From Churn to Clarity: Dan Balcauski Reveals the Missing Link Between Pricing and Product Growth

Freddy D: 00:03:14

Hey Superfan superstar Freddie D. Here in this episode 121, we're joined by Dan Balcauski, the principal consultant behind Product Tranquility, where he helps high volume B2B SaaS CEOs tackle one of their biggest challenges, defining pricing and packaging for new products.

Based in Austin, Texas, Dan brings a wealth of experience from leading product strategy roles including as Head of Product at Lawnstarter and principal product strategist at SolarWinds where he contributed to billion dollar growth initiatives. With a background in computer engineering and an MBA from Kellogg, Dan blends technical insight with strategic vision.

Get ready for a deep dive into SaaS growth, pricing strategy and product leadership. Welcome Dan to the Business Superfans podcast.

Great to have you here today and we're looking forward to talk a little bit more about Product Tranquility and what does that really mean?

Dan Balcauski: 00:04:16

I'm excited to be here. Thank you for having me, Freddie.

Freddy D: 00:04:19

So Dan, what is the, you know, let's go back to the beginning and what's the whole backstory of how did you come up with Product Tranquility? And I know that you work in a SaaS space, but let's go back to how did that all come about?

Dan Balcauski: 00:04:34

Yeah, so I've been in the SaaS space my entire career.

I guess software generally arguable whether when SaaS actually started, but started off at the builder side as an engineer into product leadership and founded my company Product Tranquility, where we all do is help B2B SaaS companies with pricing. The company name and initial thought behind it was I had been in the product world for a while.

I remember writing even my business school entrance essays saying at some point I would start a company thinking that it would be a product company. But either I'm too pessimistic or pragmatic, I'll let you choose your adjective of choice.

I could never decide on a product that I believed in enough to take all of the thousands of arrows that an entrepreneur has to deal with to birth that into existence. Because you're going to get called an idiot a lot of times along the way of how your thing will never work.

And I was probably the biggest cheerleader on that side of the fence for anything that I created an idea around. But I was on a career sabbatical.

I was doing a year and a half backpacking trip around the world trying to think of okay, it seems about time to start this company. What do I want to do? I believe in myself.

Let me go do some product consulting for other technology businesses and so that's where the product part of Product Tranquility came from.

As part of that overall experience and backpacking around the world, two very significant changes in my personal life and mental state came about, which is I did a couple of ten day meditation retreats. One of the realizations coming out of there is very much of a sense of this idea of perpetual dissatisfaction.

And especially when you're in a product or technology company, you're always trying to complete the next Sprint, the next release, the next quarterly milestone sales target, thinking that when we get there, we will have arrived. But as part of this inner work realized, much like anything else in life, that is an illusion. And so what is the antidote for that?

It is to be tranquil and calm in the presence of we are where we are. This is great. This is exactly where we need to be right now. Thus, Product Tranquility as a idea was birthed into the world.

Freddy D: 00:07:07

Oh, love that story. What countries did you go to?

Dan Balcauski: 00:07:11

Well, on that trip, I think I hit about 21. I was fully around the world seven months in South America, Fiji, New Zealand, Southeast Asia, Middle East, Europe. So it was all over the place.

Freddy D: 00:07:23

Okay.

Dan Balcauski: 00:07:23

Yeah.

Freddy D: 00:07:23

I just got back from doing a cruise from Hawaii, all the way down to Australia. So we stopped in Tahiti for a couple of days and then we were supposed to go to Pago Pago, but that got sidelined because of weather.

So we ended up in Taranga, New Zealand for a couple days and then Auckland and we're supposed to go to Picton and that got scrapped because again, the weather. So we went to another place called Bay of Islands and then we finished in Australia and hit Sydney, Brisbane and the Gold coast and flew back.

So the whole trip was about five weeks.

Dan Balcauski: 00:07:53

Sounds amazing.

Freddy D: 00:07:55

Yeah, it was a blast. I highly recommend it. I was in the SaaS space as well. I visited many countries myself as I was running global sales.

So I can appreciate the experiences that you get visiting other cultures and other people and the way they do business is just. It's fascinating. So let's go down a little bit more about the product stuff in the SaaS space. We both have similar background.

