Empower Your Agency Through Better Pricing Strategies with Casey Brown

Drew McLellan:
Hey, everybody, Drew McClellan here from agency Management Institute, back with another amazing episode of Build a Better Agency. We have a return guest with us and I think you’re going to be very excited to see that she is back and to learn from her even more than you did last time. So for many of you, one of the challenges of 24 was sales. Uh, certainly it was better for most of you than 23, but even 24 carried some challenges. And I think for most of you, it was a mix of getting in front of the right people, but also putting the right offer at the right price in front of them in the right way. And that happens to be an area that our guest, Casey Brown excels in.

So Casey is sort of a pricing guru, and she talks about pricing and pricing strategy and negotiation in ways that I have not heard anybody else talk about. And she understands our world. She works with lots of agencies. And so we had her on the podcast a couple years ago. She was a keynote speaker at the Build a Better Agency summit. People loved it, and so we knew we needed to get her back. She’s got a brand new book out, so it seemed like the perfect time to welcome her back to the show and for us to glean even more of her insight and wisdom, especially as we go into 25 and sort of see what she thinks that’s going to bring us. So without further ado, let’s welcome Casey back to the show. Casey, welcome back to the podcast.

Casey Brown:
I’m so happy to be back with you, Drew. Thanks for having me.

Drew McLellan:
You bet. So, since we last saw you both on the podcast and as one of the keynote speakers at the summit a couple years ago, let’s look back at 24 and from your perspective. Well, actually, let’s stop. Anik, on the rare occasion that somebody is just starting to listen to the podcast, isn’t familiar with you, give everybody a little bit of background on how you became the expert that you are on pricing, and then I will ask my question.

Casey Brown:
Great, thanks. Yeah. So, I didn’t set out to become a pricing geek, but I found my way there over time. The first exposure I had to it was early in my career. I was an engineer at the time and found my way into Six Sigma. Was an early Six Sigma black belt at George and did a rotation in the pricing team and kind of fell in love with it. Fell in love with the, the complexity and mystery of it, but also how powerful a lever it is on the profitability of companies. And just saw that there was a lot of emotion and fear that drove a lot of decision making around pricing. So kind of just kind of got fascinated by it as a, as a discipline leaned into that, did some roles in corporate America as a pricing manager, pricing director, and then about 15 years ago hung out my shingle as a pricing consultant and did some strategic consulting around pricing for a while. But for most of our history, the firm I run Boost Pricing. We’re very focused on execution more so than strategy. In other words, there’s this sort of two halves of pricing. It’s sort of price getting. Sorry, price setting and price getting. Right.

Price setting is how do we structure our pricing, do we do fixed fee or hourly, how do we set up our retainers, all that kind of stuff. Price getting is you’re standing in front of the customer, you tell them the number and they say that’s outside our budget. Your price is too high. I have a competitive quote that’s 10% less. How do you navigate that negotiation process and communication process such that you walk out of that with the most deals possible at the highest price as possible. So we have been really focused on that price getting side by arming sellers with methods, messaging tools and most importantly, the confidence to go into the arena with the customer and walk out with the most deals at the highest prices.

Drew McLellan:
So my, my experience is that the agency owners are the worst at this. They’re, they’re, they, they’re the ones that capitulate on price much faster than their employees do. Do you see that? Is that just us or is that industry agnostic? And it is the business owner, regardless of the kind of business that tends to give away the farm.

Casey Brown:
It’s a brilliant question and I have sort of two slightly competing answers to it. So in some ways it is industry agnostic. It’s often the case that especially founder led businesses, you know, someone started the business because they were masterful in a particular craft. Yeah, in this case it’s, you know, it’s, it’s marketing or PR or any, any of the agency space, sort of creative agency space. They had expertise in a particular craft and they started A business because they were good at it and liked it and thought they could bring something to the world. They didn’t probably become agency owners because they were like, I cannot wait to get into 10 million selling conversations with customers and negotiate pricing.

Drew McLellan:
Right.

Casey Brown:
That isn’t the driver for it. And that’s true across every kind of industry. So in some ways, the passion for the product or service outweighing the love of negotiating and deal making is pretty common. That said, I think there are some industries that sort of suffer a baby a bit more than most from this kind of problem. And I think the creative space is one of those areas. I’ve heard from a lot of agency owners. Some sort of kind of, you know, humbly point at how they’re not, you know, they’re not good at numbers, so they’re not good at the finances or they, you know, they really understand the magic of the creative side of their business, but the quote unquote business side of their business, they don’t maybe have as much comfort with. So I’ve heard that kind of thing maybe a bit more in this space than in others. I find that, that founders, they fall into one of two categories.

You know, one, in one case, they are like the standard bearer for value and they believe so passionately in every cell of, and the value of what they provide, and they are not going to accept less than they’re worth. And they are just the. They’re the source of that kind of confidence and inspiration throughout their whole agency. And their team is looking to them as the leader in other cases. The other case is that this is the person that is the sort of, the like kind of, you know, the case you alluded to. They’re the first to cave. Maybe they’re the fastest. And I think there’s a lot of reasons for it. We all remember what it was like when we first started our company and, you know, any money coming in the door was good money. We get really kind of, you know, is sort of scarred by the early days and we, and we want to chase every dollar. And sometimes it can be tempting to do that through price. When that’s the case, I call that person the cdo, the Chief Discounting Officer.

