The Pricing Psychology for Leaders to Stop Underpricing and Understand Value with Etinosa

Statistically speaking, I think it's like 8 out of 10 businesses underprice. And the problem with underpricing is that no one is going to tell you that you're underpriced unless they're really keeping an eye out for you.

From your perspective, what role should finance, particularly FP&A, play in pricing?

I think that what I've seen with bigger companies is— Meet Ediosa A, the Chief Executive Officer of Decision Alpha, also a behavioral economist. She's passionate about helping people reduce financial stress and and live healthier financial lives. Her work has been featured in MarketWatch and Morningstar. She is also the author of How to Talk to Your Parents About Money.

We've heard a lot since AI has come into the picture in the way it has. Let's talk generative AI. Also, we have these tokens and usage and we have value-based pricing. How have you seen that change things?

In professional services that typically have had hourly billing, we're seeing AI create a bit of a burning platform. Because if you used AI to save 30% of the time you would have dedicated to research, What do you build for now?

How will we help the business focus on a data-driven approach?

The thing with data is that it's being able to get good at storytelling, actually, because it's never about the data.

What does great FP&A look like?

I think that great FP&A looks like—

Welcome to another episode of FP&A Unlocked. Are you tired of being seen as just a spreadsheet person while others get a seat at the table? Well then, FP&A Unlocked is where finance meets strategy. I'm your host, Paul Barnhurst, aka the FP&A Guy, and each week we bring you conversations and practical advice from thought leaders, industry experts, and practitioners. Together, we're all uncover the strategies and experiences that separate good FP&A professionals from great ones, helping you elevate your career and drive strategic impact. I'm thrilled this week to welcome to the show Ediosa, welcome to the show. Thank you for joining us.

Thank you for having me, Paul. I'm excited for the conversation.

Yeah, it's really excited to have you here and dive into things. I've, uh, someone you know, as we were talking, we were chatting, I've had a behavioral economist on before and it was one of my favorite conversations. We had a lot of fun. So I'm really excited you were willing to join and I excited to jump into this. So a little bit of, uh, Ediosa's background. She's a behavioral economist and the CEO of Decision Alpha. A behavioral pricing firm that helps businesses improve pricing for growth, traction, and stronger perceived value. With over a decade of global experience across the US, Australia, Africa, and the UK, she has shaped pricing engagement and customer behavior strategy for major financial institutions and venture-backed startups. Her work has been featured in MarketWatch, Morningstar, and other leading platforms for her insights on how Behavior Drives Financial Outcomes. She is also the author of How to Talk to Your Parents About Money, a guide to navigating complex financial conversations. Love the background and welcome, Maguette.

Thank you.

So what made you decide to be a behavioral economist? I'm curious how that, uh, how'd you get into that path?

Yeah, I've always been interested in finance. So I'm the kid who would like count out all the money in the piggy bank. I knew down to the dollars and the cents what was going on in my actual piggy bank. And I graduated from college with a degree in psychology, and I was working at the time in the publishing industry. And I remember having a conversation with my mentor around, I'm thinking about going to grad school. I really like economics. I love finance. I don't have a background in either, but I kind of want to like lean into that direction. And I have this psychology background. What can I do with it? And he gave me this book called Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely. And it was all about how people don't make rational decisions when it comes to money. It was all around the psychology around financial decision-making. And it just blew my mind. I was like, oh my God, this is amazing. So I read the book and then started to talk to every behavioral economist I could find. This was more than 10 years ago. So there weren't really a lot of behavioral economists in industry. It wasn't really as big of a thing as it is now. So I went on LinkedIn, everyone I could find in the UK, the US, in China, wherever. Anyone had behavioral economist in their LinkedIn bio. I reached out to them. I talked to more than 20 people and decided like, this is it. This is, this is the thing I want to do because at the time I was working. So there was an opportunity cost to, I'm going to put down this publishing thing I'm doing and I'm going to go study this thing. So I wanted to make sure I was doing, I wanted to make sure it was, you know, a sensible thing to do.

Like a true behavioral economist, you were analyzing it all and trying to figure out the pros and cons and weigh the the time value of money, all those things that go into it.

Yeah. And it ended up being the right thing to do. I went to grad school for it, ended up working with a bank, then a bank in Australia, came back to the US to work at an investment bank here, and then ended up, you know, starting up Decision Alpha. So it's been a journey. It's been a global international journey I did not predict.

Yeah, no, it sounds like it. You mentioned Australia in there. I think you said Africa, UK, you know, you had experience all over the globe, which I would imagine when you started, that's not what you expected.

No, it was not. I was like, I'm gonna do this course and fingers crossed it works out and we'll see what happens. And somehow it all fell into place.

Well, that's awesome. I mean, it's definitely a field that's grown a lot, and I know pricing is an area that a lot of people need help with. So it sounds like, you know, things are going well there. Before I jump into kind of pricing behavioral economics, we like to start every interview with this question, and I'm curious to get your background because I know you don't work with FP&A full-time, but you work with them sometimes in finance. From your perspective, what does great FP&A look like? When you think of great FP&A, what comes to mind for you?

I think that great FP&A looks like moving beyond, to your point earlier about moving beyond the spreadsheet, moving beyond just capturing and speaking to historical data and moving towards insights, anticipating the future, pointing to here is something that the data tells us that we didn't know before, and this is what we can do about it, right? That actionability perspective, I think it's what really separates good from great. It's not just, yes, what the data says, it's what does this mean for the organization? What should you be thinking about doing with it?

Right?

So I think actionable insights and that forward-looking perspective is probably that differentiator.

I appreciate that. The forward-looking insights and actionable insights, being able to help the business make better decisions. It makes a lot of sense to me. So you spent several years as a behavioral economist working banking and financial services. Would love to hear a little bit about that experience and how it prepared you to start Decision Alpha, kind of how that decision came about.

