Last week I had a blast talking to founders and customer success leaders at an Atlanta Tech Village workshop.

The topic?

Customer success at startups, of course!

Want to get in on the fun? Here is the FULL SLIDE DECK with a bulleted summary below.

Not included: cheesy jokes and outstanding audience questions!

Your Customer Success Blueprint

At 1 Customer…

What Is Your Customer’s North Star?

• Seek a deep understanding of your customer’s pain, motivation, and what they get measured on.
• Build your product around this! (Duh. 😂)

What Customer Experience Will You Deliver?

• Start thinking about this now!
• Consider customer preferences, market standards, and competitive advantages.

Tools For Growth

• Start a support@company.com email
• #support Slack channel
• Talk to your customers!!!

At 10 Customers…

Your First Customer Success Hire

• What to look for & how to assess candidates
• It’s hard to go wrong with smart, positive generalists.

Tools For Growth

• Playbooks (TEMPLATE)
• Simple is great.
• Internal playbooks become customer resources and training tools.
• Slack channel for each customer
• Customer Service 101 Training Deck (TEMPLATE)
• Talk to your customers!!!

At 100 Customers…

Team Specialization

• Generalists become Support, Implementation, Account Management, and more.

Upgrades and Renewals - Sales or Customer Success?

• A timeless quandary worthy of its own post. 😉

Core Values

• Define them now if you haven’t already.
• Hire well, stay aligned, make decisions quickly, and deliver a consistent customer experience!

Tools For Growth

• CRM
• Help Desk/Support Ticketing
• Bonus
• Knowledge Base or Wiki
• Idea Exchange for Product Suggestions
• TALK TO CUSTOMERS!!! (Are you noticing a trend? 😁😁😁)

What tools, strategies, or systems work well for early customers? Any early stage customer challenges The O’Daily should cover?

Want More?

• Your Customer Success Starter Pack
• 6 Keys To Planning Your Customer Success Hiring
• 3 Customer Onboarding Stages To Prepare For As You Grow
• 1 Tweak To Massively Increase Customer Adoption

When Pardot was acquired by Salesforce, we worked with Salesforce’s pricing strategy department to update our packages.

These folks knew their shit!

We were doing pretty well considering pricing wasn’t our day job. We had a strong foundation and we evolved our packages based on learnings and market shifts.

But nothing beats learning from experts.

Apparently when you get an MBA in pricing strategy and then do pricing strategy all day every day for multiple products, you know a thing or two.

The final product was great, of course. But seeing their process was eye-opening too.

Here’s how the pricing gurus at the world’s largest SaaS company conduct pricing research. (And how you can apply these techniques at your startup today!)

3 Research Steps of the Pricing Pros

1. Analyze customer usage.

We gave the pricing strategy team a huge download of data:

• What components and features were allowed in each package
• What components customers were actually using (and how much)
• How many of each type of user
• Price for that usage (we had a mix of legacy pricing plans)

They did fancy spreadsheet things to learn:

• What things did customers use the most
• What things did customers not use
• When did people most often hit their usage limits
• Possible “breakpoints” for future packaging

Sounds obvious in hindsight but with a small team of generalists (early stage startups don’t hire pricing strategists 😂), we were usually putting out fires or working off of good instincts.

Startup Tip: Thinking about a pricing revamp? Take a look at current customer usage data to spot trends and insights. Keep it lightweight or partner with a local MBA class that looks for “real” business projects to work on.

Bonus: Analyzing customer usage data can also provide roadmap guidance. What should you invest in? What should you end-of-life because no one uses? What could be a good path to upsells?

2. Talk to customers. Talk to sales and customer success.

In addition to the data, the pricing strategy team gathered anecdotal info on:

• What customers valued in the sales process
• What customers valued when they used the product

This was particularly important because at this point, we didn’t have much feature differentiation between packages. We had 3 pricing tiers (mostly) based on usage amounts.

We needed info on what features could incentivize an upgrade.  

Startup Tip: Gather info from the front lines especially if there are gaps in data. Pricing models include qualitative and quantitative input. Listen for what functionality is most valuable, not just “how much” something is being used.

