Discounts create a lot of hidden problems. But what would happen if you removed discounts altogether? You'd unlock some truly hidden benefits.
This podcast is about scaling tech startups.
Hosted by Toni Hohlbein & Mikkel Plaehn, together they look at the full funnel.
With a combined 20 years of experience in B2B SaaS and 3 exits, they discuss growing pains, challenges and opportunities they’ve faced. Whether you're working in RevOps, sales, operations, finance or marketing - if you care about revenue, you'll care about this podcast.
If there’s one thing they hate, it’s talk. We know, it’s a bit of an oxymoron. But execution and focus is the key - that’s why each episode is designed to give 1-2 very concrete takeaways.
[00:01:41] Mikkel: So we're gonna talk a bit about that today and you know, there. So many great articles, videos, even podcasts, talking about how to do discounting, how to be, you know, successful with it. We dropped even, discount hierarchy in a previous episode and we kind of agreed, you know, again, swimming against the current, we are not gonna do that.
[00:02:01] Actually. We wanna spend some time talking about should you even do discounting and then get into some hidden benefits of not doing it
[00:02:10] Toni: No, absolutely. And I think, you know, one of the issues is the. Is the culture around it is the expectation around it, right? Hey, if you buy B2B software, you should get a discount.
[00:02:21] But this is the funny thing. I've been asking for discounts for everything, with a whole framework. It's called BACT
[00:02:28] Mikkel: Yeah.
[00:02:30] Toni: Budget of authority, competition and timing. Basically kind of mirroring bond. Just the, from, from a buyers perspective. We can talk more about that another time maybe.
[00:02:43] Toni: when I buy something, anything, I'm way too shy to ask for a discount. No way. And the person who ask for a discount is my wife, by the way. It's like, no problem. She's like, you know, going to a massage. You know, she would, she would, you know, she would win against anyone there.
[00:02:56] Right. That's, that's her thing. And I think that that the culture piece is really interesting. that to a, to a large degree, that's the current that you're fighting against, right? Kind of the, hey, you know, everyone is expecting a discount. So I guess we are giving one. Right? and I think today, you know, we're gonna talk a little bit about, what if you do swim against that current, What if you do see the world differently?
[00:03:17] You know, how, how can you, how can you survive? What are the benefits of that? And, and trying to get away from this, discount spiral that we are, that we're seeing a lot of the time.
[00:03:26] Mikkel: Yeah, and I think also, you know, we talked a bit about the, the poor account executive who go to the sales manager and say, You know, I can close this deal if I, you.
[00:03:35] Offer them a discount. And the rebuttal is, well, you obviously didn't do enough value selling. Let's, let's do some enablement.
[00:03:41] Toni: Well, it's not the sales manager, the the enablement person saying that, Well, did you build enough value with the, with the prospect, right? Yeah. Yeah. But, but even, you know, in your example, even worse, a lot of, a lot of AEs, you know, that are selling to you, you know, and you will ask them for a discount and then they will be like, Ah, Mikkel, I'm not, this is. This is asking for a lot, this is unreasonable.
[00:04:07] First of all, I need something in return. You know, you need to sign by, you know, 4:00 PM, we need to skip legal. and the, and the truth is, you know, then they will say like, Oh yeah, so difficult. And, you know, I can go to to battle for you and can try and figure this out. But, you know, I think my CEO needs to sign off on that.
[00:04:25] And then basically what they do is they, don't ask anyone and just send you the discount. Yeah. You know, there, there's a lot of. Bullshitting gaming and, and some of the, potentially bad reputation, sleazyness of the sales, sales reputation, almost kind of coming a little bit out of this whole discounting negotiation game, right?
[00:04:45] Mikkel: It's almost like that scene in Wolf of Wall Street. You know,
[00:04:48] Toni: which one,
[00:04:49] Mikkel: where you know, wait for them to answer if you know the first one, who, who replies, loses. But anyway, so. I think what we should do, first off, is let's jump into some of the issues with, discounting. We already kind of started to peel the onion a little bit here.
[00:05:03] Yeah. But I think we should get a bit into it, right? Because there are some ramifications of this behavior of offering a discount and closing a deal. Right? And one of the things you, you and I are talking about right now and talked about in the past is this whole dynamic. End quarter being able to hit, you know, your quota as, as an individual sales rep and essentially ending up potentially with the wrong customer.
