Cocktails, Tangents and Answers
Cocktails, Tangents and Answers is a marketing podcast that takes you on a ride with our team. We'll kick off every episode with a little chat, a cocktail recipe (sometimes basic, sometimes craft, sometimes bougie) before we get into a conversation to tackle some of the pressing marketing questions of the day. And of course, our brains take us on some of the most wonderful tangents. Come along for the ride!
Cocktails, Tangents and Answers
Pricing as a Marketing Strategy
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In this episode, we'll explore how pricing serves as a strategic lever in B2B marketing. We'll discuss its impact on buyer perception, its role in brand positioning and best practices for aligning pricing with value to drive growth.
Cocktail:Jack the Pumpkin
This cocktail combines applejack, pumpkin puree and apple cider for a smooth, fall-ready blend. The ginger beer gives it a little bite, and the apple slice on top finishes it off. It’s simple, seasonal and just feels right this time of year.
Ingredients:
6 oz. applejack
4 oz. pumpkin puree
4 oz. apple cider, chilled
6 oz. ginger beer, chilled
4 apple slices, for garnish
Directions:
Combine the applejack, pumpkin puree and apple cider in a shaker with ice.
Shake vigorously until chilled.
Stir in the ginger beer.
Strain into 4 rocks glasses filled with ice.
Garnish with the apple slices.'
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Hosts: Rich Mackey & Catelin Drey
Producer: Zac Hazen
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Why Hidden Pricing Fails Buyers
SPEAKER_0074% of B2B buyers expect clear and detailed pricing up front. And 65% say ROI is a top factor influencing their final decision. So if you're hiding your pricing, you could have a problem. So let's get into that, Zach.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, let's talk pricing. Pricing as a marketing strategy.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. So a lot of places, and it drives me crazy when, especially with software, like I want to go like look at some software and like the pricing's just not there. You have to reach out to sales, you have to schedule a demo. Yeah, and I'm like, if I have to schedule a demo, you're probably out of my price range.
SPEAKER_02Like, I know. It's like my least favorite thing. It's like B to C is a lot less common, obviously. Like you don't really like have prices hidden from you. But if I ever have to search for a price, yeah, it's like you said, it's probably too expensive for me anyway.
SPEAKER_00But I've seen a few lately that are like, you know, start free, start free, start free. And you know that it charges, it's a free trial, but you can't actually see what it's gonna be after the free trial. And when you click it, they want you to create an account like for your free trial before you ever see what it's gonna cost after them. Oh my god, I'm like no. No, no.
SPEAKER_02Or they do that, they like make you feel like you're doing the entire process of what the software should do. And then to get the final result, you have to make an account. Or for like B2C, adding something to your cart to see the price, that kind of irks me sometimes too.
Cocktail Interlude: Jack the Pumpkin
SPEAKER_00Yep. All right. Well, we kind of hit the stats in the uh in the intro there. So um we're gonna get to our cocktail here shortly, and we will then discuss how you can use your pricing as actually a business strategy and a growth strategy for your company.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. So the cocktail, uh, this is gonna be important I say this correctly. Uh Jack, comma, the pumpkin.
SPEAKER_00Correct. Jack the pumpkin. Yeah, there you go. Another way you could say that.
SPEAKER_02So this cocktail is another one of the fall cocktails for the seasonal stuff I'm doing this quarter. Um, it's apple jap, apple apple jack, pumpkin puree, apple cider, and a little bit of ginger beer for a bite. And uh yeah, it's pretty simple. It also has uh apple slices for a garnish. This is made by Jeffrey Zakarian from the Food Network.
SPEAKER_00Food network, yeah. And so G-Z, as they call it.
SPEAKER_02Nice.