3. Look at competitor offerings.

Stalking, I mean, researching competitors is an area where we aligned with the top pricing strategists 😁

• The sales team knew competitor pricing inside and out, including what features or pricing could put a deal at risk.
• We had recorded lost deal data for years to track which competitors we lost to and why. (Shout out Derek Grant, VP Sales & SaaS scaling pro!)

The pricing gurus collected this info, looked at it holistically, and used it to determine a competitive updated offering.

Startup Tip: Add two “Lost Deal” fields to your CRM - “Reason for Loss” and “Vendor Selected.” Same for customer attrition. It’s a light lift but invaluable data.

Skip the MBA and F500 acquisition. The O’Daily is here to cherry pick the low hanging pricing strategy fruit for you. 😉

These are relatively simple tactics that can provide big value today and long term.

Curious about the output of this research? Here’s the learnings from the final product.

What other research has honed your pricing strategy? Have you borrowed any big company strategies and applied them to your startup pricing?

Oh Hello, Pricing Experts

When Pardot was acquired by Salesforce, we were fortunate to get the chance to work with some of the top pricing strategists in software!

We had a pretty solid pricing base:

• 3 pricing tiers, following the model of Good, Better, Best
• Our revenue grew as customers were more successful
• Customers easily understood our pricing
• Pricing packages and levers had evolved as the industry did

But when you have a chance to learn from the best, you do it!

And when you have a chance to share these learnings on the O’Daily, you do it!

Here are the top 4 lessons I learned from the world’s best software pricing strategists.

4 Game-Changing Pricing Tips From Top Strategists

1. Include feature differentiation.

The top mind-blowing lesson I learned from the pricing ninjas at Salesforce is this:

PUT THINGS PEOPLE WANT INTO HIGHER TIERS!! 🤯🤯🤯

Sounds obvious, right? Lord knows, we’re used to it in other areas.

Spotify’s paid version has 12 features I don’t care about. But I really, really, really like to download songs to my phone. Here’s $13/mo, you cagey Spotify pricing ninjas.  

It’s brilliant. It’s annoying. It’s highly effective.

In Pardot Pricing v.1, we differentiated mostly on usage. If you sent a lot of emails or needed lots of forms, you’d be on the Enterprise Plan.

In Pardot Pricing v.Ninja, we included desirable, advanced functionality in higher tiers. So even if you didn’t send a high volume of emails, if you wanted specialized email testing, you’d move to a higher plan.

BOOM. More feature value at each pricing tier. Makes sense, right? You may even be asking, “Why didn’t those silly Pardashians do this earlier?”

Here’s the thing: you can’t do this on Day One. You literally don’t have enough features yet 😂

You also don’t know what people value most. Keep pricing simple while you focus on customer growth and adoption. Once you have good traction and a robust feature set, it’s time for this Jedi pricing move!

Startup Tip: As your company and the market matures, keep an eye out for ways to evolve your pricing that encourages meaningful differentiation between tiers. People understand and expect to pay more for additional value and advanced functionality.

2. Move customers off of legacy pricing.

As a scrappy, customer-focused startup, we honored all legacy pricing and packaging. We loved offering this and customers appreciated it.

It was also a huge mess behind the scenes!

What made it complicated:

• Keeping up with a database of all pricing package details and related upgrade options ever offered.
• Tracking 10-12 different pricing packages within the CRM and the app.
• Onboarding new team members to this complex process. We had a new hire every few weeks!
• Confusing for clients since “their” pricing wasn’t on the website.

Salesforce showed us a simpler way:

1. Move everyone to a modern day plan.
2. Give an appropriate blanket discount to honor previous pricing.

Instead of being on the $500 package from 2009, a customer would be on the 2015 package with a 50% discount. All of the customer service feels, none of the time-intensive administration or frustration.

Another way that also works:

1. Customer can stay on their legacy plan.
2. If they upgrade, they move to current plans and current pricing.

Startup Tip: How can you keep pricing and packaging as simple as possible on the backend? Do you have any legacy plans that can convert to newer plans?

3. Skip the small stuff.

As part of the pricing revamp, we retired very small upgrade options.

We started these in the early days when upgrades of any size were exciting and worth it.