[00:05:26] Toni: Yeah. And, You know, the reason why I end up with the wrong customer in that sense and connected that to discounting is basically, hey, you have a price. It's set at a certain level, and we believe that that certain level matches the value we provide. And if you now need to give it discount, You know, apparently the, the, the prospective customer doesn't see the value, just as, as you see, it might have many different reasons the rep didn't sell it properly.
[00:05:54] but it might also have the reason that the customer just is not as, as great of a fit for you, as, as you might otherwise would think. And that then drives two things, one, It's a selection bias, so that customer might just not be great for you in the long run because maybe they just don't need that tool that much, or they don't see the value as, you know, as outlined.
[00:06:12] But it also creates kind of this subconscious thing of like, oh the, the thing that I'm buying it isn't as valuable. Right. We're going again a little bit into some of the, pseudo psychology that we should stay clearly away from. But you know, there's this example of, you know, they did it in kind of an experiment.
[00:06:32] A bottle of wine, you know, two bottles of wine, actually, one five bucks, one 50 bucks. And then, you know, people tasted it and need to rate it. And obviously it was the same, it was the same bottle. And people rated the more expensive one, much more tasty and, you know, Oh yeah. Yes. I think 50 bucks is cheap for that one.
[00:06:52] And, and this $5 one oh oh oh, no, no, this is just, you know, sour grape juice, you know,
[00:06:57] Mikkel: so I, I actually heard from. this is gonna sound funny, but a friend of a friend, right? He was a so sommelier, so yourself. He was a sommelier restaurant, and he said, So let me get, give you a bit of advice. If you're ever gonna go out and you know, and eat you, you have the cheapest wine on the menu and no one ever buys it.
[00:07:16] The second cheapest wine on the menu is the one the restaurant earns all their money. So don't get that one. Usually you want go for like the third or the fourth really, but, but there is psychology in that, right? You, you don't want the cheapest is something with the quality of what you're getting. Right.
[00:07:31] And you can play that to your advantage total, you know, Sidetrack here,
[00:07:35] Toni: you know, I think we need to change the name of the episode. I could talk a little bit more about wine right now, but, let's maybe skip that
[00:07:40] Mikkel: Spin off. That's very popular in some shows, okay. So you know, the other dimension that isn't really being talked about is you're, you know, you're giving away value and basically you lose out on revenue in doing it.
[00:07:57] Toni: Yeah. I mean, that's like, an obvious one.
[00:08:00] Yeah. It's like duh Mikkel. Thanks. I think we found a cool quote from Jacco here, from Winning by Design, and he was basically, and he's pretty, you know, he's cool in many ways, but he was basically equating, discount to churn. Yeah. Which is.
[00:08:16] Toni: First thought. Second thought is like, Wait a minute. I didn't think about it like that.
[00:08:21] So he's basically saying, you say like, Hey, imagine you give a 20% discount and how that feels, and now compare that to having 20% churn.
[00:08:29] Toni: And it's basically the same thing. It has the same impact on your CAC payback. It has the same impact on your lifetime value. It has the same impact on your growth. All of these things are the exact same thing, but you know, for many reasons.
[00:08:42] And some of that is obviously, you know, investor sided, churn, 20% churn feels so much more hurtful than giving a 20% discount.
[00:08:51] Mikkel: But I also think, you know, the, so the ram for ramification for example, is if, if it starts impacting your elements, like CAC payback, it basically means you're less competitive in going out and buying customers.
[00:09:03] Right? So if you are doing, let's say performance marketing and running a lot of paid advertising, You actually have a competitive edge if your payback or CAC payback is better than that of the competition,
[00:09:15] Toni: Yeah, I think, I think this is very rarely talked about. and, and then maybe it goes a little bit beyond kind of the scope for today, but basically, what you're referring to here is if you have a product that costs a hundred thousand dollars, you can afford a CAC payback of, actually $150,000.
[00:09:33] So you can basically afford CAC of $150,000. Now, the fire power you can deploy. To get that customer with $150,000 budget. it's obviously much more if you were selling a $25,000 right? And that translates both into, you know, the, the ads you can run on, on Google and Facebook and what have you, but also on the quality of sales reps you can hire, you know, the support you can give and all of these, all of these other things around it.
[00:10:01] which basically gives you a competitive edge, right? So really, basically, The more CAC I can afford because the price is higher because of more funding in the bank account, the more competitive and aggressively I can go to It's, it's a little bit the flip side of the very efficient, customer acquisition cost payback period that, that many folks out there focusing on.