SPEAKER_00All right, so uh I think I actually saw them do this like back when I used to watch the kitchen all the time, but I don't anymore. Like, we don't even have Food Network. I can just catch episodes on whatever that would be on HBO Max. Now I guess they would have the bond, potentially, because of the discovery relationship for now. All right, so this one serves four. Um, or if you're just really feeling like getting loaded in an afternoon, you could just put it in a big, big glass and enjoy it. Um, so you have six ounces of apple jack, four ounces of pumpkin puree. So this one's important, and I remember this from the episode. Not pumpkin pie puree. That's different. You're gonna get the the season, the apple cider and the ginger beer are gonna give you some of that spice. This is just pumpkin puree, so it's just pure pumpkin. Uh, four ounces of apple cider chilled, six ounces of ginger beer chilled, and then four apple slices, one for each glass for a garment, garnish. Excuse me. So you put everything but the fizzy stuff into the shaker. So the apple jack, the pumpkin puree, and the apple cider go into the shaker and you shake that until it is chilled. And then you stir in the ginger beer into the shaker. Um, you stir the ginger beer in there. Don't shake it though, because fizzy everywhere. Uh, strain it into four rocks glasses filled with ice and then garnish with your apple slices. So I love the simplicity of this one. Like, aside from like, what are you gonna do with the rest of that apple puree? Because what was it? Four ounce, or pumpkin puree, sorry, because four ounces, I'm pretty sure it's like an eight or nine ounce can, is my guess.
SPEAKER_02If you have a dog, you can give it to your dog.
SPEAKER_00That's true, and you can freeze it too. You can make little pumpkin puree cubes for your dog as an enrichment treat. That is true, and that's another reason not to get pumpkin pie puree, because that you can't give to your dog.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, you can't make pup cups with pumpkin pie puree.
SPEAKER_00No. But this one, I mean, I also feel like just make a double and use all the pumpkin pie uh pumpkin puree and uh put it in a big glass. Have a good night. Yeah, have a good evening.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. I mean, it's a nice simple drink.
Fall Weather Banter and Reset
SPEAKER_00I like it. All right, so that is the Jack the Pumpkin. Just gonna be clear on as in the pumpkin whose name is Jack. Uh all right, so uh I think we avoided putting an explicit on this one for now. Um, and we can uh get into how uh pricing can be used as a uh strategy. All right, we are back. Um I wish I had that drink. That would actually be really good this afternoon. Um it's also a good soup day. It's like 54 degrees outside and raining right now. It's very weird. It sounds like good fall weather. Yeah, but it was like that it was like 90s this weekend. Like it was like 88, 90s. Really? Yeah. And then uh yesterday afternoon the rain came in and we got a cold front to push through.
SPEAKER_02That's one thing I don't miss about the Midwest. Like the crazy weather. It's just zero.
SPEAKER_00I mean, we don't get hurricanes though. We get thunderstorms and derechos and things like that, which are almost as bad. I mean, a derecho is like a land hurricane, basically. But um yeah, it's a little bit wild. But um, you would never use weather as your strategic advantage, um, I guess. Maybe you could if you're in San Diego or something. But um we can use pricing as a strategic advantage. So um let's talk about trust, Zach. Um why don't you share some thoughts on how upfront pricing can build trust?
Pricing Transparency Builds Trust
SPEAKER_02So with pricing, especially B2B, I think transparency is probably the most important. So being clear about what you offer and the value you're providing. So having things like tiered pricing, basic, standard, premium, just so buyers can see where they fit in. We've done stuff like that for our house about onboarding. Um make it easy to find. Don't make people go search for their pricing or your pricing, I mean, because chances are people that's like the number one thing people are looking for, right? So if your price is hidden and you're the type of person is like most people are looking for your price like right away. Not necessarily just the value you provide. Price is probably the most important. Yeah, exactly.
