Ep 480: Know Your Worth, Then Ask For It with Negotiation Expert Casey Brown
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Whether you sell a product or service or not, or your own salary and your own talent, we're all selling ideas. And so think of selling as serving, not as trying to get something or trying to manipulate someone or trying to, you're not trying to bilk your employer out of money you don't deserve.

Hey, everyone. Thanks so much for joining us today on Her Money. I'm Jean Chatzky. And look, we all know that negotiating for a higher salary can be incredibly nerve-wracking, even during amazing economic times. And unfortunately, we are not in amazing economic times. If you caught our recent episode with employment attorney Peter Rabar, you know

Layoffs are top of mind for a lot of people right now. And uncertainty, well, if it isn't the word of the year, it probably should be. But if you've been with your company for a while or you've taken on more work this year or even in the past couple of years, you might want to ask for a raise anyway. And I, for one, think that you should. Because every time a woman advocates for herself, we move the needle just a

a little bit more towards closing that onerous gender pay gap. By doing so, you are paving the way for other women to know what they deserve and to have the confidence and the guts to demand it. And the data actually shows that now is a good time to do it. According to research from Fortune magazine, for the first time in a decade, workers who stayed in their roles were

So way bigger wage bumps, 4.6%, than those who switched jobs, just 0.2%. So the question is, how do you do this? How do you make that ask? How do you communicate your value clearly and confidently and unapologetically?

My guest today, Casey Brown, has the answer. She is a negotiation and pricing expert, founder of Boost Pricing, and the woman behind the TED Talk, Know Your Worth and Then Ask For It, which has over 4 million views and counting. We are going to take a very quick break here. Back in a sec.

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Casey, welcome. Thank you, Jean. I'm so delighted to be here. It's great to have you here. I want to start with that TED Talk, which everyone should watch, by the way. You started by saying no one will ever pay you what you're worth. They'll pay you what you think you're worth, and you control their thinking. I love that, but how do you actually do it?

Yeah. So the key is to that statement, like whatever value we create, whatever value we provide for our employer or for our customers, internal, external, in

in absence of their recognition of that value is really limited. So they'll never pay you what you're worth. They'll only ever pay you what they think you're worth. That can feel like a really disempowering thing for people to hear, like it's out of my control. But I think that's only out of your control if you abdicating influencing what they think about your worth. And so in that TED Talk, I talk about a simple formula, which is define plus tell equals earn.

So the idea there is to define clearly what value you generate, what ways you help your company, what ways you help your boss, what problems and headaches and hassles you eliminate by your talent and your hard work, and then define.

to tell that, to share that information in the appropriate way, diplomatically and professionally, such that you're able to command the salary you deserve. Well, let's go into detail on both of those points. So when we're defining our value, I kind of think of it in two buckets. I think about what

because I'm a numbers person, I guess. I think about the money that you're making the company and the money that potentially you're saving the company. But I may be very, very limited in that viewpoint. How do you think about it? Well, I think like you, so I'm an engineer, so I'm a numbers person too. I think the degree to which we can quantify our impact, and that might mean dollars, might mean cost savings or earnings or revenue earnings. It could be a very direct

line of sight to dollars. But there are all kinds of other quantifiable impacts we can have, including how much time is saved, how many customers are served. It depends on what your role is in the company. But there's lots of quantifiable, pretty tangible ways that we can impact the value through our work and through our talent. The thing that gets overlooked a lot is some of the more intangibles or the more difficult to quantify elements that generate a lot of value.

I think even though it's hard to put a number to those, they shouldn't be overlooked in our process of defining or telling things like how we contribute to the healthy culture and how we support team or other things like that. Well, I think if you follow the breadcrumbs far enough, even those things become quantifiable. Because if you're responsible for a team and your team is not leaving anything,

And your company doesn't have to replace that team. We know there's an enormous cost to hiring, right? So you follow the breadcrumbs long enough and eventually you do get to some statistics that you should be able to use. A lot of women have problems with the tell part. We think, I don't want to toot my own horn. We think my work should speak for itself. It doesn't.

Those are exactly the kinds of things. And the TED Talk came out of noticing in my work with business owners that women business owners spoke about their value differently than the male business owners that I worked with. They said things just like you said.

