do our customers get value and then how can we align ourselves, our company around that value such that we're, our customer and us are now in parallel lockstep, right?

So if I'm charging them for value, they're getting value. We're completely aligned. My job now is to make that company successful.

As best as I can do as a software company, my job is to make them super successful because if I do, my Northstar metric goes up. And if my Northstar metric goes, starts to go [00:44:00] up, which is another thing we do Northstar metric.

But if my Northstar metric goes up, that means there's a whole bunch of other things behind that are green. one of my senior strategists like to say there's a lot of things that are green behind that. a lot of other KPIs that are really great. Because. That's what I mean by how it's, if you can get yourself really aligned, because if you're orthogonal to your customer, so for example, think about companies that sell I'll pick on insurance a little bit.

So say like an employee family assistance program, or one of these things that has an abnormally low price oh, it's a couple of bucks per employee or something. And they get access to counseling when they need it or something they're betting on. You're not going to use it. That's how they make money.

They are not aligned with your goals. Your goals is to make sure that your employees have the support and the things that they need so want them to use it, but the company who sold it to you doesn't want you to use it.

Banking on the fact that you're not going to use it. And that's how they make their money.

And I feel like that's an orthogonal, perpendicular kind of situation. And I don't like those. I want to get more aligned with my customer and I want to help lift them [00:45:00] up. And if I can help lift them up, that means that lifts me up. and maybe it's idealistic, but I've seen it play out many times.

People make, Pivots to different value metrics and different ways of pricing and things just start to move in the right direction. And I, worked with a company over the last year and it's been fantastic to see them do the hard work of actually rolling out the price change and moving all the customers that haven't been changed their price in seven years.

And the point now where they have 98. 1 percent of their customers moved over and they're feeling great and they added 28 percent to their revenue. And it's just, they have so much more confidence. They think about pricing all the time. Their success team is just absolutely.

We're changing the price. Like before they were like, no way. We're never changing the price. Our customers are going to leave. And now they're like, cool. When's the next price change? So it's really fascinating to see those transitions. And, that's what gets me out of bed anyway is seeing them win.

Jeffrey Feldberg: I know absolutely as you're talking about that, it reminds me really of my own journey. I never want to be the biggest in the industry. I just want to be the most profitable. And usually that means [00:46:00] you're actually far smaller than the competition, but you're more agile. You're enjoying the business more.

There's fewer moving parts, fewer customers, but every dollar revenue is going so much further because of the way that you really orchestrated the business. And the business model, what was that saying? Luck is not a business model, and it so often is for us entrepreneurs. Bill, there are so many different questions and different areas that we can go into.

We're bumping up against time. But let me ask you this. Before we go into wrap up mode, is there a question that I didn't get to ask, or a topic that we haven't covered, or even a message that you'd like to get out to the Deep Wealth community?

Bill Wilson: I would say the biggest message I have is if you're thinking about a pricing change or if you feel like you're not priced correctly, you're probably right and you've probably waited too long and I would encourage you to make some moves, whatever those happen to be. Get the right people on the team together, sit down, have an honest conversation about where you are with pricing and what scares you about changing it because that's the fastest way to start uncovering the truth [00:47:00] and I can't tell you how many times I've been in a room.

Where we bring everybody together and it's the first time that group of people from C suite to product have sat down together and talked about pricing and that act alone will uncover so many things for you. So, step one, get everybody together, start talking about pricing. What are your concerns? What are your fears?

Get them out of the way. We run a hopes and fears exercise at the beginning of every project. What do you hope to get out of this? What are you scared of? Get those things on the table, start having conversations about how to change pricing and go from there.

Jeffrey Feldberg: Some great advice, and getting everyone there. Because I'm sure on the one hand The sales, of course, the sales team is saying, hey, Don't kick the gift horse in the mouth. We shouldn't change anything. We've got a great pipeline. We're going to lose all that. And then the product development, well, wait a minute, what does this mean?