Drew McLellan:
Yeah.

Casey Brown:
And I find that sometimes those kind of companies are better served by putting some kind of boundaries around that person’s ability to give too much stuff away.

Drew McLellan:
Interesting. So looking back on the last year, what, what did you observe in terms of trends around pricing and what, what do you see going into 25 around just the economy and businesses you know, sort of their flexibility around budget and pricing. What do you. I mean, 24 was a crazy year economically, politically, and we still have a fair amount of crazy happening in 2025.

Casey Brown:
Yes.

Drew McLellan:
So how does that color or change how we should think about pricing?

Casey Brown:
That’s a great question. And I’ll add to that list sort of AI coming on the scene in a huge way, creating a ton of disruption. So you, you put all those things together and then some more maybe micro factors that are specific to a given industry or a different. A given market or a company inside that market. How do we navigate that relative to pricing? Well, I think that there’s. We have to separate the question when we’ve got, you know, so, so what we saw. Let me just start there.

What I saw, we saw it in our own business, but we heard it from lots and lots of clients too. First half of 24 was, was solid, was decent. Most people were at their plan maybe a little ahead, maybe a little behind, but it was a kind of a normal first half of the year for a lot of companies. And then second half of the year, like lots of industries just dried up. There was no money being spent. People were holding on to cash. There was a little bit of worry about what was going to happen, you know, recession wise or heading towards an election. All kinds of companies really paused spending on anything discretionary, which created in the agency world and in lots of other industries that, that typically receive a fair amount of their revenue from discretionary spend. A real tough Q3 and even a big part of Q4. What I saw. And again, we saw this in our business and we hear from a lot of our clients too. Toward the very end of the year, things just unlocked all this money that people have been kind of hanging on to, waiting to see what happened, suddenly was starting to flow again. And, and I’m seeing that early in this year as well. Just enormous demand in the professional services space.

Drew McLellan:
And do you think that’s going to continue into the rest of the year? Is that a, is it a first and second quarter thing? What do you and I know? I’m asking you to look into a crystal ball and predict.

Casey Brown:
Yeah, my crystal ball has been broken since the pandemic. So I don’t know. And I’m not an economist. I mean, I’m close to this stuff. I am. I will just tell you, you know, because this is a little bit outside my specific area of expertise for my own business, I’m pretty bullish on 2025. I think there will be. It will be a healthy spending year. I think, you know, this will be, that’s my expectation, that’s my hope. I’m of course, like always, you know, I’m a, I’m a, I’m a Girl Scout. So I plan for the worst or yeah, plan for the worst and hope for the best. So we’re, we’re ready if I’m wrong. But I think this is going to be a pretty, a pretty fulsome year regarding spending.

Drew McLellan:
So we’re coming out of a year that was weird and that was hard. And so my guess is that many of us are nervous about 25 and when we’re nervous we tend to give away the farm. So.

Casey Brown:
Right.

Drew McLellan:
What, what are some things we can do to make sure that we take full advantage of the opportunity that 25 is presenting as opposed to carrying the baggage from 24 into this year?

Casey Brown:
Yeah, that, that’s a great question. And I’m going to. I didn’t fully answer your prior question, so I’m going to thread that in here first, which is like how do you deal with those kind of the craziness, the up and the down, the, the really big droughts. And I would say that it is, it is important to separate internal factors versus external factors because internal factors may only affect us, whereas external factors are affecting the market. So here’s what I mean by that. If you were, you know what I described happened in the third quarter and part of the fourth quarter was your experience, then there is very little work to go around and you and all your competitors want that work.

And one of the common tools companies use, and I can agree or disagree with it all day long, is that they’ll want to throw lower and lower prices to fight for the scraps of that smaller pie. And so if your competitors are doing that, I think it requires a dispassionate, careful look at the circumstance and decide, do you need to chase that or not? Sometimes there is real compression on our ability to earn higher prices in times of lower demand. What I would encourage people to think about in those times and it starts to lead us toward the 2025 answer is whether there’s a ton of demand nobody can keep up, or there’s very little demand and we’re all fighting over it. Price premium is possible for the best in class firms in any industry. Now that price premium in boom times is bigger than the price premium available when things are very slow. But don’t be tempted to price yourself like your inferior competitors just because demand is slim.

Drew McLellan:
Yeah.

Casey Brown:
Throwing deeper Prices at it isn’t going to earn you more trust with the customer. It’s going to kill your margins. And they will pay a premium even in tough times if you’ve done a better job of connecting with their problem. So then as we sort of exit that existentially challenging four, five, six months that many of us lived through at the last part of last year, and we’re starting to get a lot of demand again, I just really ask people to kind of do a reset, you know, a tabla rasa. Like, yeah, it was tough. There wasn’t a lot of demand. Things were slow. It’s starting to turn. Don’t let the, you know, don’t kind of carry the trauma of slow times into busy times. And people eventually get there, but sometimes they’ve waited six months to get there and they’ve missed a chance to capitalize on a lot of higher margin work. In the meantime, as demand starts to unlock, use that to build your confidence and get a little more bold with your pricing faster.

Drew McLellan:
Okay, so when we think about negotiating price, so I heard you loud and clear say there’s sort of two sides of pricing, which is setting the price and getting the price right. Best of class, getting the price negotiators. What are two or three skills or tips or tricks they take into when they lay down the price in front of a client or a prospect? What do they, what do they do different or better than the people who capitulate on price?