We've both been in the space. I was more in the engineering and manufacturing and I can relate to those product milestones and trying to get stuff out the door.

The goalpost keeps moving because you keep moving the goalpost and I think sometimes people got to stop and what they've got. Get it out and. And go from there.

Dan Balcauski: 00:08:41

Yeah, for sure.

Freddy D: 00:08:43

So talk a little bit more about what it is that you do with the SaaS companies and how do you guide them with their product and their product pricing and things like that?

Dan Balcauski: 00:08:53

Yeah. So as I was mentioning, I went from this broad view of helping companies with product strategy, etc.

Realized that after a lot of conversations, folks just really struggled with their, you know, pricing and packaging. There's often no clear ownership of the pricing and packaging in these organizations. It's kind of treated as an afterthought.

Oftentimes, as companies were created, you probably had a couple of founding members in a room at some point on a Saturday for a couple hours talking about like, well, we got to figure out how we're going to price this thing. Then it kind of got set in stone. No one ever thought about it from there.

And so you had to hire more engineers to write more code and more sales folks to sell it, more marketers to get you more leads and more support people to answer the phones and the emails from customers. But at no point did you say, hey, we know what we need. We've got a pricing person shaped hole in our organization.

And so as the organizations grow up, products get more complex. Everyone kind of looks around and no one has clear ownership of it.

And by default it's probably the CEO, but they're busy dealing with a million other things and so they don't have time to spend the rigorous attention to it.

And so that's often a situation that I come into where you've got companies that get to a certain level of scale, maybe they've started to grow organically or inorganically by adding additional product complexity.

They've maybe now got multiple products, multiple tiers, and they start to realize like, hey, we've kind of grown beyond what our initial pricing of packaging was set up to really deliver. It's not scaling with the way customers experience value.

We're not growing things like metrics like net revenue retention, a very important indicator for pricing and packaging having an issue. So, you know, potentially that's, hey, we're creating a new set of technology or we've just acquired and we need to rationalize a portfolio.

We've sort of grown through this all in one. You know, I had a conversation with a company not too long ago where they're like, yeah, we've got one offer that we sell.

It's just we keep adding, adding, adding. And then all of a sudden we realize we're in four or five separate Gartner magic quadrants with our one offer.

So we got to figure out how to cut this thing up.

And it's an interesting situation because when you think about like physical products, if you're a physical product company selling widgets, this would never be the case. Like, you know, you're making sweaters, you realize very quickly you're creating a three arm sweater.

I assume there's a very small market for a three arm sweater, but with software it's so easy because it's an intangible good. You just kind of add the one more thing and then you add the one more thing and pretty soon you got this giant gory and knot.

And so now you end up with this problem. Customers can't really understand what they're buying. The sales people don't really know how to sell it.

The marketing folks don't really know how to position it. It's kind of for everyone.

Company hasn't really had to make hard trade offs in terms of who are they really going after because they just keep on adding to this big gordian dot.

And so now we got to figure out, okay, how do we actually figure out what we do with this and really unlock this such that we have the capabilities for sales folks to have proper give gets in situations, be able to clearly articulate the value inside of sales conversations, have marketing, be able to talk to the sets of capabilities that a rogue robust way. And this is especially difficult for companies where you have a lot of software companies have very technical founding teams.

They love to talk about speeds and feeds and features, right? This was always the I'm a Mac, I'm a PC that Apple executed so well against Microsoft.

Microsoft was very much the hey, we've got all these features, et cetera. And Apple Steve Jobs point of view was like hey, we help you be better at you, at whoever you are. Right?

And that's very much the MO of most technical teams.

And you can imagine as You Creep Past Feature 50 Feature 100 Feature 150 Customers Prospects are not going to understand the direct capabilities at the level, right? So you can't, you can't just enumerate a bunch of I can't vomit all the features at you waiting for you to be impressed.

I have to figure out a way to talk about collections of capabilities in terms of the use cases, in terms of the benefits, the value to you, not the underlying features capabilities.

And so that's a lot of the work that we end up doing with companies is helping them either untangle or make those stories much clearer to the marketplace that help them align their differentiated value and help them support that story.