SPEAKER_00I mean, we've talked about how much research, like 70% of our research is done online before we ever reach out to a company. And I know companies hide pricing to try to force that outreach. Um, but it's really frustrating. I mean, even if you can do sort of ranges of pricing, that can be helpful. Um, our business is kind of hard because our pricing is different based on each client. I mean, we have some things that are pretty standard. Um, and we've tried kind of giving an idea of what you get at different levels. Like here's a sample$2,000 retainer, here's a sample$5,000 retainer, here's a sample,$10,000. Um, but none of those ever work out exactly that way. But as we're shopping, we want to get at least an understanding of where your pricing is gonna come in because it's just it's just really hard.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. I mean frustrating. How do you think upfront pricing affects like a buyer's perception of a company? Like a specifically, like yeah, what do you think about that? Because you're expensive. Yeah. I think let's say you have like a really expensive price, right? And uh all they're seeing is the price and not what you offer, that can be really confusing. I think just like the main point here is transparency is really important. So not just showing what your price is, because that's one part of it, but also actually like telling them what you're getting for the price. So if you have different tiers, like basic, standard, and premium, telling them what you get and comparing them can be really valuable. So they're seeing, oh well, if I need like this additional service, like a Hobspot onboardings, for example, like okay, you can get the normal HubSpot like onboarding process where we just run you through the very basics and teach you things, but we don't do anything really hands-on, or we can do it all for you and make it easy, right? So I think it's really important to provide that transparency and value initially. The more info you can provide someone, the more likely they are to make a decision with you, obviously, because they can compare with you and other competitors, and the more valuable information you give them, the better.
SPEAKER_00So and honestly, somebody's probably giving away your price on the internet anyway. They've probably posted a review somewhere or a blog post that gives at least a like gap of it. And I think what's really frustrating for me is we just went through this with some software not too long ago as we were looking at webinar software. So, like we um, you know, didn't really have the features weren't really there for the level we wanted, and we just the next level up seemed to have it, but there wasn't a price for it. And so we, you know, we had to reach out to a sales rep. We had to schedule a meeting, we did a 30-minute and he was kind of hard selling us at the end. And in the end, when we finally got to the price, it's like I wouldn't have even done the meeting if I'd known that's what the price was, because the software we were trying to move from was actually pretty much the same price. So there was no benefit to us moving and or changing. Um, and we ended up finding a different way to do it with a lesser tier um and just make it work. But it's that whole like, you know, you and I had to be on that meeting. That salesperson did a meeting where we were never gonna buy at that price. Um, and I think I even said that up front. Like, if this is like$5,000, we're not gonna buy it. And he still went through with the meeting. He could have said, Yeah, it's like$5,000 and we a month and we would have, or a year or whatever it was. Um and we would have been like, Yeah, never mind. Like, we're not gonna do that for this.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, just don't waste people's time. Just tell them what they need to know. You can use content to support your price too. You don't need to explain everything in the moment, maybe. You can put out like blogs, send emails, things like that, that just give you a little more of an explainer. But yeah, again, transparency is really important.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, and I think in our business, it's it's helpful. Like if we're doing a case study to give like an example of, you know, this was uh roughly, you know,$15,000 project, or give a range, you know, because some clients don't want to you want people to tell like what they spent, you they want you to tell what what they spent on it. But at the same time, you can still give a range of that. I've seen that with um, we worked with a construction company for a while, and that's one of the things we really encourage them to do is this was a$15 million project. This was a$3 million project. Um, so that as they're looking at those high-end and mid-range clients, they don't they don't get a low-end client coming in looking at a high-end case study and saying, I want that. It's like, well, you can't have that. Um, like we have friends looking at, they're doing some remodeling, and the designer brought them like, you know, this beautiful wallpaper from France. Um, but it's it's hand-inked wallpaper. Oh my gosh.
SPEAKER_02I've never even heard of hand-inked wallpaper.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, it was like, um, I think they said it was like five or six thousand dollars for like a roll of it. And they're like, okay, like let's get down to something that's maybe like still beautiful but printed. I mean, but that designer also they said brings a low, medium, and high. And the high is always something that they know you're probably not gonna buy. Like one of the examples they gave where they needed three pendant lights above their island. Well, one of the ones that was amazing that they fell in love with$10,000 per light. And they're like, we're not spending$30,000 on lights.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, that's crazy.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, and so she had one that was a few thousand and one that was like a thousand or whatever for them as well.