Casey Brown:
Only two or three. Okay, I’ll do my best.

Drew McLellan:
Then we’re going to take a break and we’ll get some more.

Casey Brown:
Yeah, sure, sure, sure. Okay. Well, one is being like, and sometimes this takes some work ahead of time, but being willing and able to walk away, exercising the power of no. If you need this customer to say yes to you as if your life depends on it, you have abdicated 100% of your power. You have to be willing and able to understand the boundaries of your negotiating arena. Like, this is what I’m willing to do. This is as far as I’m willing to go. This is what I’m willing to give up. If you walk in very, very clear about that and you hold to that, you will win more deals and you will win them at much higher prices. So one of the big differentiators between the best negotiators and those that struggle is a very clear walk away point and the confidence to actually do it. That’s one.

A second one, and then we can do your break. A second one is preparation, preparation. So let’s say you’ve done your homework, you had your intake calls with your client, you understand everything that you need. You understand the best ways you’re going to go about addressing that. Who from your team needs to be involved, how much work goes into it. And you’ve put all the work together into a proposal with a number. And I’m going to pick a number just for, you know, argument’s sake. Let’s say it’s $12,000 a month for this, this body of work. You have to walk into that room prepared to say that number almost, almost without emotion. So like, if you ask me my zip code, I can tell you my zip code. It’s 43202. Is that too high? Is 43202 too high of a number? Well, that’s idiotic. Like it right? It just is what it is, just a number. It just.

Drew McLellan:
Right.

Casey Brown:
And so are we ever going to be able to say it’s $12,000 a month with the same emotionlessness that we say our zip code? No, probably not. But I use a pretty dramatic example to kind of illustrate the point, the idea that we want to walk in with it, less emotionally laden and less dripping with fear and significance. And so I think there’s some, some pre work we can do before we go into a customer conversation where we’ve, you know, said that, said it out loud. We’ve prepared for what kind of objections we might hear. We’ve practiced thinking through what is the worst that could happen, what could they say, what could they ask, what pushback might I receive? And we’ve prepared our answers to that. We’ve role played it a little bit that way.

When we’re in that room and we say that number, probably it’s not going to be the worst case scenario. They might ask a question, they might push back, they might challenge your pricing, but you’re ready for it and you can stay calm and present in the moment. And that’s another key difference between the best negotiators and those that struggle is the ability to stay calm in the moment. I often compare pricing to poker and I talk about the bluffing and things like that. But the other thing is the ability to stay calm under pressure. The half of poker is the card you’re dealt. The other half is how you play the game. Pricing is kind of the same way. It’s, it’s important to get the number right. But how you play the game as you enter the negotiating process with the customer is the other half of what drives your, your Bottom line.

Drew McLellan:
So I want to talk a little bit about sort of the prep. So one of the things I hear all the time is that, and I hear this a lot from employees who are charged with putting together the proposal, the deck, and then they show it to the boss and the boss goes, they’ll never pay that. I like, they’ve predetermined. Client will not pay that amount of money. We must charge less. Talk about that from a psychology point of view and a business practice point of view, my response is always like, how do they know? They don’t know this person. They don’t know how badly they need it. They don’t know what you know. They may or may not have been told a budget, but clients don’t always tell us the real budget. They tell us whatever they want the budget to like. So talk a little bit about the psychology of the. I’m looking at it, I am prepping, but in my prepping I have predetermined. Yeah, too high.

Casey Brown:
Yep. And we call that, and I talk about it in my book, this idea of pre discounting. So we’ve figured out this material, this software, this person, this, you know, six weeks of Sarah’s time and two weeks of Jim’s time. And when we put the whole thing together and we come up with a number and we sticker shock ourselves because we have some idea in our head, you know, hey, 12, I think their budget’s $8,000 a month or I don’t, you know, we’ve never charged that much before. This is a huge leap. You know, we have rules of thumb, margin rules of thumb, rate card rules of thumb. We have a set of ideas. And it’s not that those ideas are dead wrong. I mean, anybody who’s running a successful agency has years of experience understanding, reading customers, responding to competitive quotes and all that kind of stuff. So it’s not that it’s, it’s wholesale false, it’s that it is over constrained and it is limiting your pricing power. And the reason I think we create a ceiling that’s lower than what is actually possible is we’ve been told by every customer ever, your price is too high.

Drew McLellan:
Right.

Casey Brown:
You go out and you tell them 12. Maybe they thought this particular collection of deliverables was going to be 15. Do they say, oh geez, I thought you were going to tell me a number a lot higher than that. No, they don’t say it. They say, ooh, 12, that’s right. That’s the best you can do. Right.

Drew McLellan:
So even when the customer can you sharpen your pencil.

Casey Brown:
Yes.

Drew McLellan:
Yeah, yeah.