Freddy D: 00:13:30

Sure Now, I can completely relate where you're coming from, because I worked with a construction software company that was geared towards home builders. And it was a guy that was doing house framing, and then he had created a system for his business and then sold his business.

And he says, well, I got this really cool platform, and they kept adding features and features and features to it. And so it could.

Basically, Jack and Jill could walk up to the model house, order the way they want the house, and would create all the work orders for all the subcontractors and track all the projects and blah, blah, blah.

The problem was it was this one big fat software product, and the way they would install it at some companies, they would bring it out, and then somebody would sit there for hours and drag DLLs into particular folders. They had no installation software, no nothing.

CD. Back then, this was about: 2004

What I came up with is I created a desktop version, and then I created floating licenses.

I didn't do the work, but I guided the development team to say, okay, you know, you got a large company that's got people, they got to move it around. And then we came up with pricing, so we came up with desktop pricing, we came up with enterprise pricing, floating license pricing.

And once that took place, sales started to happen because people could actually buy a product that would work for them at the level of their business.

Dan Balcauski: 00:15:12

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

Freddy D: 00:15:15

Yeah, somebody that was a small, small remodeler could buy a desktop version for themselves. And then if they wanted to, they could, as the business grew, they could expand to an enterprise level.

And we had some companies that I sold to that would do the plumbing, they would do the Crown Creek, and they would do the framing. So we could handle all that. So they were like an enterprise type of project.

Dan Balcauski: 00:15:37

Yeah, and I think you're pointing out, assuming we'll get there, but, like, one of the things you're really highlighting is how central segmentation is. This has kind of been the tool that's served me so well throughout multiple areas of focus. What do I mean by that?

It's like in your story you pointed out, okay, hey, I've got these smaller remodelers. I got these bigger guys do bigger projects, maybe enterprise level. That's one way of thinking through segmentation.

And a lot of companies, I think, get stuck kind of at that firmographic level, Firmographics are things like what is your industry vertical, how many employees you have or how much revenue do you have? Where are you geographically based? What I found generally is that that's usually insufficient for understanding why people make decisions.

If I use the equivalent in the B2C space of demographics of a 43 year old college educated male living in Texas, when I go on Amazon to buy something, I'm not using any of those criteria I just listed in order to make the decision for the thing I'm buying. And so often we face the exact same thing in the B2B scenarios.

So you know what, in the cases like you mentioned, I remember helping a client where they were also in that construction space. And instead of the okay, SMB to mid market spread, really the challenge was, hey, we've got all these different customer segments.

They rattled off A list of 50 different types of construction. Well, we got the marble cutter and we've got the bathroom remodelers and we got the full scale sort of house developers and we got the commercial.

And it was like a list of 50. Right. Which is helpful. It's like, okay, that's a good first start.

But in order to make that actionable, you have to dig below the surface and figure out, okay, what is really driving each of those in terms of the use case and the context they're in. That's defining how those folks view value. And then what are the folks that we're most interested in serving?

Because ultimately, especially when it comes to the work I'm doing in either pricing and packaging or creating products, we have to make choices of like who are we going after? And it's very likely that there's going to be certain of those customers we're going to have to serve less well in order to serve others better.

Because your alternative is trying to make a product that pleases no one. Right. There's no average customer out there.

And if you think you're going to serve the average customer, you're going to get beaten by competitors who are more focused than you and going to serve that, that non average, that real person better than you are.

Freddy D: 00:18:27

Sure.

And that was one of the things that I leveraged when I was selling both in the CAD camp space, which is computer aid design, computer manufacturing as well as in the construction space was really, I would talk to the owners of the company or the management team and where did they want to go with their business? What was the strategy, what was the plan? So we got out of listing, has 27 different choices to do X, Y, Z.

We got into the business strategy conversations and really at that point sometimes pricing becomes a secondary part of conversation because you're now dealing with challenges.

You're looking at bottom line conversations, you're looking on ROI on the investment and this just happens to be a tool that helps them get to where they want to get to.

So when you have those type of conversations, you get out of does this and yours does that and it's more into what are the things that's costing the business money and how can we solve that and get them to the next level of where they want to go.

Dan Balcauski: 00:19:29

Yeah, couldn't agree more.