Yeah. Um, so I think a lot of the work that I did in the finance space has all been centered on financial wellbeing, right? So financial wellbeing is, as a person, how financially comfortable do you feel right now? How financially comfortable do you feel to absorb any income shocks that might come up in the future? And how prepared do you feel in general for the future you want to live, right? That is the entirety of financial wellbeing. So a lot of my career as a behavioral economist has looked at financial wellbeing for individuals. How do you help them save more, spend better, feel better about their money? And what do institutions do to help build better products, better processes, better tools that help you as a person, a customer of theirs, get to a better place financially, right? The notion is healthy financial customers for a bank makes the banks overall healthier. And so when I thought through, well, Thinking about building this company, this firm, what does financial wellbeing look like when it's not being applied to an individual, right? What does financial wellbeing look like for a company or for a business? The gateway is pricing, right? If you're a small business owner, your pricing almost has a one-to-one relationship, a linear relationship with your financial wellbeing. If you're a larger company, it has an oversized, upsized impact. And when I was doing the research, of course, before doing Building Decision Alpha, I was talking to lots of companies and small businesses to understand, well, how do you set your price? How do you price it? And I would get answers like, we guessed, we copied competitors, we kind of saw what the market was doing. It was this black hole and nobody was thinking through systematically. We spoke to customers, we took in customer psychology into consideration. We understood that if we positioned it this way, we would get this kind of customers. We positioned it the other way, we would get those other kinds of customers. So it felt like there was a real gap between this is the opportunity that getting pricing right can bring to you, not just in terms of profit, but in terms of financial wellbeing overall. And there's so much opportunity cost in terms of nobody's actually using behavioral economics properly in this space. And so it just felt like this is the right space to step into that married all of our interests and expertise, uh, together.

Makes a lot of sense. And when you said, uh, a lot of people like, we copy the competitors, we guessed. So two stories, and I think they both really hit home to what you're saying. First is when I started, remember somebody reaching out to me and go, how are you pricing your training? I was like, I have no idea. And I asked someone who'd been doing it for a while and their response was, I just make up a number. It's all BS. I'm like, you guys are really helpful. So I didn't feel too bad when I started, you know, as a solopreneur, what they're all like, we don't know. We're trying to figure it out as well. So this speaks to your point of not really doing the homework. A lot of guessing takes place. And the second, there was a study a few years ago. It was, it was the SaaS industry that said the average SaaS company spends more time a year on its janitorial services for its facility than it does on its pricing strategy.

It's incredible. It's incredible. And when you think about it, it's like building a business is like growing a farm, right? You've done all the harvesting and all the tilling and all the planting. When it comes to harvest, which is your pricing, you kind of go, eh, we'll see what happens. You know, let's just see what happens. And it's like, this is the most important part. This is the keystone. This is the thing that matters the most that will help you recoup all the effort that you've put into it. We have to get it right.

Yeah. And that part about have to get it right. It's, it's amazing how often we forget that. I, I can relate to that in my own business. I've definitely had a lot of lessons learned on pricing. So now, you know, when I worked for somebody, I was always bringing up pricing. We were having those discussions and trying to be thoughtful about it. It's been eye-opening kind of being on the other side to be in charge of all of it.

Do you find that when you think about when in the early days, when you're thinking about your own pricing, you found that a lot of like your maybe beliefs about your worth, your biases, whatever kind of came into the pricing too. It wasn't just like, what is the price? It was, what is my price?

100%. My biases impacted my pricing. And I would say in most cases it led to me underpricing, not overpricing. I've had to learn that painful lesson over time in a number of different ways.

We've seen that a lot. Um, statistically speaking, I think it's like 8 out of 10 businesses underprice. And the problem with underpricing is that no one is going to tell you that you're underpriced unless you're really keeping an eye out for you. I had a friend many years ago who started like a consulting firm and she put in a bid to do training with this big, you know, Fortune 500 company, put in a bid to do training with them. And somebody from the company called her and said, hey, I just want you to know you came in $10,000 under everybody else. So we're going to go with you, but I need you to know for next time, like you can never submit prices this low ever again. And so unless you've got somebody who's, you know, keeping an eye out for you as like, okay, we're both from the same place or we're both, you know, whatever caused that person to pick up the phone and have a conversation with them as a, I shouldn't be doing this, but I need you to know because it's a terrible mistake you're making. Most times people just let you keep underpricing and you find yourself struggling to build a sustainable business. Agree.

And, you know, for me, it's been in certain areas and I've been able to make it a sustainable business, but what I've realized is if you're perceived as value in the market and you go low pricing, it really hurts you. It doesn't help you even if you're trying to do a volume. It's been interesting to learn. That's probably one of the biggest lessons I've learned is people don't see it as volume because they see you as a premium and they think something's wrong with it if it's that price. The price is that low, even if you think you're providing a ton of value. It's really interesting to start to recognize that behavior.

Yeah. And the research backs this out. There was a famous study that was done a couple of years ago where they, um, had folks, it was with INSEAD, which is the business school out in France. They had folks hooked up to fMRI machines and they had them like taste these different bottles of wine. And the only markers that were on the bottles were just the prices that were on the bottles. Otherwise, there was nothing else identifying like, is it a Sauv? Is it a— what is it? Right? And they found that the centers of the brain associated with like value evaluation had more activity when folks were tasting the higher priced wine versus when they were tasting the cheaper one. Literally on a visceral level, the brain was processing it completely different. Of course, they were all drinking the same wine.

Yeah, I was gonna say it was the exact same wine in every bottle.

Exact same wine. The only difference was the pricing. So to that point, I tell people this, that when you're pricing low, there's— I call it the tyranny of low prices. You're pricing too low, you are signaling and affecting how people are going to look at you and value you relative to being priced either not necessarily higher, but a more premium our position.

And yeah, and like I said, not, not surprised to hear you say that. I, uh, I've lived that and I do remember that wine example at the time. I remember hearing about that at school. I'd forgot that, but it's a great example of perceptual level.

Yeah. Literally in the brain, people could feel and react to the difference in pricing in the brain. So a lot of times as business owners, we think people are walking around with a sense of what our products and services should cost, right? This is what consulting should cost. When no, people are going to look at your prices and infer your value from the price. This is why all of this stuff really matters.

Yeah. And you mentioned 8 of 10 companies tend to underprice. Why do you think that is? Is it that we, all of us feel like everything's overpriced in general? Like if I go to the store and I look at something, especially with inflation, I feel like almost everything's overpriced. Do we carry that bias into our business or what, what in your opinion are those kinds of key things that cause us to be underpriced on the whole, even though if you ask anyone on average, everything's overpriced or it's expensive, if not overpriced, it feels expensive, right? Yeah. It feels expensive. There's a difference. It's a good call out, but you know what I mean?

Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I think that there's a couple of things going on with people underpricing. I think that the first one is that there's this kind of bias towards internal cost structures. This is what it costs, right? And so I want to, it's cost plus pricing. And I did a, I just did a presentation to the Tampa Bay Chamber and I gave them this story of, I was in Kenya a couple of years ago and there was a warthog. We're on safari, Masai Mara, little warthog running across the plain with a lioness chasing it. And this poor warthog runs from one distance where we can think of how far horizon is. They run from one distance all the way, keeps running, keeps running all the way past our eyesight, cannot stop running. Lioness eventually gives up and, you know, goes back to lie down. But I was saying to them, when you choose to anchor your pricing only on the cost, you are that warthog. You are constantly looking behind you to make sure that factors beyond your influence do not creep up over your shoulder. Last year we saw inflation, we saw tariffs, we saw things black swan events, things that we could not have predicted in a million years happening back to back to back to back, right? So when you're doing cost-plus pricing, you're basically setting yourself up for constantly looking over your shoulder, right? So I think that's the first one is that people do that cost-plus thing and just think like it's standard, it's normal, it's what you're meant to do. The other thing is copying competitors, right? Or looking at, you know, mystery shopping and everyone says this like with so, with so much pride, like I did some mystery shopping, I caught up my competitors, I saw what they were charging. But you don't know that A, they're not making the same mistakes you're making. You don't know that they're not also underpricing. And you don't know that you don't offer more than they do, but you call your service the same thing that they call theirs. Right? So all of these things start to factor into why people are underpricing. And the biggest one is nobody really sits down and talks to customers. Nobody sits down and talks to prospects to understand what is your willingness to pay? What is the ceiling? What's too high? What's too low? What would you use if you're interested in my product? How does this help you? You and how do you value that help, right? So all of these things combined together to create this system where even when we feel like we're doing it the right way by doing the competitor shopping or the mystery shopping, we're actually leaving a lot of value on the table because we haven't spoken to customers yet.

Good point, Sunil. Funny enough, I actually polled people about my pricing one time on LinkedIn and asked them if I was over or underpriced because basically when I asked Claude, it's like, yeah, you have a pricing problem. So it was really, I was like, what do people think of that? It was always, it was interesting to see the answer from, yeah, you should charge more to, hey, wait a second, don't. And I more was just curious to see what people would say, but there wasn't an overwhelming of like, yeah, oh yeah, yeah, your pricing's right or don't, because it was talking about raising pricing. Especially the customers you value will tell you where they think you are, what your value is. At least that's what I've found. So why not ask?

Exactly. And I think it also allows you to get better. With your segmentation to understand who is the customer I serve, right? Because when you do any— as we've done pricing studies, there's naturally tiers and segments start to emerge, right? There's the folks who for years you've been stretching yourself to try and accommodate and you realize, oh, they're just never going to reach the place that I'm trying to get to in the business. We need to discuss, is there a different package or something we offer them? Or maybe they're just not the right customer, that they're not ICP, right? So I think Along with the conversations of pricing and value is who is the right customer? Who are we targeting? And what do they expect from us? Yeah.

So talk a little bit about, about that. How do you as a business determine you have the right customer? Like, because that's a big part of pricing, right? Like we, we see that so many studies that say what, like, you know, 80% of your revenue comes from 20% of your customers or your profit. It's usually a small group, but we're servicing a big group. And so how do we kind of know if we're servicing the right customers? I know it goes a little bit on pricing, but I'd love some of your thoughts there in that segmentation, right?

Yeah. So separate to the pricing work, there's two ways to look at it, right? So when we work with SaaS companies, we're working with, um, some folks right now where we started by understanding who is using your product and how are they using it, right? You've got the bigger enterprise-style clients who need you on call 24/7. They're using up more of your storage and more AWS costs, et cetera. You've got the smaller folks who are Every now and then they're in your platform, they're touching things, but they don't need as much of your attention, right? We're able to segment by use case, right? You also have a different way of, um, always have a different way of segmenting by actually understanding and looking at the data and spend so far, right? Who is the right type of customer? Well, who stayed with you the longest? How much has everyone spent on average? Who renews quickly? What do your salespeople say about the different kinds of customers they sit with, right? There's the qualitative and the quantitative elements to this. So when you think about who is my right customer, it's both historical in terms of what spend, retention, et cetera, but then it's also forward-looking as we think through the kind of business we want to build. Who do we want to continue to service? Who do we like working with? It's not a bad thing to look at your customer base and go, who do I actually enjoy working with? Who do my sales teams like hanging out with? Right? That also, all of those factor into who is my right customer. There's a quantum qual element to it.

I love how you said that. I still remember valuable lesson I learned. We had this customer that wanted to do this collaboration with us and it would involve someone I had partnered with and he joined the first call and he, he messaged me. He goes, just don't do it. Say no to the deal. You got too much work going on. This customer will nickel and dime you to death. They don't really know what they want. It's their first time. You're going to spend twice as much work for the money. Just say no. And I ended up ultimately saying no. And I was really glad in the end. They, they were, they were disappointed, but it was one of the better decisions I made. I'm like, it's not worth the money. So it was that good reminder of, hey, yeah, we need money, but we also want to focus on what we enjoy and the right type of customer.

Yeah, I had something like that recently in December where I had to turn somebody down. And mind you, you know, we're still building this business. So turning people down is something I think about very carefully before I do, but they were trying to build 3 different things at the same time. And they had every member on their team on the 2 calls that I had with them. And I said, this isn't going to work. There's no way you can build anything financial wellbeing is already going to be inherently difficult. Anything pricing requires you to really set up dedicated time to think through it. Trying to build 3 big things at the same time and the amount of resources I see being wasted by having every single member of your team on 2 calls to talk to one person from my team. No, I don't. No, no, no, no, this isn't going to work, but it was a difficult decision to make. Sure.

Cause it's, it's revenue. And especially when you're early in a business. That's the lifeblood is getting that cash in the door. And it's like, okay, can I replace it with something? Yeah, I, I think every business has gone through that. I mean, the advice I've heard again and again from people and I give now is that one, learn to say no, learn to say it often and early, be really focused and understand that it's okay to turn down customers that you'll, you know, you'll figure it out. But when you first start, you just, it's, there's the psychological side of that, but I can't. How will it work out? It's this much revenue. All, all that goes with that. So definitely there's, I'm sure there's a whole study that's been done on that side of behavior, like an artist, as far as, you know, that propensity to not want to say no and accepting deals even when we know we shouldn't.

There's two things, right? One is regret aversion. Graham Loomis, great professor, studies extensively. He was one of my professors at Warwick, but basically we would rather not change anything or just go the default and say yes than say no and experience the regret of having rejected or made a different decision, right? So we tend to be regret averse. We talk about loss aversion a lot, like, you know, we'd rather not lose, but regret aversion is also a very real concept. And so sometimes when you see markets change, there's volatility in the markets and people are not making any moves, it's sometimes not necessarily because they think, oh, I'm just gonna ride out the market. Sometimes it's If I change anything and it ends up badly, I don't want to experience that regret. And we all have this to some degree. Yeah.

I mean, I, I, the number one I think of regretted version is everybody, I wish I would've invested in Apple 20 years ago or Microsoft or whatever, you know, Tesla, there, there, there's a long list. Yeah. Bitcoin. We could spend the rest of the episode just listing all those we wish we had invested, but the reverse is true. What about all those that we didn't invest in that we would've lost all our That list is actually longer. We just don't think about it.

