Philipp Stelzer: Hello and welcome to another edition of the RevOps Lab podcast. I'm here together with Janis, and our guest today is Sebastian Voigt. Yes. And, it's a German name, so I pronounce it in the most German way I can. Sebastian, very warm welcome.

Sebastian Voigt: Yeah, thanks Philipp. But I have to correct you right away. It's a very weird German name which has an I in the middle, which is mute. So it's Voigt. When I say my name in English, I usually say Voigt because it's too hard to explain. But I guess you call me Sebastian anyway, and that's probably the easiest way.

Philipp Stelzer: Yeah. I know if we're like in Germany, we actually have to call you Mr. Voigt. And no. We'll skip all this. We'll keep it casual. So yeah, today we are here to talk about a topic that is pricing. I do have fond memories writing my master thesis about price discrimination. So really?

Janis Zech: Yes, it's a topic near the end. You should be interviewed here.

Philipp Stelzer: No, no. This was a long time ago. I barely remember anything.

Sebastian Voigt: No, that was a great topic, actually. I really enjoyed it.

Philipp Stelzer: But Sebastian, you are the expert. And I think just to get things started, can you briefly introduce yourself? Who are you? What do you do? And maybe most importantly, how did you become a pricing expert?

Sebastian Voigt: Yeah. So on the one hand side, it was purely coincidence, but somehow it feels also like fate. I feel like going back in time around about forty years ago, I always had fun in my mother's flower shop to see how she sells in terms of price. Because usually when we're talking SaaS, and that's probably what we do in the next half an hour, you have fixed rate cards, you have free packages, you may get a discount. But when you go into a flower shop, it's totally different. You go in there, you say, I need a, I don't know, a bunch of flowers for my wife, girlfriend, whoever, for Valentine's Day, anniversary, or other good reasons. And the first thing you'll be asked by the shop owner is, how much are you willing to spend? Or somehow they say, I could put this and that together, these kind of flowers. It's roundabout twenty five euro. Is that fine for you? And then you say, internally, you think, actually, I only wanted to spend twenty, but, yeah, twenty five is fine. And then she or he upsells you a little bit by adding some extra flowers here and there, and then you end up with thirty. And of course, at that time when I was seven and eight doing my homework in the flower shop and listening with one ear to what my mother was doing, I wasn't thinking about it like a pricing architect. But as I'm doing it now, I think it's excellent upselling, and it's a direct assessment of your customer's willingness to pay. Who comes in? Is he or she desperate? Does he or she needs to save her relationship? Or is he or she just looking for a small gift for going to a party? So depending on the car that is parked on the driveway, on the shoes that the customer is wearing, on the way he or she investigates the flowers and is talking, you assess an individual willingness to pay and are offering something in return. And I think when I realized this, how kind of perfect this was, I thought about, hey, that must be the start of my pricing career. And that was maybe the fate part. Going back to coincidence, I wrote my master's thesis as well on pricing, but I didn't choose it. But my PhD guy at the university gave it to me saying, hey, I have this idea. Somebody writing something on rebate systems. It was the year two thousand when Payback in Germany entered the market as a loyalty program, he wanted to investigate how effective these models were. And then I started basically researching on discount models and bonus models. And that's where it started. Then I went to another pricing consultancy called Simon Kutcher that everybody may know who has worked in the past with a pricing consultancy because they invented the whole business. But then after eight years, I wanted to see pricing in practice. I've done a lot of PowerPoint at that time, a lot of external models that never saw the light of day in the end in implementation. So I visited a few media and tech companies. I first worked with Bertelsmann. I worked with ProSieben where I led the mobile gaming business. Then I went to Axel Springer for years where I've set up a pricing team and have the luck of working with a lot of digital classifieds companies, media companies, and marketing models. And then I felt like somehow now I could be a better consultant than I've been a few years ago. And then I joined Hai, a Berlin based consultancy which at that time has been focused on digital transformation and innovation. I set up a pricing and sales excellence consulting team. And by now in my team, are around about twenty people. We advise all kinds of digital business models, mainly SaaS, mainly software, but also media and professional services and everything that can be sold digitally. That's forty five — not all, but I'm forty five years old, but twenty five years of pricing history in three minutes, probably.

Philipp Stelzer: Okay. Perfect. Yeah. Thank you so much for the introduction. I think you're right. I think for the sake of having a little bit of focus, at least, because the topic of pricing is pretty vast and I think matters a lot in the details, let's focus on software as a service. Let's focus on software sales. I think that makes sense. Maybe just to get things started there is like, how does a typical price consultation work? How do you run that when you work with a software company?