SPEAKER_02It's kind of cool to see that premium pricing though.
Communicating Value and Tiers
SPEAKER_00Well, and that's the thing, right? Like at least you know what you're not getting or what you could level up to if you really, really wanted to.
SPEAKER_02So I mean, I guess like, oh, sorry, with a client, I mean, if they're in the standard pricing and then they realize, oh, we need a lot more, then having the knowing what they can get out of the premium pricing is really valuable, like you said.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, and we've had a lot of clients who started smaller and built as the ROI was there and as they proved it out and they saw it, you know, they didn't want to dive into a huge retainer, but it grew and you know, their business grew with it, which is also good as well. So I think the other thing that people hear is oh, if I put my pricing out, I have to be the lowest in the market. And you have to hit this like everyday low prices and try to be the Walmart of your industry. Um, that's not the case. Um, I don't think anybody realistically is always looking for the cheapest thing. Like you said, like show me what I get for the money. Like the a grid that gives me features of your different levels of pricing is really helpful because then I can understand like what I'm gonna get uh for the money. Um so the other thing there is you have to know your own value. So we talk about like unique selling propositions, USPs, um, you know, your value proposition. So what are you what value do you bring to the client? And ideally, how does that compare to your competition? Um I you really want something that makes you more valuable than your competition. Um, so that's another area to kind of look at it. You don't have to be the lowest price, but you do have to be um, you know, competitive for the for the value, value, like features for money.
SPEAKER_02And if you're not the lowest price, it's kind of like we said earlier, you need to show the value you're providing. And just yeah. I think like seeing how you can differentiate is really important, like you said. Like if we're doing a HubSpot onboarding and another company's doing one for cheaper, but they don't offer any hands-on support, that's that's something we can sell.
SPEAKER_00So well, and our onboarding costs more than HubSpot standard onboarding. But like you said, theirs is a hands-off approach, it's a guided, you have to do everything yourself as the person being onboarded, where ours for a little bit more will actually do more stuff from you. With with theirs, you also get one person, you get one resource, and then it's online resources. With us, we can move stuff out to people in the agency. Um, and that's part of how we we onboarded somebody in two weeks, Caitlin and I did in sales, um, because we did a lot of the stuff, but then Adriana did the reports and we had, I think you even did some stuff there. You were building out something for that one. Um, but yeah, and it's really, you know, you talk about ROI. I think giving examples of clients who at that level of spend have seen this, like these are the results they got. Because if you've got a$5,000 a month, whatever it is, and the client's making$10,000 a month, you know, that's just a 2X. That's really hard. And it might not be worth it to them. But if your average client is closing$100,000 and deals on that$5,000, okay, like that's 20 times what we're paying for you. That might feel really good. You know, so it's it's just that balance of value for money. And sometimes you don't win. Like, um, you know, we had one where we lost. Uh, we had a prospect come in and they wanted a full audit of their HubSpot portal, like, and they had sales, service, marketing, operations, like they had everything in there, content. Um, they felt like they weren't using it. And so, you know, that full stack is probably two to three thousand dollars a month with HubSpot that they were spending in software. Um, and they wanted to get the value out of it. You know, well, we gave them an estimate uh because we charge for deep audits like that. And they said, Oh, we've got two other people who will do it for free, but we really want to work with you. So can you just do it for free? We said no.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Um, yeah, because they weren't gonna get what they wanted if we did it for free. Like we have free audits, not free HubSpot portal audits. Those take more time. But we have what, a free SEO audit, we'll do a free social media audit, a free lead gen audit, a free kind of website optimization audit. Um, those are surface audits. They take one to two hours and give us a general idea of how good or bad things are and what a high level scope of work would be. But what they were asking us for was like over 20 hours of work. We got to investigate, we've got to analyze, we've got to dig around, we've got to come up with recommendations. And it's just not worth it for us to do it for free, especially when there's no future business. You know, maybe they would have hired us for something, but they weren't saying they needed somebody to manage HubSpot for them on a monthly basis. They were just saying, we want to know what we're not doing right. And then it might have been like they would do a deeper, like re-onboarding or something. Um, but it's just one of those where it's like, and I told them, I'm like, and I actually have a note here to follow up because it's been about a month, to be like, did you get what you wanted from the free one? Because like if you did, that's great. And whoever's out there giving that away for free, good for them. Um, but if you didn't, you know, ours still stands and it's still the same price, and it will be a much, much deeper report.