Yep. Yeah. I had an SVP many years ago tell me that somebody had come into the company a long time ago and talked to them about Bitcoin and said, if you could do anything right now, take $500, just pop it into Bitcoin. I can show you how to do it. And the whole leadership team was like, ah, sure, Bitcoin, whatever. And then she was telling me this during 2024. So at the time Bitcoin was almost touching $100,000. And she was like, if I had done that, I'd be on an island right now. I wouldn't be talking to you. But I see your point. Yeah.

Yeah. I know a guy that worked for the company who's called Overstock, and at the time their CEO was a huge Bitcoin person, and he offered everybody, he goes, I will turn your entire check right now into Bitcoin, but you have to do the full check. You can't do part of it. And he was young and just couldn't afford that at the time. So he turned it down and he's like, I think it would have been worth like, you know, $5 or $10 billion now or some crazy number. He's like, had I known, I would just found a, we put it on the credit card. Found a way to, you know, to, to swing it. But yeah, right decision from the standpoint of, okay, young married couple, I think they had a kid or something, with no money. It's like, that's a bad decision. I can't take a risk on a paycheck, right? That's like going and gambling, kind of similar idea. But in hindsight, to look at it and go, yeah, I wish I had found a way.

Yeah.

So human, human behavior, very interesting. Well, so I want to ask a question From your perspective, what role should finance, particularly FP&A, play in pricing? I can speak today, kind of.

I think that what I've seen with bigger companies is pricing ends up being this kind of like, I want to say bastard, but like, it's like, no, it doesn't really have a parent, right? It doesn't really have a parent. It's on—

I've lived that.

Yeah, it's on the revenue team has a hand in it. Product for some reason has a hand in pricing, marketing. Everyone kind of owns a little bit of pricing. And so when you come together to build the price, you end up with, what is it, a camel is a horse that's designed by committee. A lot of prices, like Frankenstein prices, because everyone kind of owns a little bit of it. But I think that FP&A's role in pricing is bringing that data and bringing those insights, right? It's being able to say, here are the patterns of behavior we see. Here, hey, did you, when the prices, when the price ended in 99, we drove more volume., but we may not have sold as much as when it was like, you know, a flat round price. Hey, did you know that more people are coming on Wednesdays and buying at this level? You know, it's bringing those insights that marketing and sales and research can then take and marry with the research, the talking to customers to understand, okay, we know historically, we understand from a historical perspective what to expect. Let's go talk to customers. Let's marry that with some color and then be able to frame that in a way that's going to be appealing. To the customer. So I think there's a collaboration that's often needed between the analytics, the FP&A side, in addition to the folks who actually are talking to the customers, like your researchers, your product people, and so on.

So what should FP&A be bringing beyond just, I think sometimes you're guilty of, okay, here's the cost, and we don't bring any other information. What are other things you think kind of best FP&A teams are bringing to that pricing discussion?

Patterns, right? So yes, this is the cost, but if we have any historical pricing patterns from similar products that we've launched. Love to see patterns, right? At the different levels, what were, what's those demand elasticity like? Who took it? Who did not take it? Can we marry those with customer segments that marketing might have? Which customer segments were more likely to buy at what price, right? There's a cross-collaboration, cross-functional conversation that's happening. But at a very high level, would love to see patterns coming from FP&A that we can then use to feed into the new research we do around what this new price should obviously the cost data and then the patterns, which makes a lot of sense.

Who do you think should own pricing? Like how, how have you seen it best work? I know there's a lot of different ways and you mentioned collaboration, which I, I fully agree with, but I'd love to kind of get your thoughts of, cuz you mentioned how it's kind of a bastard, I think was the word you used a lot of times.

Yes. It works best when there's actually a pricing team that's accountable for it. But then also we have, you know, marketing, product, the customer research responsible for elements of it. So they all feed in, but there is one accountability with an actual pricing team. Now the pricing team can sit in the revenue team, and so they're sitting very closely to the sales data. They can sit more closely with the analytics or with marketing. The company kind of has to decide based on what its priorities are, where that pricing team needs to sit, but always best if you have a clear function that is labeled pricing. And is accountable for it and kind of like owns the, owns the buck.

Makes a lot of sense. I, uh, you know, I had a company where kind of a lot of it fell back to finance, and I still remember when I first was made a director, you know, stuff would come across my desk and I started rejecting it. Nobody was— they were setting product price, whatever. I'm like, you haven't included any of the fixed costs. Like, you have nothing but the variable costs here. You base the price completely on that. Like, I can't approve Yeah, a lot of discussions like that. It got to the point they got so used to me on it. I'm on one call, they're like, they turned to me and said, well, what should the price be? That's not really my job. I need to make sure it's a certain margin so we don't lose money. But you guys understand the customers. What's your thought in accounting and product of what this pricing should be? I kind of, you know, turned it back to them. What do you think is appropriate? I'll give you my thoughts. Happy to do that, but it's not my decision. I just need to protect us from a finance perspective. To make sure we're not losing our shirt on the pricing. That was kind of how I tried to do it, but have that real conversation because nobody owned it and was like, we can't lose. And we had a lot of bad pricing at the time is what I came to learn.

So, which is incredible when you think about the fact that this is the lifeblood of the company and yet nobody really truly owns it. Right. But what we try to do now is we have a package where we'll come into a company and just help everyone level set on This is how pricing works. This is what behavioral pricing looks like. Let's get everyone who is involved in pricing in one way or another singing from the same hymn book, because we understand that your job is to protect margins. Marketing's job is to make it look more attractive and attract the right customer, the right segments. Sales just wants to get the, you know, close the deal. They want the commission. I will discount everything. Let's go.

Right?

When we get everyone singing from the same hymn book, we all have the same foundational knowledge. It helps then when you have to have these conversations around Let's pour in all of our different insights and align on, right, what is the right pricing model and what should that price look like?

I'm thinking of all kinds of examples where I've seen so many different things, as you mentioned that, of trying to get everybody on the same page from the, you know, the sales commissions to the— just a lot of different things have to be aligned if you really want to get it all working. But I'm curious, do you have— you mentioned about getting everybody on the same page. Is there a framework you like to use when you come in to kind of analyze pricing or frameworks? What do you typically do? Because I'm sure you come into all kinds of companies and you have a pattern you use to analyze things.

