How I used mystery shopping to find out we were too cheap | Hamzah Hafesji (Advanced)

Street Pricing with Marcos Rivera

Welcome to Street Pricing, the only show where proven SaaS (Software as a Service) leaders share their mindset and mistakes in pricing so we can all stop guessing and start growing. Street Pricing is hosted by Pricing I/O CEO and Pricing Coach, Marcos Rivera, sought after slayer of bad pricing. With 20 years of pricing expertise, he has helped price over 200 SaaS products and coached over 100 SaaS CEOs and counting. From the streets of the Bronx to CEO, Marcos wants to take the guessing out of pricing.

Today’s guest is Hamzah Hafesji who is Group Product Manager at Advanced.

Hamzah talks about a talent management product that was started in 2017. (3:23) The challenge he faced was going from a start-up strategy to scaling up and having the right pricing for the packages. They needed to look at the pricing and packaging and they did mystery shop exercises on the competition. (6:26) Using all the information they collected they went to a “Good, Better, Best” model.

Hamzah tells Marcos how they went and did their mystery shopping exercise. (12:27) They used an employee who had given his notice to leave the company. That person went and inquired about pricing, packages, and other companies’ different strategies. They had a lot of data.

They wanted to position themselves as the premier product. (14:41) Hamzah talks about his biggest challenge, which was talking with the sales team about the new pricing. Hamzah felt that with any change initiative, the go-to-market execution is super important. His one takeaway from this is “selling value is not just the price point, you’ve got to think about the entire piece of your value change.” (18:09)

Advanced published their pricing and completely focused on value articulation. (18:55) Hamzah discusses many teams in the company were nervous about publishing their pricing but was a great success.

Hamzah talks about his hopes for the future at Advanced, specifically product-led growth. (22:10)

Marcos and Hamzah close out the show by discussing Hamzah’s favorite song growing up “Can I Kick It?” by A Tribe Called Quest.

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