We were finally large enough that it didn’t make sense to do really small upgrades, especially since it was handled manually by a busy team. But we had done $50 upgrades for so long, we didn’t realize we had outgrown it!

The Salesforce pricing ninjas pointed out that customers could upgrade to the next tier or work within the limits.

It was a huge time savings that let teams focus on more strategic conversations and initiatives.

Startup Tip: Are there any pricing practices that you’ve outgrown or aren’t worth the effort?

4. Increase prices.

If pricing gurus don’t raise prices, are they even pricing gurus??!!?? 🤔

When something increases the value of your offering – like the largest SaaS company in the world backing you – your price should go up!

Before Salesforce, we were usually 80-90% the cost of our larger competitors. After Salesforce, we were a large competitor. Our updated pricing reflected this.

Startup Tip: Be aware of market conditions, product development, or other factors that warrant a price increase. Regular price increases are an important part of company growth and value confirmation.

Cheat Codes

At Pardot, we learned from Salesforce, an enterprise software company 20 years ahead of us. It was a gift that accelerated our growth much faster than if we had learned it on our own.

Now, you have the cheat codes too! All the pricing knowledge of a F500 acquisition and top pricing strategy team in only 4 bullet points. 😉

Next week, we’ll dive into the pricing research and analysis that happened behind the scenes. The insights will be helpful now and lay a strong foundation for future optimization.

Savvy pricing is an important tool for growth. Small tweaks can make a big impact! 🚀

What pricing strategies have you learned from more experienced companies or teams? Any pricing changes that seemed obvious in hindsight?

Pricing Evolution in the Wild

Last week, we talked about the 4 key components of your startup pricing strategy.

This week, we’ll see what pricing strategy looks like in a real startup.

Here is the real life pricing evolution of Pardot — as told by the pricing page archives — a B2B Saas company with explosive growth that is now part of Salesforce.

I joined as employee #9 and launched and lead the Customer Success Management team. As CSMs, we were on the front lines of pricing, handling customer upgrades, renewals, and attrition.

Join me for a trip down pricing memory lane with strategy, pros and cons, and the behind-the-scenes details.

February 2009

Setting the Stage:

We’re at 80 customers, 3 pricing tiers, and customers upgrade when they need more users.

“Available” broken image = ✅
See full February 2009 pricing page here.

What’s Working:

• Good, better, best pricing tiers.
• 95% of customers sign up for Professional or Enterprise. The limitations of the Group tier (no email or CRM connectors) naturally move buyers towards Professional while still offering an entry level for budget-conscious customers.
• Simplicity.
• Put it on a credit card, no annual contract.
• Month-to-month contracts help sell early customers before you have a track record.
• “We win your business every month” and “Low risk to try us out” are common sales talking points.
• Our target customers understand user-based pricing because of software tools like Salesforce and Netsuite.
  

What’s Not Working:

• User based pricing = customers are incentivized to not add others users to keep costs down.
• This hurts overall adoption.
• Ideally pricing aligns with customer value and encourages deeper usage. We fix this soon. 😉
• Limits on components like forms, landing pages, and analytics result in small upgrade requests (for those items only) which are hard to track and not much revenue.

Pricing v.1 works (among many other things like authentic demand and product market fit)! Pardot is growing quickly. Which leads us to Pricing v2…

March 2010

Setting the Stage:

We have a couple hundred customers now. We’re pricing primarily off of email usage (users are unlimited). The market is heating up. We’ve raised prices and offer an annual prepay discount in addition to monthly pricing.

“Available” broken image = ✅

See full March 2010 pricing page here.

What’s Working:

• Email as a pricing lever aligns much better with customer value.
• Unlimited users = encourages adding sales users, more marketing users, and giving execs access to reporting. Product “stickiness” improves.
• Get 30k emails for $1000/mo or get 3x more emails for only 50% more in dollars ($1500/mo) → value-based pressure to move to Enterprise.
• Pricing Strategy 101.
• It works.

What’s Not Working:

• Email sending and contact storage (# of emails in customer’s database) are the two most expensive technical costs. If a customer has a small database but sends a TON of emails, we could lose money.
• Only “feature” differentiator between Professional and Enterprise is the amount of stuff you get. There’s no advanced product functionality at Enterprise to encourage customers to upgrade.