Casey Brown:
Is that a little out of our budget? Like, there’s a million tactics customers use, but if we look at the truth of this situation is we get asymmetric feedback. We never get the feedback when we’re too low. We always get the feedback when we’re too high, by the way, even when we’re too low. So that asymmetry of that feedback is what causes us to start to kind of like limit our own thinking. There’s a analogy of like, I don’t even know if it’s true, by the way. And it sounds like a very weird experiment to me, but I heard like, if you put fleas in a jar and put the lid on, the fleas will jump. The fleas will jump after they’ve hit the lid so many times you take the lid off, they don’t jump. They don’t jump out of the jar. Like, they start to believe. They start to limit their own aspiration based on where that. Where their perception of a limit exists, even though the limit doesn’t exist. And I think this kind of analogy can be applied to business owners. I’ve seen it, interestingly enough.

Sometimes a company will hire a brand new salesperson that’s not from their industry. And so they don’t really know where the limits are. Right. And so they, you know, start preparing the proposal. They put the whole thing together, they get the number, they go out and communicate to the customer because they don’t know it’s impossible. And then it turns out to be possible. The customer says, yes. And then they come. It’s like. And in the wizened old, either the, the owners or the more tenured salespeople are like, oh, you never get anybody to pay, you know, $400 an hour for that. That’s impossible. But. And then they do it.

Drew McLellan:
Right. Okay, so this is such a great story, but the like, when people tell stories like that, I’m like, who was the first person was like, you know what, let’s try putting a bunch of fleas in a jar and see what happens. But the example is so sort of spot on of we’ve been conditioned by our prospects and even our clients to always know in air quotes that our prices are too high, we predetermined, without any input at all. A great example. I mean, we work with hundreds of agencies, hundreds of agents, and if I went to 20 of them and I said, I’m going to, I’m going to ask you for a quote for a 10 page, a 10 page website and it’s going to include these five things. I would literally get prices between $5,000 and $50,000.

Casey Brown:
Right?

Drew McLellan:
Absolutely right.

Casey Brown:
Yeah.

Drew McLellan:
And all of them are convinced that that’s the most they could get for that website.

Casey Brown:
Maxed out 100%. Yes. 100%. Yes. I have a funny story from back when I was in corporate America and I was the pricing manager. We would, you know, determine based on all kinds of factors. It was the time is right for a price increase. And we would of course tell our own team before we’d announce it to customers and the team would lose their minds. Total panic. Oh my gosh, we’re going to lose. You know, the, you know, this was when I was working at GE Phillips in Sylvania are going to kick our butts. Like, okay, there’d be a lot of noise. Let’s call the noise level A10. Right. Then we’d announce it to customers. They didn’t like it, they’d push back, they’d complain. Noise level five. Right. Then the actual price increase would go into effect. Let’s say it’s two months later. We gave them 60 days notice. The actual response, meaning the number of customers that actually left or changed their volume commitments as a result of that price increase, was like a one. Right, Right.

So I think the reality is it’s part of the social, social contract between buyers and sellers over report their price sensitivity. They make a bigger deal about price than it really is because they think if they don’t do that, we’re going to leverage that and charge them more. And they’re probably right, we probably would. So they have to complain too much. But we, because they, they overemphasize their price sensitivity, that overemphasis leaks into our psyche and affects what we, where we think the line is. So they over report it, we believe them. Which means in the, in most businesses, we are more price sensitive on behalf of our customers than our customers are. We’re, you know, I’ve seen it a million times and you’ve probably heard this too, like agency owners that wring their hands for six months, perseverating over a price increase, running the spreadsheet seven ways to Sunday. And then they announce it to their customers and it’s like no big deal, right.

Drew McLellan:
Over and over and over.

Casey Brown:
Panic.

Drew McLellan:
Yeah. Okay, we need to take a quick break. But I, when we come back, I want to talk about how do we convey in a pricing presentation a confidence, but also that, because I do think a lot of clients, a lot of our clients Especially if they’re new and they don’t know us and we haven’t earned their trust. They do think we’re trying to take advantage. They do think we’re trying to stick it to them. So when we come back, I want to talk a little bit about how do we communicate that the pricing is legitimate? We understand their concerns. We know that they need to get the biggest bang for their buck, and we want to make sure they do all of that, because that’s the kind of partner we are. Like, how do we convey all of that? But first, let’s take a quick break, and then we will hit that when we come back.

(Break)

Hey, everybody. Just want to remind you before we get back to the show that we have a very engaged Facebook group. It’s a private group just for podcast listeners and agency owners that are in the AMI community. And to find it, if you’re not a member, head over to facebook.com groups b a bapodcast. So again, facebook.com groups bab podcast. All you have to do is answer a few questions to make sure that you are an actual agency owner or leader, and we will let you right in. And you can join over 1700 other agency owners and leaders. And I’m telling you, there’s probably 10 or 15 conversations that are started every day that are going to be of value to you. So come join us.

All right, we are back with pricing guru Casey Brown, and we are talking about how to do this better. And by the way, when we talk about better, I want to make sure that I’m really clear that I am never suggesting that you gouge the client. I am never suggesting that you get paid more than what the work is worth. Yes, I think you should value price. Yes, I think you should be paid for your decades of expertise and the fact that you can help them get across whatever finish line they are asking you to do. But it’s not about taking advantage. And I want you to be ethical. I want you to have integrity around your pricing. And honestly, as you have heard me preach before, the thing we do that diminishes our pricing integrity is when we capitulate. When we say to a client, it’s $10,000, and they go, I only have eight. And we go, okay, we’ll do it for eight. Now, what you’ve said to them is, I was trying to screw you. That’s what the message, right?

