Kevin Coppinger is currently the Director of Analytics in Ferrellgas. He is passionate about leading groups that turn large data into an asset, providing leadership the opportunity for insights and actions.
In this episode, Kevin shares his analytics journey as he talks about the importance of data in providing better service and becoming a better service provider in the field.
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Why you have to check out today’s podcast:
- Discover why data is power and how the understanding of it makes everything better
- Understand why an analyst needs to be a good overall communicator if he wants to be good at what he’s doing
- Find out how knowing your competitors help you understand where your company and your products should fit in the field
“Figure out who your top three competitors are and find their biggest weakness and their biggest strength when it comes to product offering and price.”
– Kevin Coppinger
Topics Covered:
02:40 – Talking about his failed CPA journey and how it led him to pricing
05:57 – Discussion about insurance, price segmentation, and the cost-plus model
09:20 – Ferrellgas and what Kevin does as he works there
14:04 – Ferrellgas tank users vs. non-Ferrellgas tank users and using analytics for overall betterment
20:16 – Why a good analyst needs to be a good interviewer and communicator nowadays
26:37 – How his background in accountancy helped him in switching to analytics
30:01 – Kevin’s pricing advice for the listeners
Key Takeaways:
“Price is the most important signal that a company sends to its consumers, but willingness to pay is almost as important as what they think of your actual product.” – Kevin Coppinger
“Customers would want to behave the way we wanted them to behave, so that they could control their price.” – Kevin Coppinger
“You should shop insurance every three years. I know it is a pain in the butt, it’s a hassle to move it especially if you’ve got all of your property insured with one place, but every three years, you should call just to check. It keeps your insurance company honest and it will most likely keep a couple of dollars in your pocket.” – Kevin Coppinger
“The more we know about the house and the more we can connect into how they use their energy, the better we can be for them and for ourselves.” – Kevin Coppinger
“Good pricing can only come with good data, and good data is usually tied to good understanding of your prices.” – Kevin Coppinger
“Data is power. Pure and raw data is pure and raw power and it is scary and it needs to be a little bit controlled and molded a little bit. But if you can help a company, if you can help analyst hone that data better, they become smarter, their companies become smarter, and us – we, as consumers – will inevitably benefit if more companies start using their data to much more intelligent fashion.” – Kevin Coppinger
People / Resources Mentioned:
- Ferrellgas: https://www.ferrellgas.com/
- AmeriGas: https://www.amerigas.com/
- Ivan Winfield: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ivanwinfield
- Eaton Hydraulics: https://www.eaton.com/us/en-us.html
- Syngenta: https://www.syngenta.com/en
- Resideo: https://www.resideo.com/us/en/
Connect with Kevin Coppinger:
- Email: [email protected]
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kmcoppinger
Connect with Mark Stiving:
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stiving/
- Email: [email protected]
Full Interview Transcript
(Note: This transcript was created with an AI transcription service. Please forgive any transcription or grammatical errors. We probably sounded better in real life.)
Kevin Coppinger
Figure out who your top three competitors are and find their biggest weakness and their biggest strength when it comes to product offering and price.
[Intro]
Mark Stiving
Today’s podcast is sponsored by Jennings Executive Search. I had a great conversation with John Jennings about the skills needed in different pricing roles. He and I think a lot alike. If you’re looking for a new pricing role or if you’re trying to hire just the right pricing person, I strongly suggest you reach out to Jennings Executive Search. They specialize in placing pricing people. Say that three times fast.
Mark Stiving
Welcome to Impact Pricing, the podcast where we discuss pricing, value, and the quantitative relationship between them. I’m Mark Stiving and my mission is to help your company win more business at higher prices. And helping us do that today is our guest, Kevin Coppinger. Here are three things you’d want to learn about Kevin before we start.
He’s currently the Director of Analytics at Ferrellgas. Early on, he was in Pricing Analytics which is going to be very relevant, and he’s bilingual. He speaks both Analytics and English.