Meanwhile, competitors are starting to charge on database size…

March 2013

Setting the Stage:

Pardot has been acquired by Exact Target! (Nine months later Exact Target will be acquired by Salesforce.) The customer count is around 4 digits. Selling into enterprise accounts has begun. Pricing scales to capture value (and budget) of larger accounts. It increased to match the current market rates and the product advancement. Way more product feature offerings than v.1!

And as predicted, we now price on database size instead of emails.

See full March 2013 pricing page here.

What’s Working:

• Database pricing.
• Pardot followed this market trend and updated accordingly.
• Pricing is more closely aligned with customer value. A customer’s marketing improves because of Pardot → more leads → Pardot account grows.
• Annual contracts.
• These are the norm now. Paid annually or quarterly.
• Maturity and social proof in the market make annual contracts easy.
• Many buyers are repeat users, marketing automation consultants are a thing (and recommend us), and we have lots of customer case studies, references, and reviews.
• Bye bye, Group tier.
• Still 3 tiers but the Group juice was not worth the squeeze.
• The “Ultimate” tier was added as Pardot moved upmarket.

What’s Not Working:

• Differentiation between tiers.
• The difference between pricing tiers is still primarily usage-based (e.g. 50 landing pages → unlimited landing pages).
• Ideally there are functionality-based reasons to upgrade also (e.g. get advanced email features in Ultimate only).  

Where Is Pardot Pricing Today?

When Pardot was acquired by Salesforce, we worked with some of the top SaaS software pricing strategists in the world to further iterate on the pricing tiers and offering.

Stay tuned for the next installment of The O’Daily where we dive into the ultra-advanced, Navy Seal-esque learnings of pricing strategy at a F500 level!

Any great startup pricing case studies to share? Any fun screen grabs or stories from the pricing “early days” of a company’s history?

How Should You Price Your Product?

Startup pricing is both art and science. Many companies have 5, 10, even 20 iterations.

As you grow, build out your offering, and the market develops, your pricing model will evolve.

So where do you begin? What should you anchor on when thinking about the right pricing for your company, product, and market?

Here are 4 key considerations to nail your startup pricing strategy!

These principles will guide you on Day 1, Day 1000, and through all the pricing mistakes learnings along the way.

4 Key Considerations For Great Pricing

1. Alignment With Customer Value

• What is your customer measured on? What do they care about and does your pricing show understanding of that?
• As customers get more value, do you make more money?

Test It

Imagine your largest customer is so happy they want to increase their usage by 10x. Yay! What would their total spend look like? What are the margins for you?

Another Fun Thought Experiment

I heard this pricing framework recently and loved it!

IBM expects to pay $1 million for a B2B software. If IBM buys your product, how will they pay $1 million?

(Sorry, IBM. Secret’s out 😉)

2. Simplicity

• Is the pricing easy for customers to understand?
• Is pricing easy to implement and track within the app?
• Is pricing predictable (e.g. not hugely variable or requiring custom calculations) for you and customers?
• Can customers put it on a credit card, charged monthly? (Avoid lawyers and procurement!)
• Is it easy to manage on your end with minimal invoicing, collections, or variation from client to client?  

Simplicity is hard but worth it. It’s better to leave a little money on the table than get bogged down with administration and management of complicated pricing. Simplicity speeds up the sales cycle too!

3. Cost To You (aka COGS - Cost of Goods Sold)

• What are your costs? What are the largest technical expenses? Any other costs to consider like customer support reps needed?
• Does the price increase as your costs increase?

Here’s what you don’t want: a customer paying $100/mo with hosting fees of $1000/mo. Or customer paying $100/mo that needs 3 support reps to manage their tickets. Sooooo, yeah. Avoid stuff like that.

4. Industry Norms

• How are customers used to thinking about pricing for similar products?
• What budget line items already exist?

New Kid #ProTip

If you are on the forefront of innovation or creating a new market, it may help to align with an established budget item to start out.

We saw this at Pardot. Marketers understood “email marketing” costs before they had a “marketing automation” budget. To start, pricing was based around monthly emails sent, just like an email marketing tool.