Freddy D: 00:19:32

So that's the differentiating between someone that's selling a solution and really working with business growth versus like you use the Apple and Microsoft. Look at all these cool bells and whistles that we got.

Well, reality, nobody cares because if it doesn't help me get my business to where I want to go, I could care less if it's got 57 different futures versus more importantly the understanding of how it's going to take me to the next level. Just to your point, with Apple, that was one of their power moves was, you know, we make things easy.

The information that you need right at your fingertips.

Dan Balcauski: 00:20:09

Yeah. Well, there's certainly a segment of folks who will respond to the sort of speeds and feeds.

Unfortunately, that segment is usually relegated to the engineers who look just like the people who built it. But when you're going beyond that group, the messaging starts to break down.

So this is often an area where different stakeholders inside of an organization will view the same problem quite differently.

Because you've got the marketing people pulling their hair out because they can't get the engineers to understand why we can't just list all the features. Right. It's like, yes, I understand you're super invested in those features and that makes a lot of sense.

Freddy D: 00:20:43

Yeah, I'd be in conversation with management team about strategies, growth plans and ROIs and all that stuff. Those two different groups have to be dealing with the appropriate people appropriately.

Dan Balcauski: 00:20:54

Yeah, yeah, Very important to get multiple perspectives on these things. And usually the perspective that's least represented inside the building is the voice of the customer.

And so getting that represented is incredibly important.

Freddy D: 00:21:07

Yeah.

So Dan, let's get into a story of some company that you worked with and they were stuck, they were having challenges and you helped put together their pricing, their packaging and now they're what I would call super fan of you and they're promoting you and they're referenceable and they're your champions.

Dan Balcauski: 00:21:25

Yeah. When it comes to specific pricing and packaging, clients have to demure on sort of client confidentiality.

But I will tell a story specifically around a company. I was helping with the customer retention issue and you know, there's a lot of overlap actually between pricing and packaging and retention issues.

The initial hypothesis from the company was, hey, we think somebody's running competitive play against us in terms of. And so they were starting to see this in the gross revenue retention and net revenue retention metrics.

And so tying together a couple of things that I mentioned before was, okay, understanding the raw number, hey, you know, last year churn was 5%. This year it's 6% on an annualized basis. Right. So that's pretty bad that that's a 20% increase in churn.

But all of those people who churn did not churn for the same reason. How can we pull that apart?

I think one thing that's kind of common among so many companies, I've even just at our last bit referenced perspective that's most often underrepresented inside companies is the voice of the customer. This rears its head a lot in understanding customer churn.

Companies will maybe do some light retention blocking at the end of a customer trying to cancel. Hey, why'd you cancel? Maybe giving them a counteroffer, potentially having a little survey of like, why are you canceling out?

Product is too hard to use, or it's too expensive, we're not using it anymore, whatever that might be. And then they just kind of think like, okay, that's it, that's all we could ever ask for. And that's absolutely 100 not the case.

I don't know about you, but I found that if done correctly, customers, ex customers are actually incredibly happy to tell you all the things that you screwed up along the way because they don't, like, they don't want that to happen to the next person. You know, usually, usually there's there's this bit of a social good that get paid forward of like, hey, like yeah, you guys really need to fix this.

Or hey, this was the situation that really caused this. And so we, in this particular scenario that I was explaining, I attacked that in two separate ways.

The first was a broad survey to the base also with some in depth conversations.

So what we really found there was that when you looked across all of the metrics for why people churned on a longitudinal, which basically means year on year. Right. So those might be things like price or value for the money or ease of use or any number of things of reasons people might cancel.

There was really no differentiation.

And on a broad level, there really was not any sort of screaming attribute across those that was saying, oh yeah, this is obviously the problem, this has gotten worse. Or this is obviously the long pole in the tent that's what's causing our issue.

But when we created segmentation around that, we did find a very different story.

We found that this was a very high volume transactional type business and the company had grown to such a scale that what was starting to happen was there was a much larger cohort of their customer base that was starting to have what, you know, you might think of the as needing the realm of like customer success. There was no relationship. This was a highly transactional business. So no relationship beyond the person who set up and installed the software.