So before I ask Casey the question I asked before the break, I just want to make sure that our position here at AMI is not to stick it to people. It is to get paid what you’re worth and to be honorable about that and to deliver incredible value for every dollar you get paid. So it’s not about cheating or tricking or over indexing. It is about recognizing what you’re worth and actually getting paid for that and not compromising on that. And being a person and a company of integrity where you honor your own pricing strategy and policies and all of that. So with all of that with, I will now step off my soapbox. So, Casey, how do we show up? How do we show up like that? How do we show up where we do have a pricing integrity? We aren’t trying to take advantage, but this is really what we’re worth and we diminish ourselves when we capitulate on price.

Casey Brown:
Yeah, it’s a great question, and I’ll just put an exclamation point behind your former comments there. I so agree. This isn’t about trying to trick anyone or get them to do anything counter to their interest. We’re trying to help them. People come to an agency because they have a problem to solve or an opportunity to capitalize on, and they don’t have the skills or the resources to do it. And, and your agency does. And so you, you have an opportunity to serve. Right. And your ability to serve and to do your work and to master your craft and to bring it to more companies is dependent on getting payball for it because otherwise you’re robbed of resources you could use to grow and innovate and add new lines of business and hire more people. So there’s a very virtuous cycle here that’s possible when we, when we stand in our value.

Now, to the question, you’ve presented a price, they’ve pushed back. How do you navigate that in a way that you are confidently defending your price and value, but still sort of acknowledging that the customer does have a budget to limit and manage, or a boss to report to, or employees to afford and all kinds of other things. So I think what’s important here is to think about how human beings operate relative to resistance. So if you’ve ever spent time around a toddler or a teenager, you can give them good advice that they don’t want to take because you are pushing it at them. So I think the same can sometimes be true of clients. They’ve sort of pushed back, and it’s right there in the word push they’re pushing. What I do not advise is you just engage in some kind of, you know, battle of wills. Like, they push back and you double down on your value. And they say, but I have a budget. And you say, but we’re better than those guys. And. And it turns into this sort of tug of war. It. It puts customers really on guard when you engage that way. Even if you’re right about the things you’re saying, the sort of hackles go up because they’re feeling pressured back by you.

So I’m a big fan of the idea of, like, let’s take the resistance away. Let’s not do this. Push, push, push, push, push. You know, customers love to buy. They hate to be sold to. They love to buy, they hate to be sold to. And sometimes if they say something like, drew, I like what your agency’s proposed, but we only have $40,000 budgeted for this project. There’s no way we can do 60. If the first thing you do is jump into some big old razzle dazzle about why it’s awesome and worth 60, it may. First of all, it made me feel like you didn’t hear me. You didn’t really process what I said. But also now I’m getting sort of this onslaught of pressure. So I think, like, just a conversation, just empathy and respect is a good starting point. Some curiosity is a good starting point. And so rather than meeting resistance with resistance, meet it with ease, meet it with questions. So, like, all right, I’m hearing you say that we’re, you know, what we’ve proposed is out of alignment with what you’ve got budgeted for it. Do you mind if I ask you a couple questions just so I make sure that anything I come back to you with really still honors what’s super important to you. Like, you know, you hear. And just in that little question, first of all, I’ve asked your permission. I’ve acknowledged what you’ve told me. I’ve indicated that I’m going to try to meet a solution that honors what’s important to you. Just that. And it’s. That’s nothing more than one sentence. But stuff like that can go a really long way towards inviting your client into the problem solving with you. And then it becomes you and I against the problem of the budget disconnect versus you versus me. It doesn’t have to be seller versus buyer. It can be seller and buyer versus the problem. And I think how we navigate that conversation with empathy, with honesty, with conviction still, while totally believing in our value makes a huge difference in how that customer receives that and then where we go from there.

Drew McLellan:
And so if they go yes, go ahead and ask that question, or yes, let’s go ahead and have that conversation then. How do you. So one of the things I just heard you suggest is at that point, I’m. We probably are not going to come to a conclusion in this conversation. I’m going to have to go back potentially and say, okay, I heard you. It’s 40,000. Here’s our new proposal. Or on the fly, I’m going to have to say, okay, if you only have 40,000, and the three things that are most important to you are that. Let’s look at the $60,000 proposal. What if we make these three things a phase two and we push them out six months or a year? Because this three fourths of what we propose will get you the things that are most important to you. Yes.

Casey Brown:
Yeah, I mean, that’s. That’s absolutely a very common end point for what I’m kind of talking about. And whether or not this can all be kind of buttoned up in one conversation or turns into, I gotta go back and rework the proposal really depends a lot on the complexity of the proposal, how far apart your budgets are, all that kind of stuff. It was. My advice is less about starting down the path of descoping, although that might be where we end up, and more about how we enter that conversation, acknowledging the pushback and making a commitment to trying to find a solution that works for everyone and then engaging them in a dialogue so you can uncover more. There are times that I’ve seen it. I’ve been in the room when it’s happened. I’ve actually been on a few sides of this conversation myself. I have a. You’ve quoted 60,000. I have a budget of 40,000. Fast forward a half an hour after a bunch of questions get asked. And now we’re solving problems together, and all of a sudden I’m willing to find 20 grand in my budget, Right?

Drew McLellan:
Oh, for sure.