Another great example comes from the world of robotic mowers. Lawn care companies are used to paying for workers during mowing season but not accustomed to paying for a year-round Saas software. Voila! The “robotic worker” line item that is billed during mowing season only.

Can Pricing Be Perfect?

Pricing is complicated and requires thoughtful tradeoffs and balance. There’s a reason large software companies have whole departments for pricing strategy!

The right pricing today will probably be wildly different than the right pricing next year. Like with all things at startups, pricing is a journey.

Test, learn, and improve as you go!

Startup Pricing Is Hard

Think you’re the only startup with pricing growing pains? Fear not, my friend.

Packaging and pricing at a startup is messy.

Here are 6 true stories of pricing mixups, muddles, and missteps.

I lived to tell the tales. And you will too.

6 Hilarious But True Stories About Startup Pricing

1. New Features For All.

We rolled out a new feature that was only for clients on our highest pricing tier. **BUT** we didn’t have tech built to lock the feature down. So the next feature we rolled out was pricing tier feature enforcement. 😂

Silver lining – we had a few clients like the new feature so much, they upgraded to keep it.

2. Zero Discounts.

We noticed a customer was getting quite a bit of functionality for a rather small price. After checking the contract, we understood why. There was a zero missing on the final price tag. 🤦‍♀️

Our process for making contracts was that a sales rep would copy a beautified Google Doc, adjust the pricing and package details, and send to the customer as a PDF.

I can’t imagine how a mistake could have happened! 🤔

NOTE: This is a totally legit, very common way to do contracts early on. It rarely makes sense to have a fancy automated contracting tool when you’re getting started or the sales team is <10 people.

3. Sky’s the Limit.

Our pricing plans had usage limits…but no way to limit usage within the app.

Customers would go over their limit and we’d find out because they’d tell us or we’d manually check their account. Then we’d have a conversation and draw up paperwork for an upgrade that could be as small as a $10/mo.

Only much (much much) later did we add warning limits, minimum bundle amounts, and an in-app upgrade feature so customers could buy more on the fly.

4. Well, This Is Awkward.

We found out a customer was over their usage limits…because it crashed our app. ‘Nuff said.

5. Never Ever Do One-Off Pricing.

We had a well-known, enterprise customer who wanted special pricing. Now, everyone knows that one-off, ad-hoc pricing is a huge no-no. Terrible idea, say the startup and pricing gurus. And yet, when the check is big enough…

Every month, we’d request a data pull from the engineering team, put it into a spreadsheet, do lots of math, make it beautiful, and send it to the customer.

BOOM. Technology at work 😉

NOTE: While one-off, manually-executed pricing is hilarious/terrible, it can be a legitimate way to test a new pricing model and make money while doing so. Just make sure it’s a test and not the new standard.

6. Thanks for the Pricing Help!

We had recently updated our pricing packages. A customer was increasing their usage and wanted to upgrade to the next package. Going through the upgrade process, the customer pointed out that it was cheaper to stay on their current package with add-ons than upgrade to the next tier.

Oops! Glad we had a customer who was good at math to point out that our new packages didn’t make sense. 🙃

Happily Ever After

These stories have a happy ending. The startups involved were not laid low by pricing snafus. They have all gone on to tremendous success.

Was it because of their perfect pricing strategy?

Ummmm. No comment. 😂

Was it because they moved fast, cared about their customers, solved a huge problem, and learned from their mistakes?

Most definitely.

Are you going through contract or packaging growing pains? Any hilarious pricing stories to share?

Today, I’m sharing another simple yet game changing concept from the brilliant Francis Cordón.  

It can (and should!) be used at any company stage. Your sales team will love it. Your customers will love it. It becomes a key metric for the customer success department. And you’ll know exactly where and when you’re delivering value to your customer.

Behold…the Customer Win Slide!

What is a Customer Win Slide?

• A simple one slide summary of a quantifiable “win” that a customer experienced while using your product or working with your company.
• A member of the customer success team helps uncover the win and documents it.
• It’s stored in an easily shareable format (ahem, like a slide deck) so it can be referenced and used across the company for sales, marketing, product insights, and more.

What are the components of a Customer Win Slide?

1. Company name

• Uh, pretty self explanatory here.