That was the only relationship. But you swipe a credit card, very high traffic transaction. But what happened is that person leave the company.

Okay, person who comes in next, they have no relationship to your product. Right. Or there's at the management level, hey, the new manager comes in and we use this in my last company, let's rip this thing out, put this in.

And so that really ended up being the delta was this change in the type of organizations.

These especially as you started to creep up into some larger organizations where those type of things happened more frequently than what had been their traditional customer base. So what was originally thought of as like, oh, these competitors are running a play against us was really okay.

No, what you're really looking at there is a maturity in the type of organizations you're now selling into that may merit an investment in a little bit different of a go to market approach. Before you could very much rely on a transactional, hey, we get you sold, you're user as up and running.

There's no professional services, there's no handholding, there's no customer success relationship sort of checking in on you and everything.

You know, that's almost become commonplace these days in terms of like QBRs and with your vendors that might be a little bit overdone to a certain extent, but really no relationship beyond that sale. As you start to sell in some of these larger organizations, you maybe need to invest in sort of establishing a relationship.

Otherwise you face this increased risk of the next guy coming in and ripping and replacing.

So I think the arc of that story is really about understanding those underlying contextual factors, understanding what is going on inside of your customers. Because it's not.

Because I think it's very easy to be like, oh, you know, everyone has their favorite, especially when it comes to something like sure. And everyone in the organization has their own pet theory. Oh, well, I told you.

It's because we don't have the enterprise features that we needed or our ease of use or we got to lower our prices. Everyone's championing their own thing, sales guys, whatever. Was the last objection they got from a prospect. The last three they heard. Right.

That's the number one reason why customers are canceling. It really helps to do your homework and dig below the surface. I think there's been a lot of value.

I could play that same story across the board for different areas. I think that was very strong lessons learned in my approach to things. Your customers are more apt to tell you what's wrong than not.

All you have to do is ask and then listen.

Freddy D: 00:27:51

And what you shared there, Dan, is really applicable to not just SaaS, to really any business, because people get complacent and they figure, well, the customer is happy and everything else. And they don't reach out, they don't talk, they don't recognize them for certain events.

And one of the things talked about in my book is that really to create superfans out of your customers, you got to be engaged with them. You've got to know what's happening in their world.

And just like you mentioned, you get to churn of employees and yeah, you bring in what software you're comfortable with. That's just the way it is. But now you can, you can preempt that by understanding, hey, they've got some new person.

Well, that's a perfect opportunity to get that person acclimated to the platform that you've got and go, oh, wow, this is actually cooler than the stuff I was using before. You can mitigate that right up front very quickly.

But a lot of times companies have customers and, well, they're customers, they're fine, they're good. And all of a sudden they find out subscription's canceled product is out the door and you go, what the heck happened? Too late.

Dan Balcauski: 00:28:55

Yeah, for sure.

Freddy D: 00:28:57

Totally can relate to that.

Dan Balcauski: 00:28:58

There's definitely ways to do that that are more effective. If they're sitting out there, may have the objection of, like, you may have this as well. You could do this.

I could tell the exact same story for win loss on the sales side as I can for churn in any number of perspectives. Right. It's like, oh, those lost prospects, they want to do is another email from us or phone call with us. They talk.

You know, our sales guys burned Burned them down. Right. Until they finally said stop calling. We went another direction. Closed lost customers or the turned customers will never tell us the truth.

And that may be true if they feel like you're doing it with an agenda in mind. Meaning I'm still trying to hook you on a sale, I'm still trying to get you to come back.

And so if you don't want that, for example, like on a Churn interview, you don't want that to come from anyone with retention specialist or customer success in their name. Right. But more so like you want to have your product management or product marketing team doing that. Right.

A much more strategic, higher level conversation versus like, hey, like I don't need anything from you except the 30 minutes to talk to me on a phone call or to fill out the survey. Right. And you have to incentivize them as well. Right.

Especially in B2B, people are busy and these are customers who have ended your relationship, so you may need to throw them some incentive. But I found in my experience you very rarely get someone who's just going to sit there and try to lie to you about what went wrong.

They're going to tell you exactly what happened.