Sebastian Voigt: Yeah. I mean, the first thing is that probably the company or the investor in brackets — we are very often contacted initially by a private equity investor who is the majority shareholder of the company we're then advising. Of course, if we're talking SaaS, it's very often also in the VC space. But the first thing that often comes to us is we believe we have opportunities in pricing. Then I'm asking back, what kind of opportunities? What have you done in the past? Are you increasing your prices every year? Is your win-loss rate fluctuating from the past? Do you have a differentiated offering portfolio? How did your discounts evolve in the past? How are you positioned against your competitors? And by asking a few typical questions, what consultants usually do, you typically find out what you can do in pricing. If they don't have a clue, I don't do either before working with a company, you can do something explorative and explore more or less what the biggest opportunities are. Consultants call it an audit or an opportunity check. We call it opportunity check because audit is a bad word. Then we explore basically in a few weeks what opportunities are the biggest in terms of impact and that are easily enough to implement. Is it re-bundling your product? Is it looking at the right price metric? Is it performance driven? Does it have an upsell path? If you have maybe already different bundles, are they distributed equally or is everybody just buying the cheap option? So you usually find ten to fifteen pricing opportunities in a few weeks. You can make a case around it, a business case, quantify how much it's worth, and then benchmark it against all the numbers we have from other companies and then say, hey, Janis and Philipp, I think for Weflow you should do this and that and those. And then eventually the company implements it afterwards. But it also comes — people come to us and say, hey, we haven't increased our prices for the last three years. We've now built something new, new features, new bundles, new whatever, but we need a price point for it. And of course, that's the more, let's say, conservative approach. You have something that is set already. They know clearly what to do, they know clearly when they want to implement it, but they just need the missing piece. May it be the price level itself, may it be a bit broader, maybe a go to market strategy or an upsell strategy from existing customers to the new packages. And then we validate the pre-work that has been done, the hypothesis, and basically complement it with the missing pieces.

Janis Zech: Okay, got it. Yeah. I mean, would assume just out of curiosity, how much more complicated is it to work with a software company than, I don't know, let's say, like a typical company in retail? Because like when I think about software, you kind of like alluded to it a little bit in the beginning — a company starts, they have like price point A, but then in reality, there's like ten levels of discounts that are given. And then everything just over the couple of next years, when it turns from a startup into a scale up and grows, it just becomes more and more messy with all these different SKUs and the different prices around it and the discounts. It's often feels a bit random when you look at these price ranges that particularly SaaS companies offer. So just curious, is this a topic that is extremely hard to solve compared to other industries that you work with? Or is this more like a topic you cherish?

Sebastian Voigt: I do cherish it. So maybe again, historical background. I studied computer science and business administration. I always wanted to become a developer. Somehow I failed. Maybe the algorithms in my head weren't quick enough. I don't know. So I went basically on the commercial side of software development. And I think I understand how software is being developed, what the challenges are and how to commercialize it in the end. And I totally love the industry. I think also to a certain extent, it's easier in the software space compared to — you said e-commerce. If you're going to, I don't know, a random direct to consumer e-commerce company that has a thousand SKUs, it's so complicated because it's such a data driven game. To be honest, in software and SaaS, it's still a bit simpler. It's still a lot of more knowledge around, I don't know, product managers, sales managers who have an idea about what your customers want, what the willingness to pay is. They have usually three competitors. You can see on some aspects we are better than them, on some we are worse, so we can develop the strategy against competition. In the end, the decisions are easier to take. They have more magnitude — higher magnitude — than if you are working with an e-commerce company because you can test prices — you make, I don't know, for your online flower shop prices ten euro up, ten euro down, you can test the conversion rate and change it. For SaaS, of course, you can do it, but you also have more long term contracts. Right? You usually have twelve months contracts and you only have this one opportunity every year or every other year to really change something. So the magnitude of the importance of your price changes is bigger than, for example, in e-commerce. But nevertheless, we have very structured plans how you can reduce the uncertainty of different pricing decisions. For example, by doing mystery shopping in the software sphere, you can check is it only the price list online that you see or what discounts do you actually get if you ask for it? If you make up a story about why we need the software and what is the offer we can actually get? So I believe software pricing isn't as hard if you just consider the right processes.