2. Short description that summarizes the company without using their name

• e.g. “$18B Public Market Cap Saas Data Platform” or “$400m Women’s Luxury Fashion Retailer”
• Explain it in a way that resonates with your ideal customer or addresses frequently asked questions like, “Do you have any international customers?” or “Do you have other small businesses like us?”
• Someone can easily delete company name to share this slide anonymously while preserving the company context

3. Picture of the win

• Ideally a screenshot from within your product that shows the win data!
• Less ideal but workable is data from within the customer’s organization - hiring info, revenue report, other key info related to your company’s impact
• A picture is worth a thousand words - MUST HAVE VISUAL EVIDENCE!

4. Summary - with numbers - of the win

• “Page load time decreased by 50% after identifying 3rd party tags”
• “Revenue per order increased by 15% within 30 days of implementing SolutionABC”
• Another option is to highlight one of the main value drivers of your product (see “Real World Examples” below)

What makes a great Customer Win Slide?

1. It aligns or directly ties in with your users’ North Star metric.

• If it doesn’t, why not?
• Does the customer success team need to uplevel their conversations?
• Does the product need more reporting for ROI and North Star metrics?

2. A customer can share the win with their boss’s boss.

• Sometimes a customer will share a win with you. You’ll document it into a win slide. This is a big win for them:
• Look at what I did that our vendor thought was worth sharing.
• Here’s a simple, visually appealing summary of my impact (...that our awesome vendor put together for me).
• Other times, you’ll find the win on behalf of your customer and share it with them! When you summarize it to them, make it an easily forwardable communication (email, slide, landing page) so they can share it with their boss, their boss’s boss, and beyond.

Why are Customer Win Slides so amazing?

• The database of wins continually grows.
• Scalable format and process.
• Small (only one slide) but mighty!
• Sales can easily use in pitch decks or send to customers as a reference. No need to ask, “Do you have an example of a customer who…?”, which is time consuming for all.
• A meaningful, trackable data point for customer success (# of new Customer Win slides per quarter) beyond renewal dollars or usage metrics.
• Can execute with a team of 1 or 100.
• Improves customer understanding of your value.
• Makes users look like heroes internally and externally.
• It’s more than a customer review. It’s evidence that your solution WORKS.
  

Real World Examples

Rigor is the OG of Customer Win Slides. Here are two examples.

Laudable does a super cool video-first, digital option with micro-testimonials on a landing page.

Build Your Own

Work on your first Customer Win today! Here’s a Customer Win Slide Template to get you started.

Want more customer success genius from Francis Cordón? Find his customer success overview podcast here and detail on his North Star metric concept here.

Do you do Customer Win Slides? What other strategies have you used to identify and share the success of your customers?

The Art of No

The O’Daily has been dropping a lot of k-NO-wledge lately: how to decide if something is a yes or no and how to actually say no.

We saved the best for last. The pin-no-cle. Grand fi-no-le. A culmi-no-tion. (Ok, I’m done.)

Today we talk about how to say no to your boss…or anyone else who materially impacts your livelihood and well-being and you don’t want to piss off!  

Your boss mentions a project, asks you to own something, sends over an event for you to attend. Everyone’s familiar with this scenario.

The reality is sometimes a direct “no” isn’t a good option. Here’s what I like to do instead.

3 Steps To Say No When It Matters Most

1. Ask about priorities.

Put this request in the context of the other work you’re doing help the company. Explain what you’re currently working on and ask how the new item compares to those items.

Ways To Say It:

Here are the top 3 items I’m working on right now.

List items + relevant dates. Explain why.

Where does <thing you just mentioned> land related to those?

You may find that your boss is brainstorming, thinking about something 6 months from now, or realizes this project is not important compared to other things you’re working on.

Or they may say that it’s the #1 priority. That’s cool. Proceed to Step 2…

2. Clarify timing and scope.

A “time sensitive” request could mean minutes or weeks. A “report” could be a Google Doc or might be a polished slide deck with hours of research. Make sure you understand what your boss is thinking regarding the amount of work and when.

Ways To Say It:

How quickly do we need this?

Does next week work or do you need it sooner?

Will it include XYZ, only ABC, or something else?