[00:10:21] Mikkel: Yeah. And I think if, if you stay in, in this mindset, right? You, the, the next I dimension is you, you close the deal, you have the customer for those you discount, what's the lifetime value gonna be like on that cohort? Are they gonna have higher churn and probably yes. In many cases, And so you, you talked about it a bit recently, right?
[00:10:40] You want to get more of the same type of customer and usually the ones where you discount, they're not a fit with that,
[00:10:48] Toni: Yeah. And, and this is actually another thing from, Patrick Campbell, Price Intelligently. so basically they're saying, Hey, discounting lowers the LTV. So a lifetime value of a customer by, you know, more than 30%.
[00:11:01] And now you think like, well, wow, you know, isn't more than 30% kind of a large discount to have on average? Well, the problem is actually twofold it compounds. You know, and it's basically kind of what I mentioned earlier, just now combined. It's not only that you give maybe 20, 25% discount, it's also that that customer by itself will be more likely to churn.
[00:11:23] So if you kind of combine both of these effects, you basically get to a larger than 30, 35% reduction of lifetime value.
[00:11:30] Mikkel: Yeah. That's a terrible spot to be. And I think you also mentioned, when we kind of discussed discount the other day, you know that you won't reap the same benefit of compounding on price increases and it's gonna actually be difficult for you to pull off if you.
[00:11:45] You know, a lot of time, let's say fluctuations in, in the price your customer base is paying. That's gonna be a difficult exercise to navigate as well, right? So, so there, there's a lot of obstacles for you as well.
[00:11:57] Toni: No. And you know, also on the renewal side of things, you know, once you open the door for a negotiation on the new biz side, you kind of implicitly also open the door on that negotiation.
[00:12:09] On the renewal side, just think about the additional fire power and kilojules you need to deploy. Every time you renew someone, you will potentially set yourself up. A new pricing conversation. Right? And how much time does that take off your organization, your csm? So I need to teach them and train them.
[00:12:25] And, ah jeez now need account managers to do that instead, and all of that, they know they, they're the compounding effect of issues that are surrounding that.
[00:12:32] Mikkel: Mm. And so I think the, the last piece is obviously you can infer from this that you are potentially also pushing your problems down the road, right? Let's, let's, you know, we'll deal with that issue with churn in the future. We'll deal with LTV in the future and then take it from there. And that's gonna be really hard. That's going, you know, you're gonna sit with product and say, Hey, can we fix these things?
[00:12:52] Maybe that's gonna help. You're gonna hop on a bunch of calls with your, your customer support team and, and CSMs and it's not gonna make a difference. Yeah.
[00:13:01] Toni: And obviously kind of we are sitting here and, you know, talking from the, the high ivory tower know, how, how and oh, you shouldn't do it.
[00:13:12] you know, the, in reality, I myself have never led a sales organization where it wasn't pro discounts.
[00:13:19] And also, you know, Growblocks. Yeah. You know, sometimes we do give a discount. It has to do with something else, though we are. Not a hundred percent certain what the price point really is. Right. So that's kind of, there's always a discussion and, and that's kind of another piece here, what you need figure out, early on in your journey you won't be a hundred percent sure what your price point actually is.
[00:13:40] And then standing firm and being like, No, we any discounts difficult. Right. And the same thing also if it's a highly competitive field. Yeah. and, and in those cases, you might simply need to be, you know, more precise and clear on pricing. And, the less, the less kilojules you deploy there to figure that out, the more you probably will need to, you know, give flexibility to your reps to do price adjustments on the fly.
[00:14:07] And sometimes that's a great recipe and sometimes it's a really terrible recipe. Yeah.
[00:14:12] Mikkel: But I think irregardless of, you know, yes, we've been. Doing discounts in the past, maybe even now, right? I think it's still important to stop sometimes and just reflect. Is that actually the right way, just because this is the established way of doing things, of doing business.
[00:14:26] You might actually learn a thing or two and you know, we, we certainly, I was certainly shocked by some of the things we're gonna get into. Now.
[00:14:34] so why should you actually consider a discount free future where you, you know, you, you build up a sales team, you go, Yeah, just so you know, we're not gonna do any discounts, period.
[00:14:44] It's like, well, what if my cousin wants to buy, it's like, Yeah, he's not gonna get a discount. It's like no one will get a discount. So what should you consider, What are some of the benefits actually of, of doing that?
[00:14:56] Toni: Yeah, so the first non obvious one here, and I love this one a lot and that's why we're starting out with this one.
[00:15:04] It actually cuts down your sales cycles by sometimes two to three weeks.