Janis Zech: Yeah. What I find really fascinating is that you have a certain path dependency, right? You cannot probably increase your pricing by one hundred and fifty percent from one year to the next. Or, I mean, you could reduce it a lot, but if you had a hundred million and you basically cut it in half, right, you would probably, in the renewal cycle, lose a lot of your revenue. So there's certain path dependencies, and it should probably be thought of as a core pillar of your general go to market strategy. Right? That's also why we, I mean, wanted to have you here, because it is quite strategic actually.

Sebastian Voigt: Yeah. Totally. I mean, you said you cannot increase your prices by one hundred and fifty percent. And why not? Because your customers have reference prices in mind. So the reference price is always the basis that everybody uses for assessing if a price is good or not. If I go into a grocery store and I take out a bottle of milk, I probably have in mind that the price for a liter of milk is euro something. And if it's suddenly three euro, I would probably not buy it. Even if I was thirsty as, I don't know, somebody walking through the desert, I would just feel that it's unfair, thus I would not buy it. And the same is for your software product. If you have a monthly subscription price of one hundred and suddenly you double it to two hundred, people will say: are you kidding? Why the hell should I now pay double the price? Maybe your competitor charges two fifty, three hundred, four hundred. It doesn't matter. It's just an emotional, psychological trigger where when you see the price, it's not a rational decision saying, of course, value has increased, it's still good value for money compared to competitors. But it's this emotional factor that comes into play on the buyer side, you also have to consider. And it's a very important thing. Pricing is not science. It's a mix of strategy, of analytics, and also of psychology. And that's why you need to master all three things. And when you communicate a new pricing or a price increase or repackaging or whatever it is, in the end you always have to find a communication strategy that is persuasive and also appealing to customers. That's where you need to develop reference prices. I don't want to do too long a monologue here on this one, but that's also one of the reasons why you see in SaaS always the three packages. When you founded your SaaS company a few years ago, you maybe have one product, it's priced one hundred. Then if new features came up, you don't want to sell the old stuff anymore at a price of one hundred, but you also cannot double your price. So you create a second package, which is then the two hundred euro package. You may increase your prices by these acceptable twenty, thirty percent every year. You come to one twenty, but you feel you could do more. So you create the second package, which is worth or priced at two hundred. You may discount it to your loyal old customers from day one to, I don't know, one hundred sixty to somehow get more out of the customers, maybe not the thirty, but the sixty percent. But in the end, it's actually worth two hundred percent because you've invested so much into it. But you need to — again, now I'm at tactics — how do I discount it smartly? How do I differentiate it smartly? And this all is part of the game of designing a pricing strategy, and it's so much fun. I can tell you. There are so many tactics you can apply.

Janis Zech: I mean, I think you made a good point of why you're actually excited about this topic. In your experience, you know, what are kind of — what's the upside, right? What can you drive in terms of revenue contribution from a change in pricing strategy? What are you typically seeing? Can you share some ranges maybe?

Sebastian Voigt: Yeah. I also love this job of being a pricing consultant for digital services and software because it's so remunerative for our customers. I mean, at my good old times in the old consultancy, I priced health insurance products and concrete and logistics services. In the end, it was about optimizing the piece after the decimal point. And in software, especially in growing companies, the opportunities are so much bigger. It's usually we're talking twenty percent, we're talking thirty percent. And sometimes when you have an old but gold license and maintenance model that you turn into a SaaS based subscription model, then you are actually talking two point five times revenue. Working on this process of developing a great storyline, taking a good product into a modern cloud based subscription world and just turning the company or doubling and tripling the company's value with that — for me, it's heartwarming even though I'm helping mostly the shareholders and the CFO.

Janis Zech: Yeah. I mean, when you say that, I really have to think Microsoft, Autodesk, Adobe. Right? Like, I think there was this time of uncertainty. It's probably not all pricing. Right? But I think it's a change of distribution. Right? Whether you're a perpetual licenses business or a consumption business. Right? So it has many impacts, but yeah. So massive opportunity. That's maybe — you know, you see a lot of different companies. So what we'd love to do is go through what are the biggest levers. Right? Like, what are the biggest opportunities to improve your pricing and then as a result, also your go to market and revenue. And mistakes to avoid.

Sebastian Voigt: Yeah, mistakes to avoid. Yeah, both is great.

Janis Zech: But yeah, let's maybe go through those one by one.