Welcome, Kevin.
Kevin Coppinger
Thanks for having me today, Mark. Looking forward to our conversation.
Mark Stiving
It’s going to be a lot of fun. I have read that on your LinkedIn profile that you were accused of being bilingual or credited with being bilingual. It’s a hard skill.
Kevin Coppinger
A former boss called me that and he put it a little bit more eloquently. He’s like, you speak salesman and you speak nerd. There’s not many people that can do that. I’m like, okay, that sounds like a good thing. He’s just like, yes, because the field has real problems and the nerds – the analyst – usually have the solutions, but there’s usually a disconnect because they do not speak the same language. So, I’ve made a decent life and career out of being able to understand both sides.
Mark Stiving
And I got to say how important that is in so many different fields, right? Especially in the field that you’re in right now. If you’re going to try to take analytics and apply them to different business problems, then that’s really important. I work a lot with product managers, and product managers have to do the same thing where they’re trying to translate customer speak into engineering speak and somehow be that go between. So, it’s pretty fascinating.
So, I normally start the interview off with the question how did you get into pricing? Is that a fair question for you? How did you get into pricing?
Kevin Coppinger
Absolutely. By being a failed accountant. That might sound odd, but I went to school to become a CPA. I lasted one tax season, my friend. What I found what I liked in tech school was when the puzzled, you know, there was pieces missing, you had to go in there and do the forensic piece and find the missing transactions, find the missing data. Being a tax accountant is far from that.
So, after one tax season, I went back and got my MBA. The summer of 2018. When I finished, I knew I wanted to move out of St. Louis first where I was born and raised. So, I moved up to Chicago and took a job with Allstate Insurance. I will forever have a soft spot in my heart for that company, because right before I joined, they spent many, many millions of dollars buying a brand new chunk of third-party data that allowed us, large insurance companies, to take our rates and compare it to the top five or 10 competitors for every state. In an individual basis, we could send our own policies through. We could send our own quotes through it. We could also look at what everybody else was quoting it. Real quick aside, it helps that the insurance industry is heavily mandated and it’s kind of forced to share information, but what happened was they hired about six of us all within a month of each other and they just said, “We know we’re overpriced. Insurance, you can’t be underpriced, right? Because you don’t know your true costs until after Mark or whomever gets in an accident. So, take this information and figure out a way where we can maintain our premium position while finding and being more competitive with the customers we want.” And for insurance companies, that’s generally anybody between the ages of 25 and 55. That chunk of family hood if you will, where you’re going to have a car too, you’re going to have a house, you’re going to have some kids, you might even have a toy, you probably have a life insurance, that’s where – from an insurance standpoint – you make the most sense from a risk perspective.
That almost four year journey for me was really, really fun and what it taught me was that price is the most important signal that a company sends to its consumers, that’s true, but willingness to pay, so the price consumers are willing to pay, is almost as important as what they think of your actual product. So again, finding that balance between the product we offer and the price in which the consumer was willing to pay it, that’s why I fell in love with the signal of price.
Mark Stiving
That’s actually a brilliant answer. I appreciate that.
Kevin Coppinger
No problem.
Mark Stiving
I appreciate that.
So, the big question that just jumped into my mind as you were talking about that, I want to go into some of my content real quickly and that is I often talk about price segmentation and charging different customers different prices. And what I would want to ask is did you charge a different price to existing customers vs. new customers? Did you charge a different price to customers who were competing with us against one company vs. we knew they were bidding a different company? These are fabulous questions. I’m just curious if you guys were able to do that.
Kevin Coppinger
We were able to do some. So, the good thing about insurance is you can, again, there is just terabytes of data going back since forever, so you can cut up your customers a million different ways. We had multi-level segmentation that was based off of their driving record, their age, their employment, their sex, their marital status, their credit rating that was for their car, for the home, you take those things and then you would also add in variables about the house. How big is it? What’s the pitch of the roof? What kind of property are they going to buy?