I don't want to toot my own horn. I want to let the work speak for itself. It feels like bragging. If I keep my head down, work hard and produce value, those rewards and recognition will naturally come. And it started me down a journey of researching how differently male-owned businesses and women-owned businesses are rewarded financially, which fat,

fascinated me because the idea that when even when we're in charge and we're the boss and we're setting the price tag that we're underpaid was really defied logic to me. Like, how can when we're in charge still be a gender wage gap? And it started me down the rabbit hole of understanding the sort of societal and psychological stories that we are told and that we tell ourselves that cost us 20 cents on the dollar, whether we are an employee or an employer. Talk

Talk about it a little bit from the perspective of being a business owner, because we haven't had that conversation very often on this show. What are the differences in which male versus female owned companies are paid?

Sure. I think that, so there's a study from 2014 done by Babson College that reflected that there was a 20 cent wage gap at that time between male-owned businesses and female-owned businesses. They posited various reasons in the report that came out about that. What I would say is what I had seen empirically in our work in pricing training and consulting was the language that women use is very different. I tell a story in the TED Talk of a woman that I had coached who said she ran a little web design firm.

She said those words, a little web design firm. I think in this and lots of other small ways, she was really diminishing herself in the eyes of clients. And it translated into, you know, she in her words was practically giving the work away. She showed up small and she spoke about herself and her firm in a small way. And I think that translated directly to dollars. How would you rewrite her language today?

I would root it in value always. And in that case, like using size of the firm as an example, in her mind, little was bad and big was good. First of all, that's not always true. Little can be great. Little can be nimble. Little can be responsive. Little can be personalized. And this is, by the way, this has implications for people who work for companies too. This isn't just for business owners. Any characteristic you want to talk about, don't point at it as a negative. What's the strength of that? What is the flip side of that argument that this is really powerful?

I only want to talk about attributes as it relates to the value that I'm creating, because at the end of the day, that's what people pay you for. Whether you're an employee or you're a business owner or you're a salesperson, people say yes and hand you more money if you create extraordinary value. And so how do you both create the most value?

But then how do you tell the best story about that value such that you can get paid for it? You can have the best product or service in the world. You could be the most valuable employee on the team in the world. If the boss doesn't know it, if the customer doesn't know it, you're going to struggle to be paid what you're worth. In terms of telling your story, in terms of not just getting the balls up to tell your story, but...

actually finding the right words to tell your story. What do you find works?

I think it's super important to be authentic to your voice. So sometimes people who are kind of gearing themselves up to go ask for a raise or make a big ask for promotion or something are thinking of their neighbor who's a great salesperson or their sister-in-law who tells a good joke. It's like they're trying to channel someone with more bravado than they may naturally feel. And I think that doesn't work because it comes across as artifice. So I think first and foremost is stay true to yourself, stay true to your personality.

Don't try to contrive a different personality so that you can go have this conversation. Be true to yourself. That's number one. That can, by the way, fight against vice number two, which is my natural voice is one where I wouldn't speak up and ask for this. My natural voice is one where I wouldn't point at the list of my accomplishments. And so then I think you have to find your way to make your natural voice fit the ask.

And so, for example, for women who would say something like, I don't want to toot my own horn or this feels like bragging, I'd say, think about the other party. How does what you're doing serve them? This isn't about you. It's about how you create value for someone else. So if we think of selling as serving, and by the way, every single person is a salesperson. We're all selling ideas. We're all selling, whether you sell a product or service or not, or your own salary and your own talent, we're all selling ideas. And so-

Think of selling as serving, not as trying to get something or trying to manipulate someone or trying to, you're not trying to bilk your employer out of money you don't deserve. You're trying to be paid fairly and justly for the extraordinary value you create. And so if we put ourselves in the shoes of the other party and say, how do we serve?

That's a key to helping to find an authentic way through this conversation. And a second tip on this is to connect with what you love the most about the work you do, what really excites you, what really gives you passion. This can help root us as we're having a conversation that might be a little bit uncomfortable. Yeah, I totally agree with that. I was chuckling because years ago,

And this is a bit of a deviation in terms of the story. But years ago, Suzy Orman was on QVC and she was selling like gangbusters. So Home Shopping Network, their competitor, came after me and they were like, we're going to develop a line of products. We're going to put you on the air. We're going to teach you how to sell them online.