SPEAKER_02So I mean, yeah, know your worth. Don't just put out things that are like 20 hours worth of work and give it out for free. I mean, they could have just taken that and we wouldn't have seen them again, like you said.
Case Study Ranges and Anchors
SPEAKER_00Yeah, it's possible. I mean, and and it could have been a relationship builder, but that particular offering isn't one of our relationship builders. Like if they had just wanted a lead gen audit of their website, yes, we can do that for free. It's a two-hour thing, there's three people involved in it, and we get you a report and it's really great. Um, and it gives you a an idea at a high level of what you need to do. Um, but we don't give you all of the specific recommendations. Like we just, you know, we give you sort of a hint at what you could do. Um but the idea there is obviously you hire us to fix things.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. So next point, um, we kind of covered a little bit of this in my initial point, but using pricing as a storytelling tool. So your pricing says a lot about you and your brand, as we kind of talked about. If you're offering a higher price, then you better offer premium services, especially if you're at the top end of your industry. Yep. And again, you need to be very transparent about the value that you're providing. But if you're on the lower end, it's kind of like we just covered you don't want to give too much value for too little, you know what I mean? So there's definitely a balance there. In terms of pricing being a storytelling tool, that kind of covers again of what you can use pricing for with your content with the things you're putting out. So I we talked about this several times already, but we have a comparison guide for our HubSpot onboarding process. So comparing what we do to HubSpot, that's great. That shows the value and the trend that's transparent. And even though we don't let like plaster that out on like its own landing page, I don't think, it's still a little like they have to like sign up. Do we do they have to sign up for it or do we just send it to people?
SPEAKER_00Uh we'll just send it to people who encourage it.
SPEAKER_02Oh, we just send it to people. Even though it's not like on our website or anything, it's still like very easy to probably get. Yeah, probably should be. But it's still very easy to get and very like it's not hard to find. If you want it, we can definitely send it to you. And it's yeah.
SPEAKER_00So I think we also do, I mean, we do a lot of onboardings anyway. And so a lot of what comes up is we'll be doing a HubSpot onboarding and they'll be like, Oh, can't you just do this for me? And it's like, well, yeah, but here's what that looks like, and you're gonna have to pay more. Um, you know, that kind of thing. Or, you know, sometimes we'll get people who and I love these, where the salesperson at HubSpot knows that like the standard onboarding isn't gonna work for them. It's just not. And they're really gonna need someone to do it for them and they're gonna probably need an ongoing relationship. And then we get into a shared deal with them, which is really nice. Um, but yeah, but even those HubSpot reps, like we can we send them that one sheet too, so that they can speak pretty intelligently to what their standard onboarding is and what we provide. Um, and we do have like an even higher tier where it's you dump on us and we go do everything and it's done in like three weeks. Um kind of neat.
SPEAKER_02I think something that is interesting too that you can do is like a calculator or some kind of form that estimates the cost of things that would that you'd like to do. Calculators are always really cool because it's like, oh, if I did this and this, like how much would it like cost me? And it's just like a rough estimate, but it still gives you a ballpark number. I think that's really cool. Same thing with like an assessment or like an audit where you can like basically with the information they provide you, you can ballpark numbers into how much something would cost. I think that's really cool. And honestly, just interweaving it like in a lot of your marketing materials, kind of like how we said, like we send emails to like we send emails, we create blogs, things like that. So not just like having it readily available, but also using it as your unique differentiator in a way that makes sense.
