Welcome to the Power of Authority Spotlight. I'm your host, Michelle Prince, founder and CEO of Performance Publishing Group, making a difference one story at a time. We'll be shining the light on successful founders, entrepreneurs, business owners, and leaders that are getting results and making a difference. We'll talk about how they built their businesses, are creating movements, and leveraging the power of authority in their own right. Be sure to stick around to and we'll reveal how you Hey, everybody, and welcome to the Power of Authority Spotlight, where we shine the light on successful CEOs, entrepreneurs, leaders and founders that are doing great things. They're making a difference in their in their niche, in their category, and they're out there sharing their story. And I'm excited to introduce you. To my guest today, who is James D. Wilton, the world renowned expert in SAS pricing with more than 12 years of experience helping startups and fast growing companies maximize their value through strategic pricing as the founder and managing partner of Monovate, the premier pricing and monetization consulting firm for SAS and tech companies, James continues to shape the industry's approach to pricing, his expertise. Was honed in leadership roles at McKinsey Company, where he led the pricing service line for Fuel, their startup and scale up practice, and as head strategic pricing at Relix. Driven by a mission to help innovative companies capture their true worth, James regularly shares his insights with the startup community. He's a frequent publisher of Montevideo insights and the founder of the cube, the first pricing focus community for SAS and tech leaders with his newest book, capturing value, James distills, his vast experience of knowledge into an essential guide for anyone looking to master the art and science of SAS pricing. Welcome to the show, James. Great to be here, Michelle. Thanks for having me. I am so excited to talk to you. I mean, there's, there's a lot of things we're going to unpack today, but I want to start with your book. You just published, it's about to be launched, your latest and newest book, Capturing Value, which is an incredible guide. It's, to transforming SaaS pricing, unlock and unshackling growth. So I, I want to start there. Tell us about the book and how did the book come to be? How did it? Absolutely. Well, I, I, you know, I'd love to say it came about really quickly, but this is something I've been working on for the last three to four years. So it's definitely taken, taken a little while to get it, get it out there, but. Really, I mean, this, this just came through my observations of working with a lot of smaller companies who are growing and needed to optimize their, their, their pricing strategies for the work that I did at McKinsey and also at, at Monovate since, since then, I've really found that, there are many companies out there who don't know how to build an effective pricing strategy. Pricing's incredibly niche, right? It's not very common that people have pricing experts in their staff when they're really starting off and getting going with their, with their companies. And there are some of those companies when they need to transform their, their, their, their pricing strategies, they have budgets to be able to come and spend on, on, on consultants. And of course my company motivate, SAS companies there, but I would say for every, for every company that we ended up working with, there are, I still see need help with their pricing strategy, but they don't have budgets for consultants. They just, you know, and they, and they need to do it on their own internally and they don't have expertise. And if you go online and you look for guidance on how to do price, do pricing strategy. Well, there's just a lot of information out there. That's not particularly trustworthy. It's probably not very clear. And even when it's clear, it may not be telling you to do the right, the right things. So really, you know, when we founded, when we founded Monovate all those years ago, the mission really was to be able to help these growing companies make better decisions around their pricing strategy. So we just felt there's a lot of people were not able to help here and the book and a book could help to do that. So that's really what I started, started thinking about, like, how can we. How can we create a guide that will help somebody who doesn't have experience in pricing strategy, but knows SAS? How can we give them what they need to be able to understand the decisions that they need to make, the options that they have, and kind of work as a guide to take them through the entire process and building a new pricing strategy that they can be, they can feel very confident about. Absolutely. And in fact, I mean, and it is a guide. If there's so much in here and for somebody, first of all, some people might not even know they need this and it'd be even an issue. Right? So even first discovering what that is and what pricing strategy is. And and something I learned from you and through the book as well is that it's pricing isn't just about price. Is it? No, no, it's not probably the biggest misconception around pricing in total. Michelle is like people tend to think it's all about. Okay. What's the price tag, right? Like, what is this? What is this worth? That obviously is a part of it. That is something that you do need to get to. It is a very critical part, but honestly, pricing starts way earlier than that. Really, I mean, to be able to build a pricing strategy effectively, you need to be thinking about, about what your value is, right? Where does the value of your product Come, come from and what are your customers need? What do they want? What will they react well to? What are the, you know, what are the, all the dynamics there? What are their expectations based on what else they have? They've seen out there. And for your company, what's the objectives that you have? You know, if you have, the same company. Trying to achieve two different objectives, the ideal pricing strategy that's going to help achieve those two things. It's going to look completely different, right? So