I am not that person, right? I'm actually a very good salesperson when it comes to sort of explaining something that I am truly passionate about, right? The research when it comes to personal finances can make in people's lives. But selling these financial organization products, I was a complete and total failure.

disaster because it wasn't authentic, because it was asking me to do something that I just wasn't comfortable doing. There are a lot of people who have a pretty visceral reaction against the idea of selling or sales. Like they have maybe an idea in their head what that means, and they're conjuring some outdated image of a used car salesman or something, which is like rooted in manipulation or rooted in getting somebody to do something counter to their own interests.

And if that's what you're ever doing in selling, you're doing it wrong. This is never, ever, again, whether you're selling a product or service or you're selling yourself, never about trying to trick the other party. It's about having the other party authentically connect

with what you do and how that helps them. It's all about serving. Selling is serving. Selling is helping the other side get what they want. And if the other side is your boss and they don't want to lose you to another organization, then you're helping them get what they want, which is to retain you and engage you and make you feel valued and connected so that you're helping them. You're helping them get what they want. And if we kind of keep that in our mindset, this isn't smarmy, this isn't slimy, this isn't dirty, this isn't gross, this is helping. I think that can help a lot.

One of the things that you have said is that it's unjust to accept mediocre pay for excellent work. How do you know that the pay is mediocre? And how do we justify or convey that this work is excellent? And

In part, I think that's a matter of believing that our work is truly excellent. 100%. I think it's an inside job before it's an outside effort. In other words, we have work to do inside or with ourselves or for ourselves before we go have a conversation with a boss about something different, something changing. There's some really interesting

interesting and terrifying research. So there was a recent study, some Harvard researchers administered an exam to a group of men and a group of women and asked them to estimate the percentage of questions that they got right.

And they were told when they were creating this self-assessment that your self-assessment is going to be used to determine for employers whether they offer you a job and how much they offer you. Now, these two groups performed identically on the test, virtually identically, not statistically different. And women estimated they got 46% of the questions right. And men estimated that they got 61% of the questions right. Wow. I have one more statistic, and then I'm going to bring it home to your question. Okay.

Nearly half of men asked if there were an emergency on a commercial airliner. Nearly half of men estimated that they could safely land a commercial airliner. And I think like if you know where you can be tongue in cheek or make a joke about that. But I think if we look at like the implication, women are so much harder on ourselves. We have such lower confidence in our ability, even in reality, but certainly less than men have.

And we routinely expect perfection from ourself. I have to check every box. I have to check it twice. I have to check with perfection. Like, I'll ask for a raise when all these things are true. We're chasing an impossible standard, like a horizon line that's out in front of us. But when we reach that, the horizon line is moved. We never feel good enough. So frustrating. All right. Let's talk about all of this in the context of today's economy. You heard me say at the top of the show, you know, that...

Right now, interestingly enough, staying at your job is paying off more than job hopping. That was not true during COVID. Job hopping at that point was the way to get a very, very big raise. So how does today's economic climate shape the way that we should think about our salaries? It's a great question. And there's a couple of competing things I will offer up. One is that because...

the economy is tightening and customer demand is softening and a lot of economic sectors, a lot of industries, there's less free cash flow to go around and companies are getting a lot more conservative. So they're not necessarily making a big investment in X or Y or Z. And in those kind of with that backdrop, you could see, oh, it's a hard time to ask for a raise. It's a hard time to ask for promotion. But I would offer a counter argument, which is,

Very often, a thing they're not deciding to invest on is filling those two open positions on the team. Let's hold off on hiring. We just need to make do with what we have. And making do with what we have means leaning extra hard on the people that are already here holding everything up. And your essentialness, your criticality as a member of the team goes up.

difficult times, not down. I think it's not to suggest we're expendable when times are good, but we are essential. Like we're a cornerstone of keeping the ship afloat when, you know, when the ship is in stormy seas and we're sitting low in the water, they are looking really hard at the team that's essential to keeping things moving in the right direction. And I think in some ways that's the moment they are most present

to your value, which is generally means that's when you have the most power from a negotiation standpoint. You can't do that in a manipulative way or in an ultimatum way. But if it's navigated diplomatically and respectfully, it's a great time to ask for a raise if you're in that situation.

I think when we feel like we have the least power and the least confidence is when we're going into a job interview, perhaps coming off a layoff. And there are a lot of people who are caught up in a cycle of layoffs right now. What's the pep talk you give yourself?