SPEAKER_00So yeah, and I think you're you're you're dead on there. You're telling your story, you're telling your client's story, and you're giving a little bit of like some proof points is a great way to use pricing in there. I love the calculator idea. Um, there's a few things that we do that we could put a calculator on. Um, like um, you know, Google ads day-to-day management. Um, we kind of know what that takes on average every week to do that. And, you know, the price to do like one campaign is not the it's not just five times more to do five campaigns because once we're in there moving around, there's synergies in there. And so that's a great place where a calculator could come in handy.
SPEAKER_02Uh, calculator tool was interesting too.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, it's super interesting how you can do that. But anything you can do to help people understand what they're gonna get and what they're gonna pay so they can weigh that uh potential ROI in their mind. Um, it's just helpful. I mean, I was thinking as we were talking, like, what if you went to like McDonald's and they were like, okay, we have a chicken sandwich, but we've also got the um premium chicken sandwich, and we've got the deluxe chicken sandwich. And they tell you the chicken sandwich is like$2.49 or whatever, but then they don't tell you what the other two are, like what the price is. Um, and you have to ask. Like, think about how that just stretches the buying process. And obviously, I know, right?
SPEAKER_02I don't want to have to make an unnecessary question about a chicken sandwich.
ROI Stories that Justify Cost
SPEAKER_00Right. And so I mean, and that's a real like um crazy example, right? Because in fast food, they would never ever do that. Like the menus are all there, the pricing is there, you self-select and it's it's a quick transaction. But there is that equivalent in what you know, what we do and what other people do in B2B, where it's, you know, I don't want to have to do a 30-minute discovery call for you to tell me that your average retainer is$5,000 a month and that it it generally includes these types of things. Like, just let me know that. Like, it's fine, it's not gonna hurt anybody.
SPEAKER_02Well, and it's like you kind of said too, where even though like our pricing isn't like for some things, isn't like super specific because it depends on a lot of different factors. Like I said, with the calculator or the assessment, you can still close the gap a little bit in some way to provide some kind of information so that they're not left guessing. Because the reality is if you don't have pricing on a lot of stuff, or like at least a ballpark, like it's really hard for buyers to make a decision, right? Like they need that kind of information.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, and I think you can you can couch it a little bit, be like, you know, this is an estimate, this is an average. Um, but I mean, it's one of the things that drives me crazy is like, you know, we did new insulation, and I really just wanted to be able to go to a site and tell it how many square feet our attic is and what level like I want an R8 or an R9 or whatever insulation and I want to, and like be able to look at blow-in versus roll-in versus foam, like just see all of the options. But no, you just have to fill out like your info and then they send somebody to your house and they crawl around and then they come down and they they hammer stuff out in a calculator. They put all those things in a calculator they could just ask me about, um, and then you know, give you your options. And it's like, I could have done all this online. Um it's so annoying. So annoying. Um, okay, so what you do and how you position that is important, but I think the other thing about using your price and value as a strategy is what don't you do? Oh, and what do you walk away from? So you can't be all things to everybody. We all know this. Sometimes we try to and it just generally fails. Um, there's some things that you just can't do because the pricing doesn't make sense. And so some people will try to hide the true cost, right? They'll try to package it with something else that has more margin. So I'm gonna lose money on service A, but service B, I can bump up the price. It's got more value, and I can combo those and come out, you know, in an average. Okay, like, yeah, that can work. Um, and you can do that as a package, but it might be better to just stop doing that service altogether. Like, if service A is a money loser, just stop doing it and move on to more lucrative, higher value offerings where you can have a better relationship. Because you also risk when you package things like that and you couple them together that people will want to decouple it later. And then you get into this weird, squirrely situation where they're like, well, I don't really need service B anymore. So can you just do service A for me? And you're like, yeah, no, because we'd lose money.