you need to be thinking about all these all these factors. That's before you've even started to build out any kind of pricing strategy at all. Then when you get into the pricing strategy before you get to the price level. You have to think about the structural elements. So, you know, the packaging, you know, what are the different options that you give your you give your customers? What are the what's the price architecture? You know, are you going to be able to scale your price to different customers based on their on their willingness to pay? And how do you do that? And all of these decisions? Are really going to impact how much somebody is going to pay for your product. And anyway, those, those structural decisions can make somebody more or less likely to, to pay up, to pay a price point. So you get that stuff figured out first, and then you think about setting, setting the price, on, on, on top of that. But yeah, I think it's, it's one of those disciplines that is just so much broader and multifaceted than think people think it is. And I think that's, you know, that's one of the reasons why this, this book has to exist to give, give the guidance on all those different things you need to think about. Absolutely. And why this is important to even have this conversation, because if they don't understand what all's involved, some people might think, Oh, I'm fine. I know my pricing and you know, but there's so much more to it. Like you already outlined. I'm curious. I know your expertise. I mean, you're, you're renowned in this space. This is definitely very focused on it. But does this framework, the ability to really look at all of the different pieces of pricing strategy, you know, from the offering to the clients, does that go across all industries? Or could it? It does. It certainly could. It certainly could. I mean, I will, I will say that this, this book has been written specifically for SaaS. It's really tailored to, to the SaaS world and it's, it's written through that lens. But I know I'm one of several pricing, experts out there who think good pricing is good pricing. Right. And like the things that you need to think about this, the components of it. I'm going to be the same across any industry, right? It's just that the way that you execute on those different components And probably the amount of focus that you put in these different areas is going to be slightly different So I think if you are somebody who's in a completely different industry like retail for example The book is not written explicitly for you but there's going to be elements in there that you'll still be able to to grab onto and help you with your With your, with your pricing, maybe the next box, the next book will be written on a, a different, industry segment. Well, no, and I do believe you stay in the lane that you're in, and this is where you truly have so much value to bring and, you know, walk us through what the. A little bit more of what that process looks like. So as a consulting firm, this is the type of thing that you're doing for all over the world. What? Where do you start when you're working with these companies? Like, let's say, because I could see this as somebody who's just getting started. They need to be implementing this right away. But I imagine you're working with a lot of companies that. Aren't just getting started and they're going to have to stop and reevaluate everything or is that an accurate? Okay, no, it is. I mean, I'd say like, see the vast majority of the work that we do at a motivate is about transforming pricing strategies, which have already that are already built and operational and being being used for businesses. We actually find a lot of the time right when when companies get get going. They tend to not think too deeply about their first pricing strategy for like a number of reasons, right? Partly that's because as I said, they often don't have people who know pricing, who are going to guide them on how to think about that, but also for anybody who's founded a company, right? It's a scramble of activity. You have to do so many things. probably thinking about your pricing strategy is something that happens. Oh, we're launching next week. We really need to think about how we're going to price this. So. It ends up that it's often not thought through particularly deeply and they'll just, they'll do what we call founder based pricing, which is, you know, kind of think about what it, what it could be. And they, and they put something down and that's, you know, are there, is there room for improvement there? Absolutely. But, you know, that's, that's the reality. Oftentimes, if you've got a successful business, yeah. They will start growing and doing well regardless of whether their initial pricing strategy is, is perfect or not. But they'll grow and they'll get to a point when suddenly the pricing strategy they have does matter now, right? Because there'll be decisions that they made which are, even if it's not stopping them from growing, it's probably preventing them from reaching their full potential, right? It might be, you know, the simplest one, you called it out earlier, Michelle, is, you know, just literally, We think our prices are too low. We are, we feel that we are providing more value than we are capturing through our, through our pricing. And we can, we think we can raise the price level, but it also sometimes, you know, the, the metric that we're using to price just isn't resonating with, with, with customers. I'd say probably the most common one in today's world is we set our price based on users. Because everybody does, right? But users isn't really aligned to value. Maybe people aren't buying as many users as we thought that they, that they would. They don't need to expand the number of users. So it's not giving them any, any growth. We think there are lots of other things that might be better aligned to value that if we were pricing based on those, not only would we be able to set better prices, but we'd also be able to grow those prices over time with customers. So, you know, how do we think about that? Sometimes it's that the, the packaging is wrong, right? The packaging could