Yes. So we have a decision offer pricing framework, very originally named, um, but it has, it has 4 elements to it. The first one is kind of what we call mapping monetization zones, which is what we spoke about, um, to earlier around how do you decide who your right customers are? So in that instance, we're understanding what are use cases, what are the different patterns of How are the different, what are the different kind of tiers you might need to have to take into this pricing research with you? Are they enterprise customers, solo entrepreneurs, whatever that looks like, right? You're a bagel shop. Do you have your 9-to-5ers and then the offices who you cater to, right? Separating out what are the different use cases we have. Then we move that into the actual pricing research and we call that step the willingness to pay work. And that's where we're building out the cost floor, right? What is the, what do you need to keep the lights on? That's where we're talking to customers to understand what is the price ceiling? What is the maximum any customer across this? Tiers are going to be willing to pay for this service in that we're also doing research around what are the competitors doing and also what are alternates? Because a lot of times people think about what competitors are doing, but they don't think about the fact that instead of using this SaaS, I can just hire an intern and pay him for, or pay her 8 hours on a Friday to just pound it out through Excel and ChatGPT, right? That's an alternate to me buying into a SaaS product. So taking into consideration what is the world of value, how do we understand all these different models that helps us then spit out a range for the pricing, then we take that into the third step, which is how we start to frame the conversation, right? That's where a lot of the behavioral economics framing also comes into place, thinking through what are these companies' goals long-term. With a SaaS company we've worked with, part of what they wanted to do was go back and go get another round of funding in a year or two. And so we said, okay, let's see how we can, how can we get more people to aim for one-year and two-year contracts, right? Instead of the monthly subscription thing, how do we get people locked into one and two-year contracts? Because it's aligned with the goals of the business. So in the third step is where we're thinking about how do we frame the price? How do we make it appealing to customers in a way that's gonna resonate with them and also with the business's goals? Final step, we call it the test and scaling. We always say that price needs to be a feature and not a reaction. So rather than being like the warthog that's looking over its shoulder every 5 seconds and waiting for something to change, the rent changed, inflation changed, tariffs changed, and so now I'm gonna go fix my pricing. There's intentionality there. Every 6 months you sit down with the team and you look at what new features have we shipped? What new value have we delivered? Is our pricing commensurate to that? Doesn't mean that you change your pricing every 6 months, but it does mean that you're up to date and you're understanding the value that you're delivering. And you're also constantly testing it. New customers, maybe you put a new price in front of them, see how they react to it. But you're keeping your finger on the pulse of what you would be charging for this. So those 4 elements from the mapping monetization zones, doing the willingness to pay research, the framing, and then the testing and refining. All come together to make up the decision of a pricing framework.

Thank you for sharing that. I appreciate it. Um, so within that framework, when you go into companies, do you see many companies do it? Where do you see the breakdown in those areas kind of as you go into companies? Is there one area that you most commonly see or is it kind of a little bit of everything?

It's usually in step 2. A lot of people don't talk to customers. It's before those. Before those don't mind, but a lot of companies don't necessarily talk to customers about pricing and value. They will substitute instead the competitor research. They'll substitute instead the mystery shopping. They'll substitute instead that we want 80% margins and so, and we know it costs this much. And so therefore the price needs to live at this range, right? Which is totally fine, but you have this much of a world that you could price and you're only optimizing for this much. Right? So a lot of times it really breaks down where people don't do and going to talk to customers or prospects and start to understand how do they conceptualize the value of the product? What numbers do they put around it? Well, that's where I see a lot of times things kind of break down.

That makes a lot of sense. As you mentioned, talking to the customers, I can think of some times when I've done a bad job with that. So as you're sharing all this, I'm thinking about my own business and my own experiences. And I'm like, I can relate to that. I can relate to this. So it's, it's kind of funny. I usually don't do that as much during an episode, but definitely, uh, it's causing me to think a lot. So that's, that's a good thing. Uh, one area I want to talk a little bit about is we've heard a lot since AI has come into the picture in the way it has, right? We've had AI for years. Let's talk generative AI. Also, we have these tokens and usage and we have value-based pricing and all kinds of things that come with AI, especially if you do a lot of SaaS companies. So many of them have an AI component, right? So how, how have you seen that change things? What are you seeing in the way of pricing? Just first, just kind of get your thoughts on what you're seeing.

Yeah, I think that we're seeing it affect a couple of different dimensions. So in professional services that typically have had hourly billing, we're seeing AI start to create a bit of like a, a burning platform, right? Because if you used AI to save on 30, 30% of the time you would have dedicated to research.

What do you do?

What do you bill for now? Right? So a lot of lawyers, a lot of accountants are starting to, a lot of bookkeepers are starting to think through, we need new ways to price. It cannot just be hourly anymore because AI is coming and just like kind of ripping a hole through that. And also customers know you're using AI. So therefore there's some more challenge that can be expected along those lines. On the flip side, we also see that AI companies themselves are figuring out and trying to understand what pricing should look like. So I don't know if you saw this headline a few weeks ago, somebody was running the $200 version of Claude and burned through $6,000 worth of usage. And so Anthropic very quickly had to go, right, moving forward, it is, if you're going to be running AI agents, it's going to be pay-as-you-use, right? It's this much.

Yes, I saw that. I went to play with the agents. I remember hearing about all that where they're like, we can't just let you Well, it can be unlimited elsewhere. Here we can't do it.

Exactly. So it's changing both pricing for regular businesses who are having to think about, we can't do this hourly thing anymore, but it's also changing for the companies themselves who they're trying to figure it out. There's a lot of reactivity going on right now, which is fair. Brand new world. We're trying to figure it out together, but that's where things are changing.

It feels like it's impacting almost everything that's professional services, whether it's the SaaS businesses, whether it's the AI themselves, everybody's trying to figure it out. And like you said, every time you make changes, if there's a way to exploit it, somebody will figure it out.

And it may be the, the, my, I read into that story because I was so fascinated by it. It wasn't even intentional. They just went to bed and left it. They just went to sleep and left the AI agent running on a loop and it just burned through all those credits. So. We're all figuring it out together.

I, I bet they were really glad they didn't have to pay based on usage.

Yeah, I'm sure Anthropic was not happy.

You're expecting $200, you get $6,000, it's like, um, there goes the savings.

Yep.

Yeah, if you have it. So yeah, yeah, totally. Um, so another thing we're hearing a lot about, would love to get some of your thoughts on it, maybe walk through what it is, why people are using it so much. But we hear this term outcome-based pricing. You talk a little bit about that, kind of what it is, why we're hearing so much about it now.

Yeah. So at its heart, outcome-based pricing is essentially something like a collections company can come and say, hey, instead of you using a lawyer who's going to bill per hour, and so therefore is incentivized to bill as many hours as possible, we will only collect a percentage of whatever amount we're able to recover of this debt for you, right? So now our incentives are aligned. So outcome-based pricing is basically I'm going to charge you based off of the outcome that I get for you, whether that's money I saved you, money I recovered for you, whether that's time I saved you, I'm going to collect a portion of that rather than you paying me per hour or paying me some other kind of metric.