[00:15:10] So why is that? Well, if you think about whatever you're selling, there is even a stage in your Salesforce or a HubSpot pipeline that's called negotiation, and that usually comes after, you know, discovery is done and decision makers bought in and you did your whole MEDDIC or whatever you're doing.
[00:15:32] And then in the end, it's about, you know, figuring out what the price is and, and back and forth and that. and again, when I buy software, I've my whole system to push the price down. and that system relies not on, it's not a quick phone call. It's not like, Hey, how much. You know, I need a discount.
[00:15:51] And then the other side says, Okay, how much? And done. It's never like that. You know, the, the best practice is to never, ever on the call, just go down on price. You know, always delay or ask for something in return, make it difficult, yada, yada. But what making it difficult for the other side means is also, it makes it longer for you to close that deal.
[00:16:13] And I think many people completely underestimate the importance of velocity. The, the amount of deals, basically one rep can turn over. That's how we need to think about that. If it takes a year for a rep to turn over a deal, that's one deal. Let's say a year, they can do, if it takes a month. That same rep can do 12 deals instead suddenly.
[00:16:35] Right? And obviously they do stuff in parallel and so forth, but that's how you need to think about it, right? Kind of velocity is a major efficiency driver that people don't see. And if you simply, you know, are on the call, say the price, you know, pause, don't have the question mark at the end, when you say it.
[00:16:51] and then you know, someone asked about for a discount and you just say, We don't give any discounts. you know, what will happen is what happened to me, when I bought, actually Chili Piper. They're kind of one of the ones that I really, really, you know, hard on this one. I had one of my, rev ops guys do, do the call, do the discovery, do the negotiation, blah, blah, blah.
[00:17:12] and we already decided we were gonna buy Chili Piper because we needed it. So the period there was, there was already done. and it was not like, ooh, you know, this one, $2,000 more, that's gonna break the deal. That was, you know, honestly not, not what this was about. And, you know, I talked to my RevOps guy and he was like, Toni, they don't give any discount.
[00:17:32] First, first reaction. I laugh. First reaction. Yeah. Yeah. It's like, sure, sure. They don't give a discount. And then I just get a blank. And by the way, this was not a junior RevOps guy. Those are kind of a guy who's been doing this for a long time actually. And he was looking at me with, you know, dead, honesty and certain, He's like, Toni, they do not give any discounts.
[00:17:53] And then I stopped laughing and I paused and then I was like, Well, Well then they just signed the deal now And the thing is, you know, what, what you gonna do? You know, are you gonna waste another two, three weeks and, you know, you know, push something that you won't get anything for. And, you know, obviously, you know, you know, hey, is this an outlier scenario?
[00:18:16] Blah, blah, blah, probably. but, but that's the effect that it has, right? Instead of you playing this game for two or three weeks longer, basically the other side is like, Okay, we don't need to, we can't play that game, so let's closer right now. And there you go. You have like save two, three weeks of your sales cycle, right?
[00:18:32] And I think the, just to kind of jump into the next one, another piece of why the velocity actually increases, meaning the sales cycles shortens, is, if you don't give any discounts, that means you are very, very sure of your price point. And that means, you can actually put it on the website.
[00:18:51] And we see a lot of companies, that are basically, Oh no, I can't show, I can't show a number that's larger than a thousand bucks on my pricing page because every, you know, no one will buy it. Everyone will just run away, do something else. You can't do that. But if you're so dead sure about your pricing, and your pricing is right, you can actually put it on the website.
[00:19:15] and suddenly, the, consideration phase will include your pricing. The consideration phase will, you know, when someone is doing research instead of. Needing to call you up and wasting your time, blah, blah, blah. They just know it. And then they can have that conversation already internally.
[00:19:31] And then there's no weird awkward silence when someone is, you know, presenting the pricing sheet and so forth. and again, those are things that will basically, shorten your sales cycles. Right? And, and I think, taking those two things together, it's, it's, it's a massive efficiency increase that people sometimes don't associate with, with discounting necessarily.
[00:19:52] Mikkel: Yeah. No, I think it's, it is one of those you, you don't realize, and just the pure efficiency, efficiency gain you can gain per rep is immense. It's, it's immense. And I think you and I talked about, hey, when we've. Purchased, you know, software solutions. In the past there would be three, four weeks of negotiation.
[00:20:12] Yep. And that's a lot to shave off. you know, so, so, so totally. Totally see the value there. And I think maybe jumping into to the next one
[00:20:21] Toni: I think the, next interesting one is really about the, one of the objections always like.