Mark Stiving
Let me pause you for a second because we just ought to for a second. The things that you described to me, I would have said, almost fit in a cost-plus model. Because I want to know, who’s the bigger risk? Where am I getting my bigger costs? And what I really love in price segmentation is who’s willing to pay more?
Kevin Coppinger
Well, and so where I was going to go is with both home and auto, there was the behavior of the consumer that kind of went to that cost plus model. We know based off of Mark’s attributes that he’s going to cost us x amount of dollars. We think he’ll stay with us for x amount of years. Charge him this. But then we would present opt-in discounts, pay in full, payment discounts like either pay as you go, electronic records, if you could prove how educated you were, if you bought a telemetric thing. So, you know, hey, if you want to prove that Mark isn’t like all of the other Marks, take this little box and plug it into your car. And from there, the customer got to feel like they had a fighter’s chance to control some of the aspects of price. And the more in depth we got with those opt in discounts, and started walking away from just the age and the type of car you’re driving, (a) our premium, our cost model got a lot better because we were actually ensuring the right people, but (b) our customer loyalty actually grew because we would have new customer discounts that would trigger as those fell off, loyalty discounts would come up. So again, customers would want to behave the way we wanted them to behave, so that they could control their price.
Mark Stiving
Nice. All of us think of that. It’s something called behaviors or hurdles where we’re putting hurdles in people’s way to say, prove to me you’re price sensitive and I’m not going to do that, so I love this whole thing. By the way, I hope my insurance company is not listening, but I got an offer for one of those little modules and I just said no because I know that I don’t drive safely.
Kevin Coppinger
So, if I can make an advertisement to all of your listeners, you should shop insurance every three years. I know it is a pain in the butt, it’s a hassle to move it especially if you’ve got all of your property insured with one place, but every three years, you should call just to check. It keeps your insurance company honest and it will most likely keep a couple of dollars in your pocket.
Mark Stiving
Okay, maybe I’ll try that one of these days.
Okay. Let’s jump into what you’re doing nowadays. So, you’re in Ferrellgas and you’re running Analytics.
Kevin Coppinger
Yes, Sir.
Mark Stiving
How much of that is pricing?
Kevin Coppinger
To date, I’ve been there for just over 15 months. We haven’t jumped into the pricing realm right now. Part of that is we’re updating our ERP, our CRM, and our pricing module. So, we’ve been getting into the pricing game for a while because we were getting a bunch of new toys that would make pricing the actual, you know, operation of pricing a heck of a lot easier than it is today at Ferrellgas.
But one of the things that we’ve talked about, because this is probably going to be a late q1 effort for my team and I at Ferrellgas, you know, we need to understand our customers better. We’ve got about a half a million individual consumers out there that have a big tank in their yard and that’s how they consume energy. Then we’ve got, you know, a couple of 20-30,000 business customers that have big tanks, they put it on construction sites. And then, there’s open market customers who can come and go as they please, maybe they might be residential, maybe they have their own tank. But what these different types of customers present to us is a different way to price and actually just a different way to treat our customers.
So, one thing that we’re trying to deal with at Ferrellgas, we show up at your door maybe three or four times a year. We fill your tank, not you, you’re in the desert, but me in Minnesota, they fill up my tank, and then about three weeks later, I’m going to get an $800 bill. That sticker shock. No matter who you are, we understand it. Most consumers would much rather pay an average price over the course of the year instead of getting two, three, four gigantic bills. So how can we take the function of pricing and billing and use that as an opportunity to open up the pricing gates if you will? The pricing conversation with some of our larger customers, some of our more consistent customers.
At the end of the day, it’s propane and it’s a commodity. So, you know, if our inputs go up, we’re going to have to push that down to the consumer. If they go down, we try to push some of that back as best we can; we got to hedge a little bit. But again, with propane, it’s one kind of product, it is a commodity, so what we want to do is we want to take the sticker shock away. That will allow us to embed, we believe, not just better customer service but more services for our customers and again, maybe take up their prices, maybe allow us to segment a little bit better.