Once you know the extent of the new priority, it’s time for Step 3…

3. Align on tradeoffs.

Get super clear on what will not get done and get agreement from your boss on that plan. Including recommendations on how to rearrange can be helpful and show leadership.

Know your audience though. Some bosses do better with open ended questions and directly crafting the solution.

Ways To Say It:

I’ll push Project A to next week so we can tackle Project B this week - does that work?

Do you have thoughts on how to decrease Project C to keep it on time with the new items? One idea is XYZ.

How should we reprioritize things?

What should we cut? I’d recommend A or B. What do you think?

Your boss has helped you shape the new plan. No one ever had to no. You simply reprioritized, adjusted scope, and changed timelines. Woohoo!

But what if…

If you consistently get wishy-washy answers like

• “Get it all done.”
• “Everything is a priority.”
• “You figure it out.”

Guess what? Your boss needs to work on their ability to say no! (Or not be a workaholic jerk.) They are not clear on priorities or unable to say no. The lack of focus is overflowing to you.

Is this an issue across the organization or unique to your boss? A one-time exception or ongoing problem? Analyze the situation to see if it’s something you can change, live with, or need to move on from.

BONUS: 2 More Ways To Use This Prioritization Technique

1. With Customers

Two common customer scenarios where you can discuss priorities instead of saying no:

• Product roadmap discussions
• Project management planning or timelines

Customers often have great ideas that you hadn’t considered. It’s also enlightening when talking about tradeoffs to find out what they don’t care about.

2. For Your Own Clarity

I’ve used this framework when I’ve bitten off too much and need an outside perspective to help me reign things in.

Can you look at this list of projects and share thoughts, based on what you see in the business, on what I can drop or move to next quarter?

Rigor CEO Craig Hyde could sort out in 10 minutes what I’d been agonizing over for a week.

It Works!

Most startup CEOs and leaders are creative and ambitious, which leads to lots of ideas, projects, or improvements.

When you dig in with an organized, collaborative approach, it’s quick and painless to discern what matters. No “no” required!

I’ve used this technique successfully hundreds of times with leaders and CEOs and have encouraged my teams to use it with me.

How have you said no to a boss before? What has worked or not worked? Share your learnings!

‍

The Hardest Part of No

Saying no is an incredibly important life and business skill. Once you decide whether or not to say no, the real test happens.

Can you follow through and communicate the no?!?

How do you say no without hurting someone’s feelings or burning a bridge??

Many a “no” has turned into a “yes” because someone would rather suffer through a pointless meeting than suffer through saying “no” to that meeting. The real cost is not a boring meeting but the time lost on your most important goals. Don’t let this be you!

Having the right tools is key. Specific phrases and strategies make it easier to consistently say no when you want to.

Here are 7 real life ways to say no from folks who know (and “no”). Copy, test, tweak, customize, and practice!

7 Polite Ways To Say No

1. Adam Grant shares real phrases and strategies he uses to say no.

Adam Grant is one of my favorite thinkers and a truly generous human. Lots of great nuggets.

2. Offer an alternative.

A positive way to say no is to suggest an option that’s easier for you or more scalable.

Examples:

• Phone call instead of in-person meeting
• Invite them to an event you are attending
• Ask them to do work on their end -- a forwardable intro, a one page overview, reading related articles. Your part is activated (and easier!) once their work is done. You'll learn who is serious and deserving of your time based on their follow through.
• Find a one-to-many solution. Instead of a 1:1 conversation, can it be a webinar, a group event, or open office hours?

(Adam Grant touches on this too!)

3. Two great examples of “no” in the 7 Emails You Need To Know How To Write.

A classic article from Teju Ravilochan. (I’ve also used the “friendly nudge” suggestion and it works brilliantly.)

Be funny:

Dear Mr. Adams, Thanks for your letter inviting me to join the committee of the Arts and Sciences for Eisenhower.

I must decline, for secret reasons.

Sincerely, E.B. White.

Be kind and honest:

Thanks so much for reaching out, [name]. I appreciate what you’re trying to do. One of our core values is militant transparency, so I’ll be fully honest. At the moment, I want to whole heartedly give myself to our core priorities, involving getting our new Institutes up and running, growing our team, and raising capital. That means I’m choosing to decline a lot of conversations I’d otherwise like to have; so I won’t be able to prioritize hopping on the phone with you.

