What are good ways to get buy-in from your sales team on a proposed new pricing model? Alternatively, how does feedback from your sales reps on the pricing model impact your future pricing / packaging changes?

Get them involved as quickly as possible. I run a monthly win/loss meeting with my Sales team to understand why we win and why we lose. Based on this information, there's usually tons of info to guide you in improving your pricing and packaging.

Are you seeing more deals won from a specific vertical, buyer persona, or package? It might be an excellent time to be optimizing for that pricing, feature, or vertical. 

Opinions get you in trouble but data tells the story. Focus on the data. Look at MRR, look at customer per pricing plan, look at competitors, look at NPS feedback, and make a call.

Here's what we did for our pricing revamp project:

1. We got the numbers from our back office (MRR, discounting by the size of the company, pricing plans, etc.)
2. We analyzed the data and made some hypotheses.
3. We challenged it with sales teams to understand the numbers and get their feedback.
4. We made a recommendation on a new pricing plan and interviewed product, sales, marketing, and customer success.
5. We came with a final plan and signed off on it.

This presentation here can be useful :)

Check out my answer to question "What have been your key learnings from any "Pricing/Re-pricing launch" that you have led/seen within your company?"

But it's worth repeating: involve them early and often, and build trust! This means more than occaisional pop-ins and surveys. It means building relationships with your sales org at ever level. Get to know some reps. Sit in on sales calls. Read closed won/lost reports. Figure out how they are compensated. Have regular check-ins with leadership to validate what you're hearing from the field (they often have a good sense of what's real and what's not).

Sales feedback is important, but needs to be filtered carefully. When I talk to sales, I tend to focus on the following questions

• Does the P&P structure align with the way we talk about the product and pitch the benefits it provides? 
• Do the pricing methods (note: not price points) make sense to customers and support how you position value?
• What are the main reasons you need to discount and what situations arise most?

I've always found that the sales team is a huge partner for you on pricing and packaging. Both in terms of knowledge (competitor prices, what the market will bear, direct feedback from deals etc) as well as being good supporters as you start to roll out pricing changes. A few things I've found that have helped build buy-in are:

• Always build a small group of reps you can come to to test out pricing. Either you have a set tiger team of nominees from sales leadership or you build a group yourself more informally. Whichever way you do it, get a group and use them as much as you can. Sales leadership and sales reps themselves will always take things better if the recommendations come from someone they can relate to.
• Make sure your test group are diverse and representative of all customers and prospects. If you sell to enterprise, mid-market and SMB make sure you pull in people from each group. Same for local and international sellers. 
• Be sure to pull them in early in the process. Don't get a pricing change approved by everyone else and then bring it to sales. Make sure sales is in the discussions from the start.
• Offer to be a fly on the wall in deals to hear how things are received by customers and prospects directly. Or if you have the luxury of a call analysis tool like Gong, make sure you use it and keep examples handy to pull up as you do your buy-in conversations.
• Put together a lot of before and after examples. As you have your buy-in conversations, pull up some example deals. Like here's what it looked like before in deal XYZ and here's how it would look now with the new pricing model if deal XYZ was sold again today. And even better, get the rep who sold deal XYZ to present the before and after.
• Show the data. Like the before and after examples, the more data you can show the better. Data like average historical selling prices, competitor prices, market price knowledge etc. The more data you can share, the more comfortable sales (or anyone) will be.

As for feedback from sales impacting the pricing and packaging, yes it is good input but it should not be the only thing you consider. You need to consider costs and outside factors like inflation as well. So just because sales says you should lower prices or raise prices, doesn't mean you should do it. But if they have feedback and want a change, you should definitely at least open up a research project. And make sure if you do that you include them from the start so that if the decision is to not change or to do something they don't originally want, then at least you've included them in the process.

If your Sales team is your primary channel, then the adoption of the pricing & packaging framework is vital. 

If the reps can't live with it, your work will be undermined and can lead to significant friction in the sales engine. 

I recommend forming a core feedback group: Head of Sales, Top performing reps, and some Middle performing reps. Ideally only 3-4 people at a time. 

Then structure your work and get their feedback on all layers:

1. Packages: Lay out the proposed packages in a deck and take them through them, and why you are proposing the changes. (Hint: the packages should address feedback they may have provided earlier). Show them a few before & after scenarios of deals they may have closed. Sequencing is important, you may want to start with a feedback session, then run it by the exec team and come back to your sales feedback group (Sales, Execs, Sales). Also, packaging is more important to get right than pricing. Why? Because pricing has a lot of room to maneuver via discounting, packaging does not. You need to get it right. 

2. Pricing: For pricing I would start with exec group first. Make sure your unit pricing is where you'd like it to be, and one that aligns with corporate objectives. Then get sales feedback and go back to exec team for a final ratification. (Execs, Sales, Execs). Unless the pushback on pricing is severe, there is more give on pricing. As long as you can demostrate the pricing is feasible, you will get buy in as your interests are aligned with their comp plans. 

If you are interested to learn more, I cover this concept at length, with examples in book, Price To Scale.