Freddy D: 00:30:13

No, absolutely correct. Because years ago I was in charge of the Western United States for a UK company and one of my accounts was HP and they were unhappy with the product.

And this is before I became Western Director of Sales and Marketing. And so they were going to toss the product out and go to another platform. So I went in with a tech guy, that guy flew in from uk.

We went and met with them and it was a hostile environment. I mean it was tough. That first morning was just brutal. But what I did is I just kept my mouth shut and just let them venture.

And they just aired out all the issues that they had and everything else. And I mean, it was brutal. Second day we went back and I started, pulled the executive management team aside.

So I got out of all the engineers and stuff because this was a manufacturing platform and started talking to the executive team because they were part of it and started talking about the business and things like that. And what I did was throughout that whole thing is I let everybody get it all out of their system.

So once it was all out of their system, they had nothing else to argue about.

And so at that point, once I realized that, okay, they're done venting now, we started rebuilding everything and turned the whole thing around and keeping a short story, but turned it around. So they were looking at buying additional equipment and expanding what they had and completely changed the whole mindset.

Because really, at the end of the day, what was lacking is they wanted to be heard, they wanted to vet out the features that they wanted, the capabilities, the challenges with the product. And since the company was in the uk, there was nobody really here until I came on board.

And that's what was the game changer was the fact that there was actually somebody here that stepped in and actually listened and took notes and shared it with management. And we made some changes, made some incentives and things like that for them, but it completely turned that whole situation around.

So you're absolutely correct.

Dan Balcauski: 00:32:15

Yeah, you're pointing there's definitely that idea of like a release valve and especially if you're in a leadership position, whether that's product leadership or C Suite, by the time there's a customer that's angry, they've probably been dealing with your support infrastructure, your sales infrastructure for weeks or months. And now you're on the call because they're about to have had it right.

And so I think you articulated very well of going into those conversations without really a point of view other than I'm here to listen.

Freddy D: 00:32:49

That's it.

Dan Balcauski: 00:32:50

How do we make this right? Like where do we go from here?

Freddy D: 00:32:53

You want to just let them vent it out before you start saying how do we make it right? Then they're right off the bat saying, oh, he's not going to listen. So you got to let it roll.

I mean you got to let it run its course because once they're empty, they're empty and now they can absorb new information in otherwise not going to happen.

Dan Balcauski: 00:33:11

Yeah, I agree. The order of operations, you're absolutely correct.

Freddy D: 00:33:16

Yeah, it's once that happens, it's kind of thing because you can see the body language changes on the individuals, especially when you're in person because all of a sudden they feel heard. Especially if you're taking notes and actually intensively listening and repeating all the things that they've mentioned. So it really is.

There's an art to that and that's really how you diffuse. I've done that many times when I've taken on roles and management.

Executive level management, now they call it C Suite but roles and had to go in to solve problems, perceptions and issues with companies. That was one of my MOs was just come in there and shut up and listen.

Dan Balcauski: 00:33:56

Yeah, I think like what you're pointing to as well or this kind of topic is pointing to I was mentioning before. So these churn conversations, right. You don't want anyone with retention specialists in their name to have the conversation.

With a win loss analysis, you don't want anyone that even smells of having a sales title doing those conversations. I think there's a deeper point that I run into surprisingly often when I encourage companies.

How many companies I talk to that don't have a robust churn program, don't have a robust win loss program. Because the inevitable response I get from these type of companies is our sales folks are on the phone with customers all the time.

Our customer success people are on the phone customers all the time. Our customer support people are answering questions. We know our customers because we hear for that. I'm like, no, no, no, those are.

Freddy D: 00:34:41

Good luck with that.

Dan Balcauski: 00:34:42

Those are different conversations.

Freddy D: 00:34:44

Yep.

Dan Balcauski: 00:34:45

Oh, our product people don't need to have conversations with our customers because they just get the information to the sales folks. I was like, the sales folks. First of all, it's not like you're getting a full transcription.

I mean now with gong, et cetera, we're closer than ever to getting exactly what the customer said on the phone. But the conversation is already framed as a sales conversation.

They're talking about the points that frame that the they're in a role of a negotiation. Like it's not an open, transparent, honest, free flowing investigative exploration.

