Hey, 👋 Scott from The Sales Mastermind here.

Today’s edition only takes 2 minutes.

When it comes to raising your standards, prices, or simply imposing requirements on buyers or customers, many sellers get stuck in their own heads and second-guess every decision.

It is easier to try and see what happens.

Storytime #1

There is a YouTube channel that I subscribe to on Patreon.com to access extra content.

(Patreon is a membership platform where superfans pay podcasters, video makers, and other creatives a monthly subscription fee to support their work. In exchange, creators provide extra perks like behind-the-scenes content, early releases, direct community interaction, and/or merchandise to their self-selected superfans.)

The two guys behind the channel run it as a side hustle to their physical store. Each week they release 6 videos across two YouTube channels, totalling ~2 hours of content. Plus a single Patreon exclusive video, which is ~10 mins or so.

With my accounting hat on, thinking about revenue, profits and hourly rates, I could never understand why they bothered to do so many videos only to get a couple of thousand views each (meaning less than $100 in YouTube ad money) and $200 that Patreon “superfans” send monthly. It never seemed like enough to bother.

Apparently they came to a similar conclusion recently, deciding to promote an offer to their Patreon superfans:

Upgrade to a new tier, pay annually, and they’ll send out some merch. Merch they already had made and were selling in the physical store.

In the space of 3 weeks, the Patreon money went from $200-ish to $603.90 when I checked last week.

And all it took was rebundling the offer to include some merch that they already had in the store and promoting it.

Storytime #2

A SaaS company I worked with charged a platform fee and a per-user fee.

It was a classic seat-based pricing model.

However, for the first 3? maybe 5? years, customers could add as many users as they wanted and we would only start billing them when we noticed. And sometimes not even then because we didn’t want to rock the boat.

I was unaware of this until we had a leadership meeting more than a year into my tenure. The Head of Marketing and I both argued that we needed to automate billing for additional seats as soon as possible.

The Head of Engineering and Founder both pushed back. They argued that it was a hard problem to solve. And they were right; it was fiddly to solve.

But the Head of Marketing and I pushed for the change as we both believed the incremental revenue would be worth it.

The change was made, and at first, nothing happened.

But soon enough, the leadership team started getting emails about once a day that a new user had been added and $600 ($50/m) or $960 ($80/m) would land in the company's bank account within 3-5 business days.

A year later, by requiring payment for new users upon addition, the business generated 13% additional incremental revenue from this single change.

That was a solid 6-figure increase in revenue from (effectively) zero extra work. Money that we’d been missing out on for years.

Ultimately, this newsletter is me giving you permission to raise your standards, or prices, or whatever you have known you need to increase for a while, and you’ll thank me in a month or a year.

Until next week,
Scott Cowley

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