be too, too complex. It could be that we've given them too many choices and they, and they don't make sense and it's slowing down our, our sales, or it could be that when we launched our product, we had really just a very small set of offerings. So we just said, here's our product, take it or leave it. And now we have all these different. Things and we, it doesn't necessarily make sense to give everything to everyone. It might be better for us to give some kind of a choice there so that we can a make sure customers can buy what they want, but also it's another way for us to price differentiate across our customers and capture more, more value. So there's all these things that might be, you know, potentially suboptimal. And there's also the fact that really, as I said earlier, your pricing strategy should be based around your objectives, right? It should be based around what you're trying to achieve. Companies objectives change as they, as they grow, so Even if you set your pricing strategy perfectly from day one, which doesn't happen very often, but you know, for argument's sake Let's say that it did, if you're two, three years later at that point It's probably not the right, the right pricing strategy now because your objectives have changed, your market's changed, your product's changed, everything's changed and you need a, you need a refresh. For sure. Okay. So I have to ask, cause I'm so curious. I know you didn't just wake up one day or as a little boy saying, I want to be, in the, the SaaS pricey world. So how did you get here? How, what will tell us more about your background? It was a long, long and winding road to get where I am, Michelle. Did not happen overnight. Yeah, I mean, really, it's, it has been a bit of a meandering path. I mean, I guess to sort of take you through it all, I'd have to start off in, in college, right? I mean, I, I went to college, I was in, I was in the UK, where we have to specialize a lot earlier. It's not like, you know, you pick your major, you Apply to university to do one thing, and I applied to university to do to do natural sciences. I thought I was going to be a scientist. That's what I thought in college. and it became very clear to me when I got to my, to my college that I wasn't going to be a scientist cause I didn't actually find it that interesting anymore. I don't know what it was, but the, I think the, the different things I was getting into around that time just didn't have the same magic for me that it did when I was at high school. So. I figured that out quickly, realized that wasn't what I wanted to do. and I actually spent a lot of my time at college doing a lot of other things, but not, you know, really focusing too much on my, on my courses. I did a ton of, of acting and, and drama and comedy and, you know, all those kinds of things. Yeah, it was, that's really how I spent the majority of my, of my, my years, which was great. I had a really good time, but it really meant that I left, I left, university four years later and I had no idea what I wanted to do. and I mean, to cut a long story short, I took a, I took a, a sales role initially for, for a year, just, I was told that, you know, whatever I'd be doing later on, I'd need some kind of sales skills. So I did that figured out very quickly that I'm not a salesperson and I didn't want to be doing that forever because it really wasn't for me. And I guess in that time. I figured out what I, what I did think I could be good at and I landed upon management consulting because it felt like it was, it needed a lot of skills that I, that I felt I was naturally strong in like, you know, communication, problem solving, a lot of the data analytics and so forth that would come in there. Plus I, you know, I found that I kind of get it. I got distracted. Easily and I like lots of lots of variety and consulting, you'd be doing lots of different projects. So I thought I thought that was that was a good fit. I started applying. I ended up getting, recommended to a firm through a friend. I got an all went very, very quickly. And I got into that firm, which is, which is the associates, it's a sales and marketing consulting firm. And then I was on that path. Really. I did that for the four years, went to business school, flirted with the idea of moving away from consulting, but ultimately decided that I wanted to stay. And then I went back into consulting after, after business school at, at what was called then 80, 80 Kearney when I did more general strategy and ops. Okay. And, this is actually where indirectly I found, I found pricing, right? Not at 80 Kearney, but when I was at 80 Kearney, which back at that time was very much a, you know, it was kind of a mandatory four day a week travel model at that time. At that point, you could get away from it, but not really. and that was fine until, I had the complication that I had my, my first kid in my, my second year at AT Kearney. So my, me and my wife, we kind of went from this existence where we both. Worked really hard in the week and then hung out at the weekends and that was fine to a situation where I had a son at home and I didn't see him except weekends for the first, I think, probably like six months of his life. That was how it went. and that wasn't okay with me. I didn't, you know, I was I, I wanted to be with him and my wife far more than I, than I was. So I kind of realized I needed to do something different, but I didn't know what to do because I really felt identified as a consultant at that point. And I didn't really fancy the idea of getting a, a normal, nine to five job or an operational role somewhere, but this is, this is what happened. I ended up getting headhunted by this internal consulting firm for, for a big company called Rolex group. and this consulting firm focused on pricing. And the idea was, you know, you'd, these, this team would go in and start working with all the different businesses and this, this pretty big, big company, this whole group of companies as Rolex was and help them transform their pricing strategies when they, when they needed to, you know, this was right around 2012. So there was a lot of movement from these kind