Sebastian Voigt: Okay, let's maybe start with the opportunities or let's say the levers that you can look into when you're reviewing your pricing. And then I can try to find a few typical mistakes that are made along the way. When we're talking pricing, just to clarify this, we're not talking solely about the price point. Is it one hundred, one hundred twenty, one hundred thirty? Of course, it's one thing, but you first have to think about the entire price strategy. The first thing you should clarify for yourself and with all your team is what's actually your price strategy? What is our goal? Do we want to grow in volume? Do we want to grow in revenue? Do we want to grow in profitability? Do we want to be the good guys that are transparent and have website prices? Or do we want to be differentiated and opaque and are trying to squeeze out the last cent of each client? Are we working with all these tactical elements like discounts? Or do we ever want to have a one hundred percent stickiness to our price list? Do we want to have a packaging strategy, good, better, best, but with fixed bundles? Or do we want to be flexible that everybody can pick and choose every feature that they want to select? I guess when you set up these rules, the next step is then to determine out of our strategy and goals what the best model is. The best price model means, for example, what is the metric? If I decide that I want recurring revenues, stable budgets for my clients, then probably a, let's say, subscription based per seat model may be better than, for example, a consumption based per transaction model. But if you want to scale big time and you are in the AI business and you believe that computing power needed in the future will be more and more, then maybe you should choose a price metric that is scalable, like a per transaction pricing. I guess this — we have frameworks for that and feel free to write me an email. I guess there are show notes and everything how you can contact me, but then I can send it to you. But overall, coming from the strategy, business strategy, price strategy, price model, metric, packaging, then of course right price levels versus competition — there's a clear, let's say, execution of steps you should take in optimizing your pricing strategy. With it, for example, you can then have subtopics like what's my customer acquisition pricing? How do I get new customers in with free trial, freemium, low price? But then also within a clear upsell path — you said, Janis, a few minutes ago, you can only increase prices to a certain level because you have set this reference bar, and many founders and not only founders, but almost every company sets the bar too low at the beginning. Just win a price, just win a customer, even if it's zero euro, even if it's the first twelve months for free, we'll get them there at any point of time. But reality is it's hard to get somebody from zero to anywhere. So you need to have a clear upsell path. And there we have bundling come into play. I mentioned this good, better, best a few times — that everybody's using three packages usually so that everybody's buying the middle option. And then you have all these, let's say, tactical and psychological tactics that you're using, price anchoring, optimizing price distances, even and odd numbers, and so on. Then at a certain point of time, you have your perfect price model. But the thing is nothing lasts forever. Also not prices. You know, there's inflation. There are people wanting to make more money. So you also need to set up the process, getting improving on a consecutive level. You also need to establish a price improvement process. For example, how every twelve months we repeat this exercise, how do we optimize our pricing for our new customers, but also how do we increase, improve our prices for our existing customer base over time. And probably you cannot go plus thirty percent each year for every client. But for some, you can and you should. And there are others where you should hold your feet still. And I guess also there you need to have a good process to identify, to collect data — which customers you can improve in pricing over time and where maybe you shouldn't overdo it too much because you risk churn.

Janis Zech: Okay. This was a lot of stuff. I think a quite impressive list of things and levers you can do. I just want to share a real life example of what Philipp and I went through with regards to pricing Weflow. So, you know, if you look at our revenue intelligence platform, most of our players in the space, right, like if you look at Clari or Gong or BoostUp or so, right, they actually don't have transparent pricing on their website. But everybody knows they are quite expensive, I would say. Right? So the first thing we thought was, like, okay, can we cut their prices by fifty percent? Probably not. So where do we actually wanna be priced? We wanna be significantly more budget efficient because we think that's actually priced too high. Right? So this was like a strategic decision we took. And then, you know, in addition to that, we said, okay, like, typically, you need to buy different bundles. We also wanna offer bundles. But what we realized is that the buyers often also just wanna buy single products. Right? So activity capture, conversation intelligence, pipeline management forecasting — as single products, not as a bundle. And so what we realized is like, okay, we actually wanna bundle those products at a discount, but then you can also buy standalone those products to fix specific problems you have there. Right? And then, you know, this is obviously then also a question like, how do you go to market? Are you freemium? Are you product led? How do you exactly do it? Right? Do you offer free trials or not? Right? And so I think there's always the company perspective. Right? Like, okay, this is how we see it. And then there's the customer perspective. Right? What would be a great customer journey to go through? So you go from, you know, is this a potential option to this is actually the value I get out. Right? Like, more accurate forecasting or better deal execution or better win rates and so on. So I think, you know, this is all things that should be considerations in your pricing strategy. You know, obviously, we not only invited Sebastian here to share all his learnings, but also to help us with our pricing. No, just joking. But it's such an important topic. And so, I mean, if you think about the way you operationalize pricing, how is that typically done? Right? Like, because here, it's fairly simple. Like, Philipp and I, we sit down, we think about it, we do a deep write down, we go through different scenarios, we plan it out, we talk to customers. But like, if you're a hundred million company, right, is this the CEO turning around and saying, hey, we need to change pricing? Probably not. Like, what are the setups you typically see there?