[00:20:27] well, you know if you use discount the right way, it acts like gravy and it basically, accelerates the sales cycles, right? That is the argument many times.
[00:20:38] And basically someone says like, Hey, listen. I can, you know, maybe I can give you a discount, but what I need in return is urgency, urgency, urgency. You know, whatever form of that. You know, you need to assign this thing, You need to get this to legal. You need to give me a verbal, you need to, whatever, whatever you're asking in return is always urgency.
[00:20:57] And basically you're bargaining around the urgency piece here, right? and for example, when I bought, Salesforce, I don't know, a couple of years.
[00:21:06] What I did there on purpose, was basically I started the conversation in, the first week of January Yeah. And this was a hundred, $150,000 deal or something with, had a fairly sizable sales team at that point.
[00:21:22] and you know what maybe some listeners don't know is that Salesforce year end, is on January 31st, so basically the sales rep that I was reaching out to was incredibly lucky. You know, it ended up being a three year deal, more than $300,000, you know, was, it was a big thing even for, you know, for the size that we wear at that point, still was a big thing for the rep.
[00:21:47] and, you know, he didn't have time to go through all of those negotiation steps and kind of, Hey, blah, blah, blah. He needed to get this deal closed. In, in a month from now or less than that. So basically, his only choice was skipping some discounting steps going further down, much quicker. And basically we were capitalizing on, on this exact problem where the counterpart your, you know, account executive on the other side.
[00:22:12] They have a deadline, you kind of don't have a deadline, right? you don't care if, if you're close to this first of Feb or last day of, of January. so really you will basically have on the vendor side, one of your helpers, basically trying to give you the discount fighting for you on the vendor side to give you that discount.
[00:22:30] and again, right? Does it really matter for the business whether or not that deal closes on the 31st of January or the 1st of February. It doesn't really matter all that much, but it matters for that salesperson. So therefore that salesperson will be incredibly incentivized to give you this discount, Right?
[00:22:48] And with all the kickers and, you know, spiffs and all of that stuff going on, you know, for him giving you a 20% discount and closing the deal will make him a ton more money. So it's a completely rational decision on, on, in his or her side to actually kind of go ahead and do it. But for you as a business, I, it didn't really change much, right?
[00:23:08] You might have closed that deal for a hundred percent or, you know, whatever, discount a week later anyway, right?
[00:23:14] Mikkel: So, you know, we've covered a bunch of the, benefits of, you know, of future with no discounting. so you become more competitive. You, you avoid the whole, incentives for rep to just skip ahead and do the discounting right, and a bunch of other pieces. you still might want some solutions in place because you will still be faced with a prospective client expecting you to move somewhat in, in their direction. Yeah. So what are some of the alternatives? Because we, I, I think it would be a, you know, poor job of us to just say, Yeah, and that's it. Now go, you know, without discount.
[00:23:49] Toni: Yeah. Go to a CEO and say, Hey, stop discounting.
[00:23:52] Mikkel: Yeah, no. So you have the benefits now, right? Let's talk about what are some of the, the remedies in, in, when you actually start the work in the sales cycle.
[00:24:00] Toni: Yeah, I think, lots of that has to do with, pricing and packaging, honestly. So there might be some benefits here in figuring out what the righter price for you is.
[00:24:11] If you give a discount all the time, you know, people will expect that discount and so forth. and, and that might come with different, value offerings for the different tiers. So, hey, if you only. if you only have that budget, then you can only have that thing here. And basically try and match, value that you give with, with the, the pricing that you're able to achieve.
[00:24:33] Right. And. If you have fairly unsophisticated pricing, you, you don't have that opportunity. You can't then say, Okay, no, it's, it's no problem. If you want a 20% discount, it's, it's no issue. you, you just then buy this other, you know, level, this other tier here of the and you need to go for that instead.
[00:24:50] Right. I think that conversation sometimes it's, it's really painful for the buyer. Because then they're like, Ah, no, but I want this other thing. And it's like, well, but if you want the other thing, you need to pay for that. Right. So this is sometimes kind of a good conversation. I think my favorite is actually a vanishing discount.
[00:25:06] Honestly. Really? And I think someone like HubSpot is doing this extremely well. Basically they're saying, Sure, you know, whatever this count, but it will go away slash need to be renegotiated at renewal. and basically they're putting it in a contract in a way where you need to be proactive. you know, calling up your AM and, you know, asking and begging and pushing for a discount. And the, rationale is pretty smart actually at that point because, you know, when you buy a new tool, you always have this, Oh, damn, I need to roll this out now, and I, you know, won't be able to use it for two, three months.