If there’s something quick I can help you with or if you have a specific question, do send me an email about it and I’ll be happy to get back to you!

My best, Teju

4. How to say no to customers?

Check out the training deck with slides on common situations in the Customer Success Starter Pack.

5. A fantastic video on how to say no nicely from Mo Bunnell.

Mo is a business development genius. I’m going to try his “quantify it” strategy starting today! He has lots of great content on productivity and goal setting too.

6. From my personal no-tes.

When someone sends me a great “no” email, I jot it down for R&D (ripoff & duplicate) purposes.

A few favorites:

• “Sadly, I won’t be able to make it Thursday. I hope to go to one of these soon.”
• “Good to hear from you. I'm booked then but I'd like to introduce you to <someone else>, included here, who would enjoy connecting with you.”
• “I'll have to pass on this Wednesday, but I'd love to do <this event> another day.”

7. Warren Buffett recommends you say no to almost everything.

Here’s how he practices what he preaches:  

Thanks for the invitation, but I’ll have to decline [your request for an interview]. I’ve talked about Ben [Graham] on a number of occasions, so my appraisal of him is already out there for people to see. In addition, every interview I grant results in about 20 more requests. That’s a geometric progression that I have no inclination to foster.

BOOM. A great one to end one. It’s clear, charming, and saved Buffett hours of time now and in the future. Mastering “no” is a powerful way to stay focused and achieve your biggest goals.  

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Know How To No

Saying no is one of the most important skills of successful founders and leaders. It helps you focus, gives you time to execute, and preserves your energy and mental health.

Simple, right?

If only it was!

It’s hard to say no because:

1. You want to help.
2. You find many things interesting.
3. You don’t want to disappoint people.
4. You see the potential benefit.
5. You feel productive when you’re busy.

Most people (including me) are continually honing their “saying no” skills.

The first part of saying no is to decide if you should say no. Duh.

But this can be agonizing, time consuming, and stressful if you’re not clear and prepared.

Here are 10 simple frameworks and prompts to help you quickly arrive at a yes or no.

10 Simple Ways To Decide Yes Or No

1. Hell Yeah or No.

A classic from Derek Sivers.

2. If this event/activity/project in 6 months was tomorrow, would I say yes?

A great question from Mo Bunnell. It’s easy to say yes when things are far away. Force yourself to consider it’s true importance rather than mentally defer the decision.

3. Warren Buffett: Say No To Almost Everything

He’s a pretty smart dude. 😉

4. Default to “no.”

Most of us want to say yes by default. Flip the script. The “yes” has to be carefully considered and truly earned.

5. Does it feel like a “should” or a “want to”?

Avoid the “shoulds” whenever you can! It’s true for networking and beyond.

6. Schedule important non-meeting items.

Book time for priorities like reading, thinking, or long term projects. Put them on your calendar and make them non-negotiable. You’ll quickly see what you actually have time for.

7. Do I understand the true cost of this yes?

A.T. Gimbel reminds us to think about the tradeoffs. Make it concrete by identifying the time you’ll spend, the dollars you won’t earn, or the other goals you’ll be letting go of by saying yes to the wrong thing.

8. “Saying no frees you up to say yes when it matters most.” - Adam Grant

Just because you have the time doesn’t mean you should. Don’t miss out something great that comes up because you’re too busy with “eh” commitments.

9. Reframe it.

What you’re really doing is saying “yes” to something else that’s more important. Spell it out if you need to: “I’m not saying no to my friend. I’m saying yes to my family.”  

10. Audit your time.

Does your calendar match your stated priorities? You’ll likely spot items that should be dropped or delegated. Constant vigilance is required to avoid “yes” creep!

Ready…Set…No!

Once you have clarity on yes or no, it’s time to put it into action.

Yes is easy. Everyone loves to hear yes.

But how can you say no in a kind or motivating way that doesn’t burn bridges?

For more k-no-wledge, check out specific phrases to use when saying “no” and a 3 step process to say no to your boss!

What other frameworks or prompts have you found to be helpful when deciding yes or no??