I've said it a couple of times, I'll say it throughout because this is always the cornerstone is the value. What can I do? What have I done? How do my unique skill sets align with the needs of this employer? How can I solve problems in ways nobody else solves them? What experience and special unique skill set do I bring to bear that is really important and helpful in this situation? And so this isn't just about having these things in your head. A story I told on a stage when you and I met actually at ICANN, I told a story about a woman who was a data analyst who

who had a lot of trouble around her beliefs around her own value. She would do the homework going into performance reviews of like sort of listing some accomplishments, but she had a lot of self-doubt. Our own belief

Stop us short. It's the old Henry Ford, if you think you can or you think you can't, you're right. Like we can go in and say the right words, but if we don't believe it, we're going to struggle to have success with it. And her mentor, this woman's mentor, had suggested she start keeping an archive of wins. Like what have I accomplished? What have I learned? How have I grown? What things are being accomplished as a result of my work and my efforts?

And the benefit of the Archive of Wins was less about building this list she could show somebody and more about retraining her own mind around her value so that she wasn't immediately rushing to discount her value or to chase an impossible standard of perfection. So I think

especially if your confidence is taken hit in the face of a layoff or some other kind of challenging career circumstance, that it's so important to protect confidence and build confidence. Don't think about what isn't true or what you're missing. Every single person applying for that job is not perfect. Every single person applying for that job has a gap somewhere in skill or in experience. Don't focus on what you don't have. Focus on what you do have and build a ton of confidence around it.

We are talking with pricing and negotiation expert Casey Brown. When we come back, we're going to take a turn. We're going to talk about how to price your products and services the right way. And because we've got Casey here, we're also going to talk about tariffs and how they can affect you. Back in a sec.

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We are back with Casey Brown, pricing and negotiation expert. So let's start with pricing our own services, Casey. You said you underpriced yours at first and eventually needed to double your prices. That was what you realized, which scared the hell out of you. How did you come to that realization? And then how did you actually execute?

I took a look at the work that I was doing for clients, calculated their return, how their profitability had improved as a result of hiring me. This is back when I was a solopreneur, a team of one. And the work that I was doing and how that was generating benefit for them. And the return was sort of off the charts. It was like 100x the price tag. And I thought, you know, they need to win. I mean, it can't be 1x the price tag, but it doesn't need to be 100x the price tag. And I revisited a pricing strategy that really had me doubling my price overnight, which

after less than one year in business. And as you said, I was terrified. I was a single mom of two beautiful baby girls. I'm a truck driver's daughter from the wrong side of the tracks. You know, there's no cavalry to ride in and save the day. I had this, you know, this new business. And I was really scared. Like, what if I fail? And, you know, there's no one, there's no one to save me. It's all up to me. And so there was a lot of wrestling with fear and risk.

And especially if you sell a professional service. In other words, what you're selling is your expertise. You're a digital marketer or you're a pricing consultant or you're, you know, whatever, a service-based business. When we hear no, it can often feel like a very personal rejection. In other words, the customer saying, this price is too high, you know, it's not worth it, can feel like you're not worth it. Yeah. Right?

I don't value you. And so it's very easy in a professional services world to get our identity and our own worth caught up in how others value us. And I had to wrestle through all that. And kind of the key outcome of that in terms of advice I would offer is doubts and fears are normal, natural.

Totally reasonable that you feel that. It's just a terrible reason to be underpaid. They don't define your value. They don't define your worth. And they shouldn't limit your earning potential. So it's sort of a, you know, feel the fear and do it anyway kind of thing. And I confess the first few times I said that new doubled price, I felt it in my throat. I felt that tightness in my throat. I felt it in my stomach. But I did it anyway. And they stayed. They kept showing up. They kept saying yes because the value was there.

I have had the exact same experience and I do think it's a little fake it till you make it, right? You've got to just force those numbers out of your mouth and watch as the person on the other side says, okay, no prop. Right. Sounds fine to me. And then you realize like,

Like, shit, I should have charged more. Well, sure. Yeah. When they say yes too easily, it's bad news. But I would say remember that half of men think they can land a commercial airliner and 61% of men think they got the questions right compared to 46%. If we channel our inner white male counterparts, there's a little bravado there. But the bravado works because it's almost certain in my experience that we underestimate our own value.

