What a pricer learns from a book that prices ideas
Maarten Laruelle On 10 August I pre-ordered two copies of The Price of Influence by Claire Wang, €45 for the bundle. Claire spent twenty years setting prices for mobile plans, bank fees and insurance policies, so I expected a pricing book, which it is not. It is a book about getting a yes from people who do not owe you one, and she uses the pricing toolbox to get there.
So what did I learn from an “influence” book? Claire points the same tools I often use in a direction I do not. Here are 3 angles that stayed with me.
Your stakeholder is the buyer
Her premise is simple: your idea is the product, the person whose yes you need is the buyer, and that buyer weighs your idea against what saying yes costs them (time, energy, reputation, the risk of being wrong). In my practice I aim that logic outward, at customers. Claire aims it inward, at the people who have to give the yes.
Her HBO story is the one that stuck. A channel listed at $14.99 a month, approved by finance, announced by product, built into the system by IT, and one department nobody asked. What actually came in per subscriber, I leave to the book.
As you know for me pricing sits at the crossroad of sales, marketing and product. Claire turns that into a buy-in question: who has to commit before the number on the price list becomes the number on the invoice?
Packaging is not display
She splits the two cleanly. Packaging is what you offer and at what price, display is how you show it. Her example is a yoga studio in Taiwan that answered a one-line question about a Wednesday evening class with four pages of timetables and colour-coded credits.
Claire gives display a chapter of its own, and takes it from the price list into the meeting room, with a pricing manager whose recommendation sat on slide 13.
The status quo is the competitor
In 2017 Claire joined a FinTech startup in Hong Kong with a better trading platform for about 800 small brokerage firms. Every firm agreed their current platform was outdated. None of them signed, and the reason was sitting in her own interview notes the whole time.
Her check for this is three questions: how much does it hurt, what does it cost to keep ignoring it, and what do I get if I act. In “What are they hiring you for?” I look for the job the customer needs done. Claire adds the question of what keeps them from firing the old solution.
She made me think about how much of a rollout plan depends on people who were never in the room when the price was decided.