[00:25:42] And then there will be some bug and some things won't work. You know, arguably your value for the first year probably is less than you know, the following years, and, and you can almost think like you add that amount of, you know, rollout work on top of the price. You need to pay as your full cost basically. And guess what? Up on renewal, That additional rollout cost or onboarding cost. That will have vanished at that point. You have rolled it out. Right. and then going to the vendor asking for a discount will be much harder conversation and actually, The rollout cost works in their benefit Because if you wanted to stop using them, well you need to spend the rollout cost now on another tool. and you know, this only works with like sticky products and HubSpot and you know, products where a lot of users are in there. It obviously makes a bunch of sense, but it does, I gotta say it, that did create kind of a bad taste in my mouth many times.
[00:26:38] Kind of, you know, especially working with HubSpot on this specific thing. But you. Generally speaking, vanishing discounts. That would be actually my, my overall go to in terms of, Sure you will have a discount conversation. Sure. Your, you know, rep will have that toolbox that tool in the box. but you know, it won't overall hurt your business.
[00:26:58] Mikkel: I think it doesn't have to be on the, let's say the license, you do a vanishing discount because I, I even believe HubSpot at some point, they did a, and I don't know how strict they were about it, but a required onboarding package with training came at a cost.
[00:27:12] Yeah. And they would, you know, potentially wave that. Cost, but that wasn't then the license. Right. So you're basically switching it out. So, so I think you can, you can enable with other things if you have services or, or whatever Right. You can do, do things on the side because they're non-recurring. It, it won't impact you the same way.
[00:27:31] Toni: Yeah. I think, I think the, the main, the main piece is, you know what, if you can't get away from discounts, try and not make them recurring.
[00:27:39] know, I think I said it once before, in a world of recurring revenues, You want to have oneoff discounts, you know, not the other way around. And, and that's really, you know, if you can find ways to install that into your organization, I think that's gonna be extremely beneficial. You know, And then the, the, the alternative, not giving any discounts.
[00:27:59] I think it can drive efficiencies that people don't realize that it might drive. And the reason why people aren't able to resist the discounting piece is sure there's a culture and an expectation and that's, you know, difficult to just changes one vendor. But also how sure are you about your pricing
[00:28:19] if you're not a thousand percent rock solid?
[00:28:21] Sure. You will always be like, Okay, you know, let's, let's, let's fix that issue by giving a discount here and there. Right. And, and I think, you know, focusing on the pricing side. Yeah. you know, not only creating more options and add-ons and, you know, value can dial up and down with the, you know, price that someone wants to pay.
[00:28:39] but also with the certainty of that is the correct price and we are gonna stand by it. you know, doing that will also give your reps much more. Stamina and you know, not ending, not ending the, the pricing slide with a question mark, you know, but with just a pause. Yeah. And you know, then there's sometimes the soft door opening, like, well, we tailor our pricing and you know, blah, blah, blah.
[00:29:02] And you know, you will kind of hear those soft openings from reps. And if you have a much more conviction in your pricing, you know, some of this will actually go away.
[00:29:11] Mikkel: Yeah. I think that's also why for some businesses they're going the no discount route. It just brings more clarity. Right. And I, so I've, by the way, fun fact actually been, you know, selling things direct to consumer at one point face to face.
[00:29:24] And, we were the only importer, we had exclusivity of a certain product. So when they asked for a discount, it was easy to say no. Because there were no substitute
[00:29:34] Toni: I, I don't think we should, advertise for selling drugs. Mikkel. This not okay here,
[00:29:40] Mikkel: I think our show just got, you know, rated something just with that comment there.
[00:29:44] But, let's see. Let's see. Okay. But anyway, I think this was a good one's. It's always fun to kind of challenge your own views. Like you said, we've been used, the discounting. If you probably hire your. Salesperson for the team. That's probably gonna be a topic at some point in time because of course it's a thing, but I think it's really important to just take a different view on it.
[00:30:06] Yeah. Every now and then, you will definitely learn something and maybe you land on the middle ground, maybe you go the full monty. Let's see.
[00:30:14] Toni: and, you know, if, if you need help pushing this through your organization, just maybe send this podcast link to, one of those folks.
[00:30:21] And let's see if we were able to convince the VP of sales, your ceo, your C let's see about that.