Sebastian Voigt: So let's maybe start with the small company first, because usually pricing is the CEO's baby, right? When he or she or they found the company, they probably sit down and say, this should be our pricing strategy. They look on some websites at all the competitors that you just mentioned. You cut them by twenty percent so that you have an edge somehow against the incumbents and existing players and to also have a good communication on price. That's the typical story. Then success kicks in. You win customers probably with tremendous discounts because you want to get their logo on your website by all means. And it's more important than profitability on day one. You win investors, you grow. But later in time, you set up a larger sales team. And of course, it's not only the CEO or CEOs who have all the knowledge about customers in the initial validation phase, but there are more people knowing what works and what doesn't work. If you continue growing, you probably come to a certain, let's say, growth — I would say the critical growth is two hundred people — when you set up a pricing person. When you have actually somebody who is taking care not only about collecting knowledge, about collecting data, conducting research from time to time and setting up a pricing strategy, also conducting price tests, setting up discount guidelines and all the stuff that a pricing manager is doing. Also because it's here our target group, I guess, of the listeners, it can also be a RevOps function to a certain point. Collecting the data and individualizing offers, for example, because it's not only the classical website pricing, you're very transparent, but it can also be especially on the enterprise level, less transparent at that time. I guess at a certain point, and I guess it's one hundred, two hundred employees, the CEO is not the pricing decider anymore, but there will be pricing committees. There may be the chief revenue officer or, of course, CCO who's taking over the role. And then there's a larger audience internally deciding on pricing and price changes over time. And, of course, if the CEO or the internal team is sure about it, they do it internally. If they see that complexity is too high, if they see opportunity is great, then external people like me and my teams could come in to support on a temporary level to really ensure that the pricing strategy is solid.

Philipp Stelzer: Yeah, this is the part where I wonder, like, how would you — since we are RevOps based or RevOps focused podcast, curious just like how you've seen RevOps play a role here or has this not really been the case in your experience so far? What would you tell our listeners listening to this and hearing you talk about like, oh, yeah, twenty five percent increase in revenue, no problem. Obviously, this would be something that everyone wants to achieve and put on their resume and shine in front of the CEO. So what would you tell RevOps people? Like, how can they get involved? What do they need to do in order to set this whole thing up and really make this successful?

Sebastian Voigt: Yeah. Operationalize this plan. Yeah. I mean, I have to admit, of course, I'm talking from a consultant's perspective. Right? Usually, I get to know the people, work with them for, I don't know, between six weeks and six months. And then unfortunately out of the business and only get very limited information about how it's being implemented, how successful it was. But yeah, most people still talk to me after the project, so it mustn't be too bad. So I would say, when we come in, very often the project is initiated — a pricing project — by C-level. Somehow the salespeople, they are all against it because pricing is a very tough market and there's no lever we have to improve. We try our best to find out if it's true. We check competition. We do mystery shopping. We do workshops with the sales team and so on. And in this — I call it sales team on purpose — RevOps is not always on the table, to be honest. I think it's a fifty-fifty thing. But I've seen their value, especially in, let's say, turning these often consultant impulses into reality and then also creating processes out of it. Let me do one example. We've worked for a — I have to be careful not to disclose too much. Let's call it a media company who are sending out newsletters. And in these newsletters, they were selling advertisements. So this newsletter is sponsored by Bridgit. And it was basically direct sales of newsletter advertisement spaces. And they were expensive. It was like six digits for a single one week newsletter. And what we basically said is, wow, you have newsletters that are sold out all the time. Some have a very low utilization. Some you have to discount heavily. Others work very great, some newsletters are growing swiftly, others are stagnating. Basically, out of this data, you should create a scorecard for your pricing. If something is — for example, it was at that time where the Ukraine war started, all security aspects of this media company were skyrocketing. Everybody subscribed to it. We said, you need to develop a framework to see if a newsletter's topic kicks off or lifts off, that you should raise your prices not only in twelve months, but instantly. With RevOps, we sat together and said, how can we operationalize this together? And we created a scorecard with four different factors, which was like kind of a hotness of the topic, subscriber development, then we had the utilization rate and so on. And then they created a process which in the end did not only set up the process, but also reviewed the data every six weeks. And every six weeks, RevOps made a suggestion basically to the sales team how the new prices for the next six weeks should be. So right, we come up with this idea, with this concept that we've seen a hundred times. The RevOps team at that time took over and made a suggestion about the process, how to make it real life. Basically, they took the lead about the entire pricing process, advising the sales team afterwards what the pricing should be for the next six weeks consecutively. And that, I believe, gave RevOps the opportunity to shine because, I mean, in the end, the project made, I don't know, twenty percent more revenues in this case. The RevOps lady in this case was the owner of the process. I think it helped her to get more exposure to C-level, to work with sales on a success story, and also gave her more reputation in the company. So, yes, it should be involved. Definitely.