Casey Brown:
Or I always. I already had 75 grand in my budget, but why not? Can’t hurt to ask. Let me see. And then in the course of the conversation, the questions you’re asking, the conversations we’re engaging in, all of a sudden it’s like, now I really want to work with Drew and Drew’s agency. And sure, I’d love if he would give it to me for nothing, but he’s obviously really masterful in what he does. He’s my trusted advisor. I’m willing to pony up the extra 20. I want to say something important about reducing resistance. Questions are so underused in this regard. Questions, questions, questions. There’s something called the, I don’t think we talked about this last time I was on, but if so, it’s worth a reminder, something called instinctive elaboration, which is where it’s a physiological and psychological phenomenon whereby we cannot, our brains are physiologically incapable of contemplating anything else in the split second after a question is asked. So here’s a illustration of this. If I ask you right now, Drew, what color is your shirt? For a second or a microsecond, your brain was occupied with the question, what color is my shirt? It might then jump from, why is she asking me about the color of my shirt?

Drew McLellan:
Right.

Casey Brown:
When you are engaged in active resistance, the most powerful way to break that down is through questions, through smart questions. And that is the like chipping away at resistance until we are now on the same team against the problem of the budget or the problem of your boss told you you had to get three quotes and they want to go with you, but the other two are cheaper and. Or whatever other thing they’re throwing at you. So questions are a super power for sellers.

Drew McLellan:
And to your point, if it breaks the mental sort of whatever in a negotia in a negotiation, I suspect the buyer is already anticipating what you’re going to say and coming up with their argument or their rationale. So you’re also breaking that thought pattern. Right.

Casey Brown:
They’re sort of script of, here’s what I’m going to say, what I’m going to do. Right?

Drew McLellan:
Right.

Casey Brown:
And let me just make it. I mean, I’m going to say something, you know, and everyone listening knows, but it’s worth being explicit about. None of this stuff works 100% of the time.

Drew McLellan:
Right.

Casey Brown:
Like, you may do everything just right. You may be like, wow, I nailed that. And you may still walk out without the deal, or you may walk out with a deal having had to really take a haircut on the price. Like, none of this works 100% of the time. Don’t let the times it doesn’t work stop you from believing that it can work. Don’t overemphasize. There’s something, another thing from psychology. There’s something called the negativity bias where we recall negative events with greater frequency and intensity than positive events. We can win 10 deals in a row where a customer doesn’t say one thing about our price, just sales. Right through the 11th negotiation, customer starts complaining about our price. We think our prices are too high. So, you know, we’ve got to be careful not to let the you know, the boogeyman take over when we have a loss or when we have a really challenging negotiation. Just kind of come out of that, you know, shake it off and reset for the next one.

Drew McLellan:
Yeah, really great advice. Okay, so I’m mindful that we’re, we’re marching towards the end of our conversation. A, we have to prep, we have to make sure that our prices are right. We have to decide how much we are willing to negotiate. What is the bottom line of what we’re willing to do this work for. We got to do all that ahead of time. We go in and we present the pricing. And ideally in most cases we’re probably spent. We may be presenting multiple options so they can choose between the options so they can see we can match a budget, but we can’t do the same amount of money for different amounts of dollars. We get resistance. We ask better questions. When we just get. We, we ask all the questions, we do whatever, but we just can’t land the deal. What’s best practice after that in terms of follow up or follow through or checking back in or any of the like? When we get a no, what should we do with that?

Casey Brown:
So let me just make sure I’m tracking with your example. We never got there in this in the terms of like what you’re able to scope it at a certain price does not ever find a match on the customer side. And then we all say, okay, follow up. Well, I think that that’s the kind of what’s the right time frame to circle back with a client? What’s the next thing you propose them? That’s a little bit to me outside the purview of pricing to a certain degree. I think it’s. I like to figure out what we can learn from a loss. And I think we, you know, it feels universally negative when a customer doesn’t hire us for something we wanted to do. It feels like, well, that’s lost opportunity. It’s lost money. It’s lost. But, but there is a silver lining in a loss. And there’s actually, there’s two. One is losing business over price is an important part of an effective price strategy.

Drew McLellan:
Tell us more about that.

Casey Brown:
Never lose. If we never lose over price, we are undercharging. We don’t know where the ceiling is. We have just been living way underneath it. We have to lose some deals over price. Otherwise we’re not pushing the boundaries. We are not mapping the extent of our pricing power. So one kind of nugget of consolation we can mine from a loss Is that, that is actually important to do now. You don’t want to lose 99% of your proposals. You don’t want to win 99% of them either. And so some, some losses are an important part of a good price strategy. I think there’s also, and this depends a little bit on the nature of the relationship with the client or prospect. But you can, you can ask them questions like, hey, I am, you know, I would be lying if I didn’t say I was bombed. This, we would, we weren’t able to figure out a way to work together. I hope we’ll have a chance to work together in the future. Do you mind if I ask you a few questions about, about this process, both for my learning, for, you know, for our future engagements, but also just so I can continue to get better? Yeah, sure. What would have had to have been different about our proposal? Under what circumstances would the price I proposed have actually worked for you? By the way, some of these can actually be used in the negotiation before we’ve given up. Right?

Drew McLellan:
Yeah.