It's a targeted how can I get you to sign on the line which is dotted conversation. Right.

And so you need to be able to have those conversations that are much more exploratory without free of the agenda in order to really understand what's going on. I don't feel like I just know this from so many conversations.

Customers and clients where their organizations are set up be like, oh no, we get enough interaction with our customers from our frontline sales folks or support people. And it's just you're getting a very biased point of view of what's going on in the world.

Freddy D: 00:35:39

And it's a 30,000 foot view as well. So it's not deep inside what's going on because you're not even talking to the users that are using the technology and stuff like that.

You're just getting a higher level conversation, which is not a lot of times not getting into what the perceptions of within the company. Because I have a saying, an individual's perception is their own reality, right or wrong.

And you gotta understand that and you gotta accept that person's perception before you can even look at potentially getting them to look at it from a different perspective.

Dan Balcauski: 00:36:12

Well, and you know, this is a nuance, especially when it comes to pricing and packaging work.

This could also be related to sort of churn analysis as well, is that you can often have very different perspectives depending on are you talking to the end user of your product, Are you talking to the buyer decision maker? Because they are often do not have.

Freddy D: 00:36:31

The same, different conversations.

Dan Balcauski: 00:36:33

Two very different conversations. One, is the buyer decision maker very concerned about, you know, you're buying a CRM? How efficient are my sales folks?

How many more calls per day are they able to make and what is my change in pipeline? They're looking at it from business metrics. The KPIs they don't care about.

Oh, we added this field in the UI that you could put this information like that's doesn't matter to them that oh, we, we did a new wizard workflow to help you. They don't care. Right.

Freddy D: 00:36:57

Actually I look at it as there's three things that they're after. What's it cost me, what's it do for me, how fast do I make my money back? The rest, they don't care.

Dan Balcauski: 00:37:07

We are in a world where they may care, especially if they have to interact with your reports or anything out of there as well. Right?

Freddy D: 00:37:14

I'm keeping it simple.

Dan Balcauski: 00:37:15

Yeah, exactly. But they're going to have different perspectives and often they're going to be absorbing different information.

They're going to be exposed, be much less exposed to you as a company because they're not like in the software all the time, right? You're like, you're out of sight, out of mind. Right.

They're going to other events or talking to other peers, hear different information that was relevant to that kind of scenario I outlined before. Because as you get to potentially large organizations, you're selling highly transactional software.

The end user, buyer, maybe that's the same person as you're growing and all of a sudden, hey, we're selling more mid market, more enterprise. Okay? You can't make that assumption anymore.

The end user and your buyer decision maker, the guy who's going to decide whether to renew that contract, he has not talked to you. He's not touched the software in the year since he signed the check last year. Right. We asked around. Are we still using that thing?

Okay, I'll renew it. But otherwise he doesn't know you, he doesn't remember you. And so often important to understand.

That goes again to the fact that your sales guys probably were talking to that person. Maybe they're talking to the champion end user, but they couldn't get the CFO on the phone.

Right, but he's the one who has to sign the check and make the renewal decision. And so you need to be aware of where that input is coming from.

Freddy D: 00:38:22

Yeah, absolutely. Right on the money.

And yeah, reminds me of some fun times and some interesting events that I've gone through in the three decades that I was in this space. So I can appreciate Dan as we come kind of close to the end here. How can people find you?

Dan Balcauski: 00:38:38

Yeah, happy to connect with folks on LinkedIn. Dan Bulkowski send me a note.

I try to blog fairly regularly at my website product tranquility.com I also run my own podcast called SaaS Scaling Secrets. So folks who are also in the SaaS world I interview scale up B2B SaaS CEOs.

All the different ways to grow and scale a SaaS company straight from the folks who are in the jungle doing it as we speak. So that can be found wherever podcasts are found.

Freddy D: 00:39:03

Yeah, we'll make sure that that's in the show notes and thank you so much for your time. Great conversation. We look forward to having you on the show down the road again.

Dan Balcauski: 00:39:11

Yeah, well thank you so much for.

Freddy D: 00:39:13

The time before we wrap, here's your quick debrief. Each episode in this nine part series zooms in on one powerful pillar of my Superfans Framework.

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