Mark Stiving
So, two things jump to mind real fast. Back when I was living in California, I remember that PG&E actually had a program where they would balance out your bill so you didn’t have the spikes in the summer, in the winter. So, they just charge you the same amount all year round and of course that had to modify us as prices changed. So just want to share that with everybody. But the second one, I would be really remiss if I didn’t chastise you for a second, because you used the word that I never use unless it’s in a derogatory sentence, and that is the word “commodity”. You said we are a commodity. And so, what I much prefer to hear pricing people say, now I get it, you’re not a pricing person, you’re an analytics person, but what I much prefer your pricing people say is, “Here’s how we differentiate ourselves. These are the services we offer. These are the things that we do.” Because as soon as we say we’re a commodity, then we have zero control over pricing.
Kevin Coppinger
I’ll gladly take that lecture because you hit exactly where we know we can start to differentiate. We have some of the best drivers. We have the strongest fleet. We have some of the best service techs in our industry. We don’t just want to have people think of us as their energy provider. We want to be more of a service provider. So, when I said commodity, it’s because that’s how we are viewed today. Again, with some of the new systems and toys we’re trying to get, it’s going to allow us to push, we believe, away from that commodity mindset to our consumers, and again, more in a service-based type of customer interaction.
Mark Stiving
Yep. And so now, I’m really curious and maybe you don’t want to answer these questions, but I’m really curious. You describe to me, let’s just talk about two different types of customers – the customer that has a Ferrellgas tank and the customer that owns their own tank – and I’m going to assume that means that a Ferrellgas customer has to buy gas from you, someone who has the tank that is your tank. Then, do we charge them different prices?
Kevin Coppinger
Yes. So, if I’m to understand correctly, if they lease our tanks, our Ferrellgas tanks, by law, we are the only people that can fill that tank. Now, the customer still has power. They can tell us at any moment, “Hey, come get this thing off my lawn. I called AmeriGas. I called whomever.” But at the end of the day, we get to charge them a tank rental fee, and that’s somewhat how we differentiate. Then, when customers come in, the price they pay is going to be based off of our margins and our costs at the time.
Again, our pricing today is relatively simple and old school and we’re trying to become a little bit better. Customer on tank, those are the people that we want to understand better because they can come and they go, right? So, we would call them a price chaser. So, if Ferrellgas is going to cost him and charge him $5 a gallon and AmeriGas is going to cost him for now $4.95 a gallon, today, they’re going to call AmeriGas because they can. There’s no obligation to Ferrellgas or to whomever because they own their own tank.
Again, that’s where we see our opportunity for customer on tank, people that own their own tank, my apologies, is, yeah, you’re going to chase price, but we can provide better services. Here’s the things that we want to be able to do so that, you know, we might be a little bit more expensive than the other guy, but you know, when we show up, we’ll be there on time, we’ll be easy to deal with, and then there’s a slew of other things that we can do to make your whole experience better, whether it be overall lower energy costs, lower usage, these are just some of the things that we’re talking about.
Mark Stiving
I mean, those are great. And as I think through those two customers for a second, it seems to me that the person, a customer own tank, that’s where you’ve got the most opportunity to add value and charge a little bit extra for the value. And I think what happens with a Ferrell own tank is that eventually, a customer says, you know, “they’re always a nickel more expensive. I’m going to switch to these other guys.” And it’s a pain in the derriere to switch. There’s no doubt in my mind. And so, then after they’ve switched, they realized, “Well, look at all these services that I was getting with those guys that I’m not getting with these other guys.” And they don’t really want to switch back because it’s just so hard to switch, right?
So, I think the interesting part is going to be convincing your current customers, the ones that that own your tanks, no, sorry, the ones that use your tanks, that the value that you’re delivering is way better than the competition, because they don’t get to experience both.
