The Secret to Selling Solutions, Not Just Product Features with Johnny Cheng

Impact Pricing

Johnny Cheng is the Senior Director of Pricing and Packaging at ClickUp. He was the Senior Director of Pricing and Packaging at Coupa Software, and has years of experience in Product Marketing through various companies.

In this episode, Johnny shares his knowledge and experience on product marketing and product management as he educates us on the benefits of solution pricing, especially as to how a lens test helps on creating packages.

Why you have to checkout today’s podcast:

• Find out what crucial perspective companies miss when pricing sits in finance
• Learn about the benefits of having solution pricing, as well as to how you can sell value instead of features
• Discover a packaging system that incredibly works, both for the customers and the company

“Go do the lens test. Even if your packaging is already set, I would go back and do that exercise. I feel like if you do it across different teams, you'll be very surprised at what you see.”

– Johnny Cheng

Topics Covered:

01:05 – How Johnny got into pricing

01:50 – Comparing the role of product management with product marketing

05:46 – Does pricing ever exist without packaging or are the two just so tightly connected?

08:33 – Johnny as a strong believer of having solution pricing

12:18 – Johnny vs. Mark on good, better, best

15:16 – The system Johnny uses to decide which features goes in which package

20:58 – Tips and tools that can help you sell value instead of features

26:56 – Salespeople discounting too much because they don’t sell the value of the product

28:47 – Johnny’s pricing advice

30:05 – Connect with Johnny

Key Takeaways:

“I'm seeing more and more in product marketing just exactly to your point. It's more customer driven, it's more go-to market driven, it's more value driven. And so, if you sit in product management, every feature you release is the best feature ever, right? But product marketing really understands the value and how to apply to certain customers, what the use cases are, what the different profiles are and how you monetize that, and I feel like you kind of lose that lens sitting in the product management side.” – Johnny Cheng

“Once you have kind of that product marketing angle, that's where the magic happens, right? Because that feature could be worth $1 to this one segment and $10 to this other segment. You would never know unless you actually go find out what their pain points are, find out what their needs are.” – Johnny Cheng

People / Resources Mentioned:

• ClickUp: https://clickup.com/
• Marketo: https://business.adobe.com/products/marketo/adobe-marketo.html
• Gainsight: https://www.gainsight.com/
• Coupa: https://www.coupa.com/
• Selling Value: https://selling-value.com/
• Zoom: https://zoom.us/

Connect with Johnny Cheng:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jdcheng/
• Email: [e-mail]

Connect with Mark Stiving:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stiving/
• Email: mailto:[e-mail]