Is that kind of similar to value-based pricing or how would you differentiate those two?

I think that value-based pricing is a bit more amorphous, so to speak, right? Because if I could say value-based pricing is based off the fact that Part of the value I deliver to my customers is that they have confidence in their pricing, right? And so I can do the research to try and understand how to put a number around confidence, whereas outcome-based pricing is, I say to them, if with this new price you generate $100,000 over the next 3 months, I would like 3% of that, right? So one is more concrete and one is more amorphous, so to speak.

And that makes sense because, you know, historically up in here, the kind of the holy grail is you want value-based pricing. A lot of times I've heard that term and it feels like in many ways, if you believe in your product and transparency, outcome-based pricing can be, I mean, it, it obviously it varies a lot, but it feels like it can be a real win for everybody if you're able to do it.

If you're able to deliver and where the outcomes are clean and clear cut, right? There's an, there's an AI company called Fin, and they were the first ones I've seen who have really done this outcome-based pricing phenomenally, and Finney helps folks resolve inquiries, right? So if you go into Gap and you ask to resolve a customer query, they might be running Finney on the backend. I don't think they are. That's just an example. But what Finney charges on is the AI asks, did I resolve your query? And the customer says yes or no. And if the customer says yes, then Finney bills a few cents to the company. So in that instance, outcome-based pricing is pretty clear-cut. It's based on the customer saying yes, you resolved it, or no, you didn't resolve it. So it's pretty clear-cut and you can tie that back to, right, how many FTE have I saved you based off of using the AI firm? How much, you know, there's a lot more you can tie to that, but because the outcome is so clear and so tangible, it's easy for them to say we are outcome-based pricing. I've seen McKinsey has been talking a lot about wanting to do outcome-based pricing as well. And I think there it requires a lot more trust, a lot more conversation, because if McKinsey comes in to do a, Let's say they're coming to do an optimization exercise, right? And they determine, right, if we can save you a million dollars in FT over the next week or two, we want to take 3% of that. Well, who decides that million dollars, right? Who decides what it was that McKinsey did that affected the million dollars? What if we're already doing things before McKinsey came in? Do we do it before and after? There's a lot more clarity that needs to be determined, but a lot more, you just need to be very clear-cut if you're starting to walk down this line.

Yeah, I could see. Easily there could be a lot of subjectivity. So you got to have really clear guidelines ahead of time. And I would imagine that's one of the kind of biggest pitfalls or challenges, right, with outcome-based pricing is being able to try to make it clear from the beginning. And also, how do you clearly calculate it and determine it? That's not even speaking about outcome-based pricing, but I've seen situations where, you know, the data is completely dependent on the other party. That requires a very high degree of trust. To even validate the pricing's right. Now base it on outcome where they have an incentive to make it lower. Not saying you're going to behave unethically or not, but I mean, that's, that's a risk when you incentivize, you know, them to, uh, easily not be transparent, at least from a price standpoint.

Right. So I think there's a couple of places where outcome-based pricing works really well. It is where there's a clear outcome. It's mutually agreed to, it's fairly objective, right? Did I resolve the query? Yes or no, right? Did you collect— did you get me my money back as a collections company? Yes or no. It's fairly objective for us to determine what the outcome was and if success was met or not. In those areas where there's just— it's the clarity is there, the objectivity is there, and there's clear standards for what an outcome is, I go for it. In instances where there's more trust, more transparency, more subjectivity involved, probably need, want to do a few conversations before you start leaning towards outcome-based pricing.

Yeah, makes a lot of sense. So what I'm hearing is the, the more clear you can establish everything where it's clear upfront, hey, it's a yes, no, or for everyone, every dollar we recover, we get a percentage. It can easily be tracked, measured, is kind of transparent, relatively straightforward. Those are good cases for outcome-based pricing.

Absolutely. Exactly.

As soon as you start to lose those, make sure you're having enough conversations to clarify all the gray areas.

Yes. And also there's nothing wrong with having hybrid models. You might have pricing that is, you know, the bulk of the pricing is how you would usually charge and you have your margins baked in, you have your research baked in, you have your customers' willingness to pay baked in, and then you have a little bit of a bonus that's tied to whatever outcome you get. Right? So that might be a way of dipping your toe into the outcome-based pricing waters first, right? And then as you get more comfortable with it, as you and the customer who you're testing this with become more comfortable and familiar with each other, maybe then it becomes more of the price and it's taken up by that, you know, by the bonus or by the outcome metrics.

What that reminds me of, so I, I started my career in procurement.

I worked for the government.

And one of the, you know, big contracts we use, all our service contracts, is what they call cost plus performance. So you got reimbursed for all your costs and then the rest was based on performance metrics and you could earn a certain amount. So how much did you deliver? And they were all clearly defined in the contract ahead of time. You know, very detailed.

Okay.

The max you could earn is this amount. Here's kind of the minimum. Here's how it's all calculated. Here's how much is dependent on this and that, you know, all in the statement of work. And so it kind of reminds me, oh, there's a portion, obviously they got reimbursed for all their costs. They didn't have risk in the sense of I recovered all my costs. It was just everything beyond that, all the profit was dependent on performance. Right.

That is that contingent. Exactly.

Yes. And that's kind of that what the hybrid model you speak of, you know, different ways of doing that. But that's what it reminded me of.

Yeah. Yeah, absolutely.

So if someone's, you know, thinking about implementing outcome-based pricing, what process should they walk through? I mean, what, how would you encourage them to get started or how to think about it?

Yeah, I think first of all, you wanna clearly define the outcomes and you wanna define the outcomes in conversation with your customers or your clients, right? You both need to be on the same page as to what are the outcomes and how do we measure them, right? You wanna make sure that they're quantifiable. It's not, if we increase trust in the organization, we get a portion of, you know, we get an X percentage bonus. How do you measure trust? Who's going to be taking the measurements and the readings? Get clear around the outcome and the, and how you measure those. I think that there's also a range, there's something around the data infrastructure. So who is tracking the outcomes, who owns the data, right? With something like the example I gave where the chatbot Finn, I imagine that they're able to track it through their own metrics because they own the chatbot, but the customer also has access to that data on their servers. So there's mutual transparency as to what's going on, right? So just understanding who's actually going to track the data. If you're reliant on your customers to give you data to evidence so that that's going to affect what you charge them. Probably not the right way to go. So figuring out the who's gonna own the data gonna be a big part of this as well. I also think just in general, from an ethical perspective, making sure you can actually affect and influence those outcomes. Because when you get to the outcome side of the table, it's easy to just chuck everything, right? We're gonna increase this and that and the other thing and the third thing. Just make sure there's— you're talking to outcomes that are one-to-one with what you can actually affect and influence. And that will no longer come back. The customer can't come back later and litigate that and say, well, actually we did the work and our team did this, so therefore you wanna avoid that. Finally, get it into the contract. You know, I'm a fan of the first kind of draft of a contract. You write it out in plain English and then you take it to the lawyer so they can like, you know, do it properly for you. But make sure you and your customer are aligned in very plain English what you're talking about and you both have a clear understanding of it. Then the lawyers can like go expand it and make it all, you know, more codified.