We're going to have to change things up and we have a terrific quality. We've got everything down and you're hearing all of these different comments in different directions. So I really like what you're doing there. So much there. And [00:48:00] again, Deep Wealth Nation in the show notes, please go there.

There are a number of links with resources that you'll get to Bill of all of the resources Different questions that you can ask and his information and some of the resources that he has on his website. But that said, Bill, let's go into wrap up mode and it's a tradition here on the Deep Wealth Podcast where every guest, I have the privilege, the honor of asking the same question and it's a fun question.

Let me set this one up for you. When you think of the movie Back to the Future, you have that magical DeLorean car that will take you to any point in time. So Bill, tomorrow morning, you look outside your window, not DeLorean car curbside, the door is open, you hop on in and you're now going to go to any point in your life.

Bill, as a young child, a teenager, whatever point in time it would be. What are you telling your younger self in terms of life lessons or life wisdom or, hey, Bill, do this, but don't do that? What would it sound like? 

Bill Wilson: I think like many of us entrepreneurs type A's, we suffer from a little bit of imposter syndrome and maybe a lot and I would probably tell myself that everything that you're going through, every anxiety you have [00:49:00] now just keep pushing through it because All the good things are on I mean, it's probably some corny saying and I'm going to screw it up, but it's like this idea that all the good things are on the other side of being uncomfortable.

if I look back on my life and I look at the big moments that have changed trajectories for me, they've all been when I've taken a chance when I don't feel like I know what I'm doing. And so. I would just encourage myself to keep doing that and maybe even do it younger. Yeah, I think that's, that would be the big one for me.

And if I were to go anywhere in that DeLorean, I may go back to, my teenage self or whatever, but more importantly, I'd probably just stay here, drive the thing. It's amazing. we are exactly where we're supposed to be, 

Jeffrey Feldberg: yeah. I couldn't read more. It's actually a theme. So many of the guests say I wouldn't change anything. I love where I am and yeah, I've had some ups, I've had a lot of downs, but that's made me who I 

Bill Wilson: Yeah, you got to live in the game, right?

Jeffrey Feldberg: yeah. Yeah. But that's some great advice that all the good things are on the other side of being uncomfortable.

Feel the fear. Just go do it. Thank yourself for it. Fall up. Pick yourself back up. Get [00:50:00] out there. And so Bill, a listener, they have a question, they want to bring you into their company or they want to have a chat with you, where would be the best place online for someone to reach you?

Bill Wilson: The easiest way is just email me directly, Bill at PacePricing. com. That's it. That's the simplest way to get ahold of me. I am on all the regular networks, so have a look for me there. I do post some really cool stuff on LinkedIn, Bill at PacePricing. com. Happy to have a chat.

Jeffrey Feldberg: Wow. Deep Wealth Nation, did you hear that? Take Bill up on his offer. Reach out. He's been there. He's done that. Hey, one small change can be digits, double digits or more in terms of your profits, your growth, market disruption just around the corner. It's worth the time. It's worth the effort. Well, Bill, congratulations.

It's official. This is a wrap. And as we love to say here at Deep Wealth, may you continue to thrive and prosper while you remain healthy and safe. Thank you so much.

Bill Wilson: Thank you. It's been a pleasure. 

Jeffrey Feldberg: So there you have it, Deep Wealth Nation. What did you think? 

So with all that said and as we wrap it up, I have another question for you.

Actually, it's more of a personal [00:51:00] favor. 

Did you find this episode helpful? 

Have you found other episodes of the Deep Wealth Podcast empowering and a game changer for your journey? 

And if you said yes, and I really hope you did, I have a small but really meaningful way that you can actually help us out and keep these episodes coming to you.

Are you ready for it? 

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So all that said. Thank you so much for listening. And remember your wealth isn't just about the money in the bank. It's about the depth of your journey and the impact that you're creating. So let's continue this journey together. And from the bottom of my heart, thank you so much for listening to this episode.

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God bless.