Kevin Coppinger
Absolutely. And that is on the mind of myself and some of the operational leaders across Ferrellgas that I have the pleasure of working with, my boss as well.
So, one of the things that we’re trying to do is how can we be more timely with our deliveries? If we show up too early, it’s not an efficient delivery for us. If we show up too late, we run the risk of running somebody out of gas, which means they’re freezing their butts off in the middle of winter and we don’t want that. So, the fine line is how can we – and this is where my area comes in – how can we use analytics and data science to better predict when people are about to be out of gas? We have some people that are plugged into a tank monitor but not everybody, so we have to guess on a lot of folks. On our customer own tanks, they just call. They will call no matter what to make room for more will call customers to call, and for us to be ready quickly, we need to be better at overall demand forecasting. And if we do that, our overall expense load comes down, our service level in terms of timeliness and efficiency can go up, and at that point, we can then go to our customers and we can start asking them some really interesting questions which will allow us to segment like, how do you truly use your gas? How big is your house? Can you tell us a little bit more demographically about your house? about yourself? about your family? Because when we start to get those data points, and this is where my data science team is really, really just chomping at the bit, we can really start to segment our customers. There’s an obvious benefit to price, but there’s some benefit to marketing and retention and operations as well.
Mark Stiving
Are you collecting data or can you buy data from Nest thermostats or some of the electronic thermostat companies?
Kevin Coppinger
We’ve talked about that. You know, I report to the CIO, Ivan Winfield, and we talk all the time on where can we source better information on our customers: the Amazons, the Googles, even the videos of the world where I came from before I was at Ferrellgas, right? Everything is connected, right? Whether it be thermostat, your water heater, your faucets, everything can be plugged in, and all of that leads to understanding how they use their energy and their water. It’s probably not going to be something that we tackle in obviously 2021. Maybe we start piloting something in 2022. But again, we know that the more we know about the house and the more we can connect into how they use their energy, the better we can be for them and for ourselves.
And that, just speaking from an analytics perspective, having that marriage between using data to become better for your customers and to become better as a company yourself, that’s the balance that I’ve always tried to strive for in all the years that I’ve worked in, because that’s the power of data, right? There’s upstream and there’s downstream. Price is usually tied right to the hip with analytics. I’ll be honest. They are brother and sister; they are husband and wife. Good pricing can only come with good data, and good data is usually tied to good understanding of your prices. So, they’re usually walking together.
Mark Stiving
Yes, absolutely. When you do data analysts analytics. So, one of my favorite questions that we always face is the difference between causality and correlation. how do you deal with that inside the company and who actually understands the difference? I’m going to assume that you do.
Kevin Coppinger
Sometimes. Sometimes, it can be hard because you’ll do the algorithm, you’ll do the model, you’ll just do the math and it’ll say, look, there’s a shiny blinking right. A has to equal b, because a moves with B, and either directly or inversely, but they’re modelled the same way. Then from an analyst perspective, you get excited. You’re like, oh, I think I found it. But there has to be a little devil’s advocate in your head or maybe your colleagues sitting next to you, they say, okay, but what if it’s not? How can you then prove that it is or is not? So, you take a little bit of the scientific method approach.
But overall, Mark, one thing that I’ve found, and this is what I’ve taught every team that I’ve ever been a part of or managed, when you’re a good analyst, you need to have your suite of tools and toys. You need to probably have a little bit of code experience. You need to know Tableau or Power BI. Obviously, you have to know Excel. You have to know some of the bigger databases. And you have to be good at math, right? But those are table stakes. You can learn those things. A good analyst today has to be one heck of an interviewer, because it’s me talking to my customer Mark and understand what his mission is and the data points that he thinks he needs vs. what I have at the ready for him and what we can develop over time. That will help tease out some of those red flags those red herrings if you will and allow us to truly find the things that are actually connected through causality and not just correlation.