I like how you said that. Make sure you align in plain English, then let the lawyers in the room.

Exactly. Yes. Yeah.

I agree. Because if you let them in at first, by the time you're done reading, what does it even mean?

You're not going to understand anything.

Uh, so true. Yeah, we talked a little bit earlier about data, but a lot of times people have this, we think this feels right as an approach to pricing. Pricing. So how do you, you know, especially I think as finance professionals, how would we help the business focus on a data-driven approach to pricing? If we, if we go in and you see you're in a company, you're like, all right, I can tell they're just, oh, this feels good, or I saw this competitor doing that, you know, the typical thing we often see. How do we as kind of FP&A approach that to help them have a more data-driven approach?

Yeah, I think that the thing with data is that it's It's being able to get good at storytelling, actually, because it's never about the data. It's never about having the access to the data. It's always about, well, what, how do you make sure and how do you help them? How do you tell the story in a way that allows them to see the insights that the data is bringing that it wouldn't otherwise have, right? This is where you have your behavioral economist saying, oh, if your pricing ends in 97, it means something different from if it ends in a round number. Hey, if you use partitions, people are only going to anchor on the base price. They won't think of all of the other surcharges and transitions you have in your pricing. So we have more leeway here. Right here, if you segment it this way, that way, the different conversations that you can have, but it all kind of rests on, are you able to tell that story very well and point to the different examples of with this one change, this company was able to get a 27% increase. If we could do that in our pricing, what could that mean for us? So it really just rests less on the role that data should be played. I think we're all aligned and you really do need to look at the data and understand both from the historical data you have and then talking to customers. But it really is how do you marry that data with the insights and the understanding of customer psychology to tell a compelling story that allows the organization to go, okay, I see what you're saying. Let's go test it. Let's go talk to some customers.

It makes a lot of sense. One part that really resonated with me is you talk about how the kind of the storytelling, right? You gotta be able to tell the story with data. One of my favorite books is, uh, Data Storytelling by Brett Dykes.

He does a really good job of— Is it an orange book? I think I read that.

It is. Yes. Orange cover. Yeah.

Yeah. I've read that. Yeah.

Yeah. I interviewed him. He actually lives locally. So we've got to lunch together a few times and I've got to know him. And yeah, I, he does a really good job on the importance of data and storytelling. Just interviewed someone else on that. And I think it's, uh, an area that FP&A often struggles with. I think a lot of people do. You have this idea, well, you just got to bring data. Data needs a story behind it.

Like, yes. Yeah.

A framework and you have to tell people what it means. It's not enough to just be like, well, here's the data. Isn't it obvious? Exactly. Even if it is, people use emotion to make decisions. I'm sure you know that as a behavior. Yeah.

Yeah. I, this was a lesson I learned a long time ago when I was working at a bank where my instinct, we ran an experiment, instinct was to just put, these are all the numbers. This is the graphs and the charts. And my boss at the time was like, oh, you need to— what do people say? What do the customers say? Put the voice of the customer on the page. If you want leadership to care about this, put the voice of the customer, get them, let them hear what's actually going on. And we could bring that emotional element onto the page, change the conversation entirely. So it's critical. It's a critical skill.

All right. So I want to move on. I know we've covered a lot on pricing. They have a little bit of an FP&A section. Gonna ask a couple questions here and then just a few get-to-know-you questions. So we have a few we ask every guest, and I would love to get your perspective being somebody that's not in, you know, finance or FP&A, but work with people. What do you think the number one technical skill that FP&A professionals should have or that they should master?

I still think it's data storytelling. I really do. I think it's too often everyone comes in with the data. You need some, so what, so what, now what. What is it? What does that mean? What are the implications of it? Now what should we do? What are the actions we should take? Even just using a framework as simple as that will exponentiate the impact you can have in your organization. So that is storytelling critical skill.

I love the framework you shared there. It's one we do in my training quite a bit. What, so what, now what? If you just need something simple to start with, it could be as simple as that as a place to start. What about softer human skill?

What's that?

What's that top skill?

I think that there's something around influence and persuasion that as any kind of professional, it's useful for you to have in your career. And the trick about that is that you have to actually be able to listen well and ask good questions. So if you want to influence people, you want to persuade them to do stuff, you need to hear what they're saying. You need to make sure they think that you're on the same page with them and you're, you know, you are fighting from the same team or they understand your position and you understand theirs. There's a really good book. I think it's The Trusted Advisor, David Meister, Trusted Advisor.

Haven't heard that one.

I think it's The Trusted Advisor and he speaks to speak to this, how you can become, I think, how you can become a trusted professional, trusted advisor in your profession. They are speaking mostly to financial advisors, but it's useful for all professionals, right? Understanding that soft skill of influence and persuasion, but at the root of that is how to hear better. How to understand better and get and elicit better information from the people around you.

Podcasting is definitely something where I've had to learn to be a better listener, and I can see it helping me in other areas of the business. And it's something that takes a lot of practice. So I think it's great. I love that you shared the book. Another one I really like, if you ever read, a little different approach, but Never Split the Difference, Christopher Voss, you know, more negotiation, but he shares a lot of great things on the importance of active listening, empathizing. Hearing their position, not just responding.

Yeah. And I think this matters too from an FP&A perspective. If you go back to what we said about just surfacing data and think that people are going to use the data and, you know, you think that's the extent to which your involvement in the conversation is. But sometimes when you ask the right questions, you realize, yes, we're so glad you have that model, but the president of the company absolutely wants us to use this other strategy. So therefore, how do we, how do we differentiate? How do we kind of come together and, you know, create something that's going to work for everybody. You hear the tensions, you hear the subtleties that people aren't going to say out loud when you practice being a better listener and drawing out better questions from people.

Yeah. And you know, one of the things I love now, even if you don't have someone you can practice with, run through the conversation, even if it's written with AI, at least give you some good ideas. I've done that, you know, give it a persona and have it try to play the role of the other person. It will make you think of questions and be better prepared. May not be perfect, but it's better than nothing.