In the eyes of who we're selling our products to, our services to, or ourselves to, we are harder on ourselves. There is more value being created. And so even if you don't 1,000% believe it, when you start doing it and, you know, when they said, okay, now it's like, well, that has to challenge my assumption that they would never pay that. That has to challenge my assumption that this couldn't work because it just did.

And courage is a skill, by the way. There's some really fascinating research. There was an article that came out in Forbes a few years ago. Courage is a skill that can be learned and through repeated practice. I think when it comes to saying a big number out loud that we're scared to tell somebody, if you haven't said it out loud, the first time you say it out loud should not be when you're on a Zoom call with your customer. You have to say it out loud. You have to practice it. You have to role play it. Like if you ask me, what's my zip code? I would say my zip code is 43202. Is that number too high or too low?

What do you mean? It doesn't matter. It's just a number. Like, I don't have any emotional connection to whether it starts with a one or a nine, right? Like none. And I don't think it's realistic that we're going to get to quoting pricing or quoting salary ranges that we're going to have no emotional connection to. But I think if we keep that example in our head of like, we want to move in that direction where the number doesn't have so much heaviness on an emotional level for us, which is rooted in an ability to say no and walk away. If we have no ability to walk away, we'll always end up price.

Yeah, 100%. All right, let's talk tariffs. We are recording this the week after President Trump got on the phone with the CEO of Walmart and told him that he thought Walmart should really eat the price differences that are due to the tariffs. Now,

Whether that is going to happen or not, you know far better than I do. Let's just stipulate tariffs are an unknown. They're a moving target at this point. How do you think this is all going to impact the way that we spend our money? And where is it going to impact us most?

Well, I don't have a perfect crystal ball, obviously. What I can tell you is there's some things about this round of tariffs that are the same as other rounds of tariffs. And I think that gives us a clue to what to expect. And there are things about this round of tariffs that are different. And I'll talk about how I think that affects what

what's going to happen, but it's my best guess, frankly. So the kind of what's the same. So if you look at all of history in the modern era, tariffs have an inflationary effect. They first affect the B2B market and then ultimately the B2C market. And I don't see that that is not going to happen. It's already happening. It's already having an inflationary effect in the B2B market and the B2C market is right on its heels. There's another

reality of that, which is, and this starts to deal with where things are different. So where things are different is there's so much uncertainty around

This like tariffs have been announced, paused, unpaused, increased, decreased, repealed. Exceptions have been added. There's been I have a little chart I'm keeping. There's about 23 different tariff actions that have happened since February. There's more than that, but I've captured the major ones. And that kind of constant change has its own meaning.

effect that I think is ultimately pretty costly to businesses trying to figure out how to navigate it because they put a plan in place and they put time and effort and resources into building a great plan. And then tomorrow they have to do that again. And the next day they have to do that again. And so I think every business owner that I'm speaking to is spending way too much of their available calories, so to speak, on figuring out this chaos and

And every calorie they spend there is not a calorie that's available for them to run a world-class business and produce world-class products and services. So I think it's a very distracting and time-consuming stressor on businesses. It's also making businesses much more risk-averse.

So they're not spending as much money. So like I said, there may be two open positions. And they're not filling them right now, because let's just see if we can hang on a little bit longer. They're pausing plan investments. They're slamming their checkbook shut. And they're not doing discretionary spending. And this is where there's a downstream effect, even if you don't sell products that are directly affected by tariffs, whether you're a manufacturer or distributor.

If, like, for example, my company, we are a training and consulting company. We don't import products. But some of our customers do, and they're getting more risk averse, and they're slamming their checkbook shut, which means they're saying, they call me and said, hey, I know we plan to kick off a program this quarter, but we think we want to wait until Q3 or Q4. Can you call us back in a couple months? And so this has this, like, this chilling effect, this slowing effect of,

across the whole economic spectrum. And so now my business, we're in the same boat. We're like, well, there were a couple of conferences we were going to attend and there was this other thing we're going to do, but we're going to pause some of that spending because, you know, we're seeing a slowing down of some demand. And so there's just no way this isn't going to trickle to every consumer in this country through many of the goods and services that they buy because costs are going to continue to rise.

Casey Brown, thank you so much for all the great advice. Thank you for being here. Thank you so much. I really enjoyed it. If you love this episode, please give us a five-star review on Apple Podcasts. We always value your feedback. And if you want to keep the financial conversations going, join me for a deeper dive.

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