Janis Zech: Yes. I think it's very interesting. I mean, we talked about, for example, board meetings, right, how RevOps can help prepare and also sometimes even sit in them as observers. Right? Like, that depends on the company size. I think pricing is another of those topics where you typically have kind of the CRO, the CFO, the product people, probably the marketing people, and ideally also RevOps on board. And I think one thing is kind of the voice of the customer. Right? Like, really understanding what are the things — like the packaging — by going through the kind of unstructured core data, trying to understand, okay, like, where are the drop off points, right? Like, if you think of three bundles, right, typically you bundle certain things into the higher plans so that people migrate to the higher plan or to the middle plan depending on what you optimize for. Right? So really understanding this, thinking about this from a customer point of view, I think is very, very interesting. And then I'm pretty sure you could also run AB tests, right, and different tests to think about that further and get some hard data on it. But yeah, I mean, I think this is a topic that is just a strategic topic on the go to market part. And, of course, right, if there's no interest in that, then probably better not to be in those meetings. But I generally believe that it's a great opportunity to have a seat at the table. And then, I mean, obviously, all the operationalization goes also into the CPQ. But I think this is more like the nitty gritty part afterwards. Right? I think it's really — you wanna make sure that you inform the general pricing and packaging discussion because that's where the potential levers are probably the highest, I would assume.

Sebastian Voigt: But but here I have to say — hey, dear audience, when you listen to that podcast to minute thirty six now, how can you not be interested in pricing? Because I mean, it's your — no, not because of what I'm saying, I mean your goal, your job description is basically to improve revenues, right? And I think pricing is the most effective lever you have at hand. There's this 1980s — I don't know whether it comes from a book or calculation, I think it came from Hermann Simón, the pricing pope himself — saying: if you increase your sales prices or reduce costs by ten percent, you make the calculation, pricing always has the most effective impact on your profitability. So with pricing, I believe it's easier to increase prices by ten percent than, I don't know, cutting ten percent in costs or even increasing ten percent in volume. Maybe for us both works well, but it's the most effective and efficient profit lever you have. So if you can contribute to that as a RevOps person in pricing, I think you can get your salary back very quickly. Don't tell that to the government — I'm not sure if I would prefer the government increase prices by ten percent instead of reducing costs by ten percent.

Janis Zech: But no, I hear you. And I think I'm fully with you. I think the pricing is maybe one of the most creative ways to really grow a company because, like you said in the beginning, it's a great mix. It's numbers. There is a science aspect to it, but there is also a lot of psychology around it that is truly fascinating. Thank you so much, Sebastian. I think this was a really, really, really fun episode. Enjoyed it a lot and brought back some good memories.

Sebastian Voigt: Fun. Yeah. So it's a business podcast here.

Janis Zech: Yeah. Can be a little bit of fun. And one fun thing we always save for last, and that is a book recommendation from our guests. So, Sebastian, curious, what's one book that you would recommend to our audience today?

Sebastian Voigt: Yeah. I mean, there are so many pricing books out there and some of them are actually fun. I enjoyed reading for the second time a few months ago Predictably Irrational from Dan Ariely. It's not a pricing book, but Dan Ariely, a fascinating Israeli semi-American professor who is looking at all the flawed decisions we are kind of taking, especially buying and business decisions, by showing how also different pricing tactics work. I mentioned good, better, best. I mentioned price anchors. He was making — it's a bit older, I think it's like twenty years old, the book — a