Yeah. Stress test is for me. What obvious questions arise from this? What am I missing?

Right.

Spot on.

Yeah. All right. So now I want to move on to the get to know you section. Just kind of ask a few personal questions here to get to know you a little bit better. What do you like to do in your spare time? Or do you have any with a fairly new startup?

I like to go hiking or I live in Florida, so I don't get a lot of I have to make a concerted effort to go hiking, um, when I'm here, but trying to do all of the US national parks. Um, but I've gone hiking in Spain, in Fiji. I did Brazil last year. Um, but hiking is like one of the things I like to do. And I'm a massive reader. I have apparently read 156 books in the 5 months of this year alone. So I don't know how I've done that, but that's what the Kindle says.

But Guys, if you're a Kindle reader. So on favorite hike, do you have a favorite hike you've done? Either location or just, you know, because of the experience.

Yeah, I did the, um, Sierra de Guadarrama in, uh, outside of Madrid 2 years ago. And it's basically just like all rocks and hills going all the way up, but like, it is gorgeous. It's like this stunning quiet that like takes over the entire kind of region. It's beautiful. So there's not really a view. It's like the hike itself is enjoyable. In terms of vistas, the Smokies, of course, the Grand Canyon. I did that a few years ago. Can't top that.

Grand Canyon is amazing.

I used to live in Arizona. Ah, you can't top that in the fall with all the leaves changing and stuff. Yeah.

Yeah, I know. I'm a big hiker as well. So I imagine we could do a whole episode on hikes, but everybody else would be like, what are they talking about?

So, well, before, what was your, what is your favorite hike before we move on? That is a good question.

One of my favorite, I really enjoyed hiking with, that was, that was a fun hike. And I think part of it is because it's the, it's the highest peak in the continental US, but also I used to live outside there and just a gorgeous up from the top, really kind of fun. All the switchbacks, we did it as a one-day hike. So I think it was the fact that I could say I went up over 6,000 feet and came back, you know, 22 miles in one day.

Oh, wow.

There's just something to be said for kind of accomplishing all that. So that was probably my favorite. Plus I was in really good health. So I was able to, because I was training for a marathon at the time.

Okay.

And everybody else with me wasn't in good health. So that made me feel better as I'm up at the top saying, I'm fine. And they're all like, thank you. Because I was young and a punk at the time. I was under 30 back then. This was 20+ years ago. All right. You mentioned you've read 156 books. Do you have a favorite book or one you'd recommend to our audience? You obviously love to read.

Yes. So, hmm, favorite book is hard, but I will say I like Go for No. So I don't know if you've read it. It's, I can't remember the author. There's two authors, but Go for No is this cute little story, very small book. Basically it's about how a lot of times we think about success as like you're going after the big yeses. When actually, you know, as you get to the yes, you have to go through a lot of nos. So if you just aim your target at going for the nos, you're more likely to encounter more yeses and be more successful. It's written in a really cute book. It's a cute story. Really enjoyed. I give it to a lot of people. Go Giver is kind of that book.

Bob Burg, I interviewed him a lot.

Did you?

Great guy. Yeah, him and, uh, you ever read The Fred Factor?

No.

If you get a chance, read that one. Really easy, great book. I can't remember the author's name, but we interviewed both of them together. The Go Giver and the guy who wrote The Fred Factor for a few years back. It's on, it's on YouTube still. It was a really funny interview.

Yeah. I'll look it up, but great book. Highly recommend both. Yeah.

So I'll have to check out the other one. I haven't read the other one, but yeah, a big Go-Giver fan. I, I really like that book. All right. Here's kind of a fun one. If you could have any superpower in the world, what would you have and why? Yes.

It's like, hmm. I don't think I have a useful superpower. This is not gonna be useful for the rest of the world, but I personally would like to be one of those people who can just sleep when they want to sleep. You know, like there's people who just like can sleep standing up or like can lie in a bed and just like, I cannot do it. I cannot do it. I can't sleep without waking up 7 times and walking around and doing 17 different things. I would like to be one of those people who you just, it's like you press a button and you turn the power off and they're out.

I'm the kind that if you've put the lights down and I'm, even if I'm in class or a meeting, I'm going to fall asleep unless I stand up. Oh my God.

And so I'm so almost too easy.

So sometimes I'd almost We could maybe swap a little bit here.

I'm very jealous. That would be a superpower.

Yeah, my wife hates it too because she has a hard time sleeping and she'll be talking to me next and she's like, you're asleep, like this isn't fair.

It's like you're out. Yeah, my sister can do that too. She just knocks off like that. Like, how is it possible?

Yeah. Yeah, it's amazing how it can be so, uh, different for people in the same family. All right, so any last advice before before we wrap up here around pricing that you'd give our audience? Any final advice?

Yeah, I think that at the end of the day, it comes down to understanding the human behind the transaction, right? So if your pricing hasn't really considered customer input, customer psychology, how are they going to think about these numbers? What are they willing to pay? How do they value our different services? It's very important that you start to have those conversations and it doesn't have to be big or complex. Just sit with customers, sit with a prospect, ask them some questions around this, and you can start to gather those insights. But I think that is one an area that a lot of people overlook. We have a pricing playbook where folks, if you're interested in understanding more around the behavioral science behind pricing, how do I structure my prices in a way that's going to resonate with people, it's playbook.decisionalpha.co. I'm sure my people will get that link to you. Well, it's free and it's a good way to just get started in thinking through what is the methodology behind this and how do I do this in a way that I'm not leaving a bunch of money on the table.

Awesome. So we'll put that in the show notes and that'll be great to have that link. Appreciate that. And then if someone wants to get in touch with you, you know, learn more about your business or reach out to you, what's the best way for them to do that?

They can go through our website. Uh, it's decisionalpha.co. So decisionalpha.co. And we have pricing audits every Monday. If they're interested in that, just reach out through the website and we can coordinate something.

All right. Perfect. Well, thank you so much for your time, Eddie. I really appreciate it. It was a pleasure chatting with you. Enjoyed the conversation and We'll have to do it again sometime.

Likewise. Thank you for having me, Paul.

That's it for today's episode of FP&A Unlocked. If you enjoy FP&A Unlocked, please take a moment to leave a 5-star rating and review. It's the best way to support the FP&A Guy and help more FP&A professionals discover the show. Remember, you can earn CPE credit for this episode by visiting earmarkcpa.com. Downloading the app and completing the quiz. If you need continuing education credits for the FPAC certification, complete the quiz and reach out to me directly. Thanks for listening. I'm Paul Barnhurst, the FP&A Guy, and I'll see you next time.