Casey Brown:
Right through the lens of almost like a forensic post mortem, like what went wrong and getting the customer to collaborate with you on understanding and learning from that. You’re not going to get that everywhere. Some people aren’t going to spend 10 minutes with you having that conversation. But if you can get that, it’s a, I’ve seen it be a really powerful trust unlocker because they’re, there’s like at that point, quote, unquote, nothing’s at stake anymore. You’re not still selling them. And some of some, some customers, I mentioned before, that resistance thing, some customers have been sold to so aggressively by so many people over the years. They come into every negotiation armed for battle. Like, they’re very defended and everything you do to try to reduce their resistance, it doesn’t really work. And you may not break all the way through. And sometimes it’s not until after. Okay, Jim, thanks for, for sitting with me on that. I, you know, I, I’d love to get another chance in the future to do some work with you. I think we could do a great job for you. I just want to learn as much as I can from this one. Do you mind if I have a couple questions for you? Boom. Unlock. And then like, then you will learn. Sometimes the biggest, biggest insights come out of conversations like that.

Drew McLellan:
Yeah. Yeah. And it also is, is cultivating a relationship that may come to fruition later. Right. It’s, it’s a, it’s sort of just the human connection of you know, I’m, I’m bummed that we couldn’t land this together, but, you know, can you help me be better?

Casey Brown:
Yeah.

Drew McLellan:
Yeah.

Casey Brown:
And it’s just, and I think with everything. And this goes back to kind of your, your caveat that you offered after the break. It has to come from an authentic place. Like if you’re trying to convince someone or sell, like if you’re salesying, like if you’re being salesy or you’re being like scripty about anything, if it feels weird. By the way, dogs and prospects can smell fear. And there is nothing grosser than commission breath. Right? So like, if you’re coming at them like desperate to sell them, that is the biggest turnoff in the world. And the other thing about that is, particularly to the agency space, you’re not selling them some, you know, some post it notes or something. You’re selling expertise, right? You’re asking them to trust you as the thought leader, as the expert, as the, as their guide in an area they don’t have expertise in. And how you show up as an expert throughout the selling process, it’s not just your marketing expertise or your PR expertise or your digital ad expertise. It, you, your, their experience of you as an expert starts the moment the very first conversation happens. And how you sell, how you propose, how you negotiate, how you conduct yourself through that is an important part of your leadership. That’s one of the things.

When you said, you know, if you said it’s 10,000 and they said, I can do it, I can only do eight, you say, okay, I can do it for eight. You don’t, you don’t honor your expertise when you do that, and you give them reason to question your expertise when you do that.

Drew McLellan:
Yeah, I think we think we’re doing ourselves and them a favor. And really, I think we’re shooting ourselves in the foot.

Casey Brown:
Absolutely. It hurts trust. I mean, like you said, if, if I said I can do it for eight, your first question is, geez, how much margin was padded in there? Like, Right. Of course you don’t know where the floor is. You know, it’s just it, it, it makes everybody suspicious of everybody else when there isn’t. And you use the word integrity. I, I talk about that in the book, the idea of price integrity. And I don’t mean that as much morally as structurally. It’s like you got a house sitting on the foundation. You rip a brick out of one side, the house is on a lean. The only way this works is if you remove a course of bricks around the whole house. Like this idea of give to get and what changes about the dealer. What can I ask for from you? If I’m going from 10 to 8, I need to tell you that that means, you know, we’re not going to do this piece of the project. Or I need you to make an introduction to the other three division heads in your company for a sit down meeting. And in that case I’d be willing to do it at that price tag or whatever. Right.

Drew McLellan:
That’s an interesting. So part of our prep should be not only what am I willing to lower the price to, but but if I’m going to lower the price, what do I want in exchange?

Casey Brown:
That’s right. And it can, I mean a very obvious and probably the most commonly used one is this idea of descoping or phasing. And that can be totally appropriate. But there are a lot of other things that you could ask for sometimes and I don’t know how, how many listeners would run into this, but sometimes people say there’s really no way to scope this like this. As soon as I change anything about this, it’s no longer a, a solution I’m actually proud of. You know, I talk about like if you sell chocolate cake and it’s 10 bucks and my customer says I needed for 8 bucks, okay, I can do it for 8 bucks. But it doesn’t come on a glass plate and it doesn’t have extra sprinkles. It’s still a good cake. Right. But at a certain point you don’t want to get descoped to the point that there’s no eggs and sugar in that cake. Right. You still need to deliver a delicious result. So if you get to a point where this is the kind of has been atomized to its umpteenth degree and it can’t go any smaller then your, then your give to get isn’t reducing your offering, it’s what can you ask in exchange? Can I get a testimonial I can use for my website? Can you make these introductions? Will you appear on my podcast? You know, I’m trying to reach more companies in your demographic and like what, what’s the ask? And so. Or I need 100 of the payment up front or I can’t, you know what, what.

Drew McLellan:
Or the timetable has to change or.

Casey Brown:
Yeah, exactly.

Drew McLellan:
And to me I suspect we don’t think about that often enough.

Casey Brown:
No, I think that’s right. And especially because it’s because descoping is always in our hip pocket at all times. It’s like, well, then we won’t do, you know, we can’t do a ten page website. We’re going to do a seven page website.

Drew McLellan:
Right.

Casey Brown:
And that’s fine. But there are other ways to maintain price integrity with discounts that don’t demand a D scope.