of old perpetual type models over to, to subscription and SAS models. I hadn't really done any pricing work within my consulting at this. At this point, but I decided to roll the dice and give it a go. I felt like I'd be able to do this. I'd be able to keep being a consultant and I'd be, I'd be back working in New York, which was where I lived at the time. So I'd be home more. so I took a, I took a shot on it and as it turned out, I just found that I, I love the pricing content. I just, I hadn't really found that area in consulting that really, really resonated with me and got me excited until that, until that point. But, But yeah, pricing turned out to be way more strategic than I was expecting it to be. And there was a lot more scope for creativity than I thought that there would be. So I was, I was hooked. I stayed with that team for four years, ended up leading that, that team. And by the end of that, with the world slightly different at that point, I decided then that I wanted to go back into external consulting, but just focus on, on pricing. So that's what I did. You know, I got, a couple of different roles. I built a pricing practice at a small firm called SBI. And then I went to McKinsey, where I was brought in to lead the pricing practice for fuel, which was, is the part of McKinsey that was set up to work with startups and scale ups and other fast growing tech companies. So it really felt like kind of coming home at that point because I'd starting off in larger consulting firms and then ended, ended back there. And also I had the opportunity to go work with these smaller, smaller companies, which was the, the favorite part of my, of my previous couple of jobs that I found. But, you know, doing so with all the resources of McKinsey behind you, it kind of felt like a, a dream fit. And it was great. You know, I, I really found that, I really enjoyed the people I was working with, and I felt that, the work we did when we did it was, we, you know, it was really, really high, high quality. It was a very natural fit with the way that I, I just felt that things should be done. So I was pretty happy doing that. I think the only thing that, that kind of made me. A little less happy over time was, the fact that it was McKinsey and the fees that McKinsey carry, right? I'm actually, I think, you know, a believer in pricing to value and McKinsey provides a lot of, a lot of value. But the reality was, the companies that we were trying to work with, For the fees that McKinsey was charging, just so many companies just was not viable. Right. It wasn't even a, it wasn't even a starter. so I was kind of, we, we did some great work, but for every company that we were able to work with, there were probably like two or three that were, I was really excited about working with, but we just, we just couldn't make the arrangements work. So I kind of had this epiphany. About three years in that, you know, it would be a lot easier for me to do the kind of work that I wanted to do with the kind of companies I wanted to do if I was just able to take the McKinsey fees out of it. And that that's really what led to founding Monovate back in 2021, where I said, I'm going to try to keep doing the work at this at this level, keep doing the same kind of work, but be more flexible based on the sizes of companies that we're working with and hopefully be able to serve a lot more of these companies that I that I want to work with. And yeah, I guess the rest is history. I mean, we've, we've grown relatively quickly. We are a 12 full time consultants now and, hopefully growing up to, we, I mean, we'd love to be considered kind of end state as being the go to, for, you know, for pricing strategy work for, for smaller, growth stage companies. I find it so ironic that you're at McKinsey doing. Pricing strategy for clients, and it is exactly that reason that, you know, some of those clients are not so going back to the point of the importance of this right there. They weren't able to work with those, but it created this opportunity for you, which is absolutely. Was awesome. I just have to say, on a personal level, I know that going back to when you were doing your 4 day a week travel schedule and all that. I know that world. My dad was in consulting, for vibrant and and many others. And and so I, I recall growing up saying goodbye to him on a Sunday night and hello on a Friday night. And and so for you to make that decision early, we were a little older, but I, I. I applaud you for that because that that's a road warrior. That's tough. It's tough on a family. But for that season, it sounded like you were able to be put. You know, stay put where you were, but then go with Rexel and then eventually with McKinsey, which is amazing. I, there's so much I want to talk to you about and I want to be sensitive to your time, but I do want to ask about, you know, in working with you with this book, there's so much I learned just not only just on the pricing strategy, but that there are. There are people out there that need this kind of support, right? Outside of just directly working with a company and you founded something called the cube, which is unity. Do you mind talking a little bit about that and what that's all about and how people can get involved? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think the cube is, it's kind of born out of the same, kind of born out of the same place as, as, as capturing value, the book really, in the sense that we just, we know that there are a lot of companies out there who need help with pricing. That our kind of traditional consulting model cannot help just because of just because of fees and resources and so forth. Right. So the idea was, you know, again, how can we, how can we help, help those people? We want to make sure that they get access to, to content and guidance, which is, which is trustworthy and right. And we'll help them know what they need to know about, about, about, about pricing. And it kind of, it came to us a couple of years into, into motivate that this community offering could be a good way to do that. Right. Because I think through doing that, we can get. A lot of these SAS leaders who are in this quite difficult position, right? Of like, I need to build a pricing strategy, but I don't know how to, how to do it. You can get them together in this, in this community so that they can have almost a support group around that, right? Speak to other companies who are trying to do the same thing and, and, and figure it out. But also give them access to a lot of our thinking around pricing strategy. And we do that through a masterclasses that we run every, every couple of weeks. We'll take it. We'll pick a different pricing topic and go super deep and give guidance on how to navigate that, that particular topic. And we also put within our, within our portal, we have a lot of tools that. You know, that we use within our, within our projects that other people can use, as well to help them make decisions and do analyses and, and, and so forth. And that's, we're building it out now as well. We're increasingly, we're building up our, our benchmarks on a lot of the metrics that, you know, SAS leaders who are thinking about price, pricing strategy need, need to know. So it's, you know, it's set up to really be a great one stop shop source of information for anybody who's, who's in the SAS or any kind of, subscription business really, and who needs to know how to either build or manage a pricing strategy. Yeah, no, and I love that. And community is so important to me, have that support, people coming together. And, I, so I, I love the concept of it. And then that way they can ask questions if they have a particular pricing challenge. what are some of the challenges you hear most, would you say? Like, what are some of the things that companies or even these individuals struggle with or the questions that they ask? There are so many. I mean, there's so much variety here, right? Which I think is why it was one of the reasons why I like the area because it's, it, you know, you do, you do get different challenges the whole, the whole time. and some of the things I've, I've mentioned that, right? Like it's. You get, you get companies saying, like, we need to, we need to change our, our metric. And sometimes that's the question of what do we change the metric to? And if we do change it, then that becomes the questions. Well, how do we do that? Right? Like a lot of the time you've probably seen, there's a lot of noise. Right now about people moving from user based pricing to usage based pricing. That's really, you know, a lot of companies are going through that transition now, which is often the right answer, not always, but by the way, but often, often does make theoretical sense, but doing it is very difficult, right? Because you, you know, you have to, aside from the. The new deal piece of it, which is, you know, getting your sales people up and running to try to sell in this completely different way and all the telemetry that you need to be able to build to track if you're going to move your existing customers over to this new usage based pricing. I mean, it's completely different and they're all sort of anchored and set on what they're kind of paying already if you run what the new prices should be for them. Some of them might stay roughly the same. Some of them are probably gonna get massive price in increases, and actually some of them may end up with better pricing than, than before. So it conjures up this whole set of questions about how do I have those conversations with my, with my customers? How do I move them over? Should I grandfather people over from this old, old pricing to, you know, rather than them, them move them onto the new, the new pricing. Especially if we're gonna, they're gonna end up paying, paying less. There's just a lot of, a lot of questions that it gets, that get thrown up for which it seems like there's no obvious answer for it. and there often isn't, you know, a lot of these things, there's no kind of default, this is always the right thing to do. It's really, you have to think through what is the right decision making framework to let, you know, to help you decide what you should do in your particular case. So it's, you know, helping them walk, walk through all. All of that. Wow, so much. But that's, that's the reason for the book, for the community, for, for what you do, as your consulting firm. If somebody wanted to learn more about you, Monovate, and also the book, where's the best place for them to go? So the, I think probably the best place to learn about Monovate would be our website, which is, monovate. com. and learning about me, there is some, there is some content about me on, on, on our website, but there's also my My LinkedIn profile, which is, LinkedIn slash James D. Wilton. Awesome. Well, the book is awesome. Definitely for those of you listening, go get the book, Capturing Value, the Definitive Guide to Transforming SaaS Pricing and Unshackling Growth, which who doesn't want that? So that's amazing. James, thank you so much for being on the show. I so appreciate it. I've learned a lot. I know the listeners have as well, and I'm excited to. See what your next book is going to be, too. Thank you, Michelle. Well, great to chat. Thanks for having me on the show. Absolutely. All right, everyone, that's it for the Power of Authority Spotlight. Definitely go to Monovate. com. Check out what they're doing in terms of helping companies, helping businesses to really get strategic with their pricing, which is, as we talked about, So much more than price and check out James on LinkedIn as well. And thanks again for listening. We'll see you next time on the power of authority spotlight. Thanks so much for listening to the power of authority spotlight. If you are a successful founder, entrepreneur, business owner, or leader, that's getting results and making a difference, and you'd like to be on this program, please visit performancepublishinggroup. com forward slash podcast to apply that's performancepublishinggroup. com forward slash. podcast. Also, if you got something out of this interview, please share this episode. Just do a quick screenshot with your phone and text it to a friend or post it on the socials. 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