SPEAKER_02I thought of something similar that I just like encountered with Hulu, how they're doing like their bundle with like Hulu, Disney Plus, and ESPN Plus. So I'm a Hulu premium subscriber, and I really like watching Hulu without ads. I think the whole point of a streaming service is I shouldn't have to watch like shows and movies with ads I'm paying. And uh it's football season, so I wanted to like get ESPN Plus to watch some football games on the weekends, and I was like, okay, like is there like a bundle I can do that will like make the cost cheaper? And there's a bundle for like Disney Plus, ESPN Plus, and regular Hulu with ads that's cheaper and like save me a lot of money, but I have no option of just having Hulu Premium and also having ESPN Plus and Disney Plus, so it's like I don't want Hulu with ads, but I do want ESPN Plus. Like take it or I don't really care about Disney Plus, but yeah, it's just so frustrating because I want one thing and I'd like another and I'd like it to be like affordable, so I'm not paying$30 compared to like$15. But that's just like how the bundles are, and it's so annoying.
Pricing as Brand Storytelling
SPEAKER_00Yeah, it's weird. Um, they do have, is it them who has the NFL add-on? Um somebody has just an NFL add-on, like you don't have to do everything. Um, but yeah, you can just do an NFL add-on, which is interesting. Um, so we ran into that. We were annual on Hulu because it's just easier to pay. It was like$79 a year. We just pay the whole year. Um and when you combine when you bundle it with Disney Plus, you have to go monthly. Um, so one thing I think one more thing when it comes to pat like passing on things or what you're not gonna do, um, you've got to really look at the work. So we had an RFP come through and it was something that we could definitely do. Um and it was social media management and a few other things. Um, and they had a total budget on the RFP. Um, and we took a look at it, and at first glance, it was like, oh, this makes sense. And I kicked it out to see members. And as they got deeper into it, they're like, you know, we have to be available weekends and evenings with a physical person to go to events and take pictures and shoot videos. And they want like multiple videos per week on social media, like edited down. Um, and it was all like the budget was not set for that. It was a more shoestring budget. And so we passed because we're just like, there's no we will, we will fail at this or lose money, or we'll be angry, they'll be angry. So we're just like, no. And it was somebody that we knew we'd had a relationship with before. So we just actually told them, like, if I were you, I would pull the RFP and I would just put it out for freelancers. Because for that budget, a freelancer is going to be able to stretch that further and commit more hours to it. And also, like, if they're really into the things, because it was very specific types of events and things. And it's like if they're into those things anyway, you're gonna give them like behind the scenes access to an event they would want to go to anyway. So that's still like a really good option as you look through that. So, yeah, what you don't do can be really important. 100%.
SPEAKER_02Well, that was a great episode. We covered a lot.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, it's a lot of stuff. Um, so I guess you know, a few things in there, you know, being honest and up front about pricing builds trust. People are looking for that, people want that. Um, you don't have to give away details if you're not that kind of a business where it's It's not that easy to package it, but you um you do need to give people an idea so that they can do their research. Um doesn't mean you have to have everyday low prices, you don't have to be the lowest out there. You just need to show your value. Um leverage storytelling to really get your pricing out there. So case studies are a great way with that and giving sort of an average price of it, uh, that type of thing. And then um also decide what you're not gonna do, like where your pricing just won't make sense anyway. So you're just gonna cut it out.
SPEAKER_02So good stuff. Good stuff. As always, uh, thank you for listening. You can find our agency at antidote71.com and all of our socials there as well. And if you have a question you'd like to send our way, head to CTA Podcast.live to shoot us an email. Or even better, leave us a voice message on our hotline at 402 718 9971. Your question, even especially if it's about pricing, we'll make it into a future episode. Had to tie it back a little. But we'll do a follow up.
SPEAKER_00There you go. 100%.
SPEAKER_02All right, all right.
SPEAKER_00See you guys next week. I will see you next time.