Drew McLellan:
Right. Yeah. Such good, such good points. Okay, we are almost at the top of the hour. Tell us a little bit about the book and also how and where people can, I mean, I know people are like, I want more of Casey Brown. Where do they get more of Casey Brown?

Casey Brown:
Oh, thank you. Well, the book came out in November. It’s called Fearless Pricing. It’s available on Amazon and anywhere books are sold. And I was just in the studio this week recording the audiobook version, which will be coming out in March. So I’m excited about that. So it’s on paperback, it’s in hardcover, ebook, and it will soon be on audiobook as well. So all the formats, however you choose to consume content, we’re coming to you if you want. And just a quick word about the book. I have a lot of passion for this topic and for me it’s a mission and the, you know, I can only be on so many keynote stages, I can only be on so many podcasts, I can only. Our company can only work with so many firms, but I believe every business that’s excellent at what they do ought to have access to these principles. And that’s, to me, the reason for the book. So it’s a, it’s a labor of love more than anything else. If people want to find other resources, I put out a fair bit of content on LinkedIn in particular. That’s where I put a lot, post a lot of videos. So you can find me at Casey Brown Boost or you can find and sign up for our blog. We put out a lot of content there as well on boostpricing.com those are the best two ways to find us.

Drew McLellan:
I always love listening to you because your counsel is so practical and it’s so tangible and you have your craft down to a place where there’s nothing fluffy about your advice or counsel and it all is spot on, makes perfect sense. And the explanation of why we do certain things or why we allow certain things to mess with our head, tease us up to be successful. So I’m always super grateful for your time and expertise. I think you have a rare gift not only around pricing, but around explaining it in a way that business owners and leaders can understand and can wrap their arms around. And so I’m super grateful that you came back on the show. So thank you for being with us.

Casey Brown:
Oh, it was my absolute 100% pleasure. Thank you so much.

Drew McLellan:
You bet. All right, you guys, this was an episode that I’m hoping you took lots of notes. I’m hoping you actually stepped off the treadmill and sat down and wrote down this. Or you stopped the podcast, finished your walk, and then listen to it. Going into 2025, especially after 23, was hard for a lot of you. 24 was challenging, knock on wood. Casey’s right that 2025 is going to be a better year, that their wallets are starting to open up. You know, I think we have all gone through this. If you’ve owned Your agency for 10 or 20 years, every 10 years or so, something huge hits us, whether it’s the Great Recession or Covid or whatever. And it takes a few years for everybody to go, oh, this isn’t going to change. This is new normal. Okay? I cannot sit on my foot forever. I have to move. And. And I think we’re at the point now where post Covid, we’re through the election. People are like, regardless of what’s going out in the world, I got to sell my stuff. I got to get out there. I’ve got to get market share. I’ve got to get more customers. I have to keep more customers. I have to figure out this AI thing. Like, there’s a lot going on out there that we can be super helpful in. And so what I don’t want you to do is carry the weight and the. And the sort of burden of the last few years into this year. So this is a perfect time for this podcast. It’s a perfect time for you to go buy Casey’s book and highlight the crap out of it. It’s a perfect time for you to think about how you want to show up in terms of your pricing integrity for 25, to take care of yourself, your family, your team, the agency, and most importantly, to honor how good you are at what you do. And if you’re not that good at it and you’re, like, feeling a little anxious about your pricing because you’re like, well, maybe we’re a B player. Then figure that out first and then do great pricing.

So, again, I’m not saying sell something mediocre for a premium price. I’m saying every one of you has the capacity to be a premium product and a premium advisor. You know how to do that. So do it, and then get paid for it. And so you’ve got the blueprint for how to do that in this episode and in much greater detail and which with a lot more specificity and tools and tricks in the book. So two things. One, get your head in the right place so that you’re pricing properly for 2025. Two, do not assume that this is all you need of Casey Brown. Go buy the book. And however you want to listen to, if you want to listen to it or read it or whatever, however you consume content, make sure you’re following her on LinkedIn. But this is the year for you to sort of really get back what you’ve probably had to give up over the last couple years. So it’s time to make up the lost ground. And I think Casey has shown you in a lot of ways how to do that. So again, step off my soapbox. Go do it.

Before I let you go, two more things. First and foremost, thank you to our friends at White Label iq. As you know, they are the presenting sponsor of both the podcast and the Summit, which is coming up in May 20th and 21st here in Denver. We are super grateful to them. They come alongside agencies speaking of pricing. They understand that web dev and app development and all of those sort of things PPC are challenging to get paid for in the way that you want to because those employees are expensive, the work is expensive, the scopes are complicated and they can help you with all of that. They are your White Label partner for Design, Dev and PPC. You can learn more about them@whitelabeliq.com AMI. Great, great partners. Lovely human beings have been a part of AMI for 20 something years. So good people and we are super grateful for their support on the podcast. And last but not least, I just want to remind you, I like doing these. I love talking to people like Casey. If you don’t listen, I don’t get to keep doing it. So super grateful that you hang out with me every week and I love all the things that we do together. I know that I’m walking some of your dogs with you. I know I’m on treadmills. I know for a couple of you we’re putting on your makeup for the morning. Love all of it. Happy to be a part of all of those sort of rituals in your life and I’m super grateful to be able to bring folks like Casey to you every week. So thanks for listening. I’ll be back next week. Hope you will too. All right, talk to you then.