And again, if you’re a good interviewer and you are a decent communicator, a good analyst is I tell my team, they need to be with their customers at least every two weeks, have a 30 minute, have a 60-minute touch base with your customers, show them what you’re working on, show them where you’re stuck. It’s not that you need to show them a new pretty dashboard every single time you talk with them, but you’d want to show them how you’ve moved the ball forward based off of the missions that they’re trying to accomplish. And that constant feedback allows that relationship to grow and allows my analysts to understand their problems better, and it also helps our customers understand how we develop and some of the things that we need to have a better understanding of so that again, we can be better together.
Mark Stiving
Yep. So, I want to come back to the analogy I use really early in our interview where I talked about product managers. And so, what’s really funny about product managers is if you take them out of the picture for a second, you’ve got customers who have problems and they need stuff, you have engineers who can design products and stuff but they don’t really understand the customers and the problems really well, so we put product managers in the middle so that they can speak both worlds, right? So, I need to know what the customer’s problems are and I need to know a lot about what’s possible in engineering. And I think that exact same thing is true in the world of analytics. I could take some really powerful statisticians who are unable to truly understand the problems but they know math and formulas and coding exceptionally well and we can’t get to the problem. Or I can take a business person who doesn’t understand what’s possible with statistics and analytics and data and I’ll never know that I can go try to tackle that problem. So, it really takes somebody in the middle like that product manager and it sounds like you’re trying to get your people to play that role.
Kevin Coppinger
Yeah, I think that would be correct. I would frame it a little bit differently, right? Because we’re not just trying to understand our products, right? It’s our operations. It’s our marketing. But yeah, it’s us trying to be the conduit between how the business needs to function and how the business needs to operate vs. all of the data, all of the proof, and then my team in the middle being able to speak both of those directions to form up the correct story.
And when I say correct, you probably have heard this in one way or the other, statistics never lie but liars use statistics, right? It’s true. Figures never lie, I forget the other version of it, but a good analyst can make numbers say whatever they want. It’s their job, though, to make sure that it says not what the business people want or not what the actuaries want or what the accountants want. It’s just that they have to boil it down to the truth. Because one I’ve worked in the analytics and pricing world long enough to know that if you put together a story that makes people happy, it’s not going to get the job done. A good dashboard, a good data driven story should be shocking. Not whole, holistically shocking, but there should be elements that people will be like, really? A equals B, huh? I didn’t know that. Are you sure? Yup. We’ve tested it. Because when they have those aha moments, their biases start to fall and they’re much more receptive to actually using new tools and new data than what they’ve always had.
So, I’ll tie this back to project managers or product managers. Some of the best product managers I ever worked with were at Eaton Hydraulics. I was there from between 2011 and 2015 and Eaton did a really good job of vetting good engineers who could also speak human. I hope that’s, you know, a bit of a joke there, but they would have them, you know, design products for a couple years and then they would put them out in the field and they would make them sell stuff for maybe a quarter, maybe a year, but they would force them to grow that skill set, so that when they became product managers and they sat in the middle and they were defending the customer’s needs with the products that we were trying to provide, they had a much more grounded version of what they could deliver and how they could deliver it.
Mark Stiving
I think that’s brilliant. I have one more question before I hit you with the last question. As I looked through your LinkedIn profile, nothing in there jumped out at me that said “I studied statistics or analytics or big data.” And so, I’m going to assume that you didn’t do that in school. How did you learn it?
Kevin Coppinger
I mean, the good thing about accounting is it’s two mile wide and an inch deep across pretty much all the mathematical categories you can have. So, I had a decent knowledge of most mathematical concepts outside of physics, coming out of school. Also, when you learn accounting, you have learned some database design, some reporting basics, because you’re going to make payrolls, you’re going to make, you know, the 10-40s, you’re going to make the year-end financials.
Again, when I got to Allstate, the mission was so interesting to me, and again, the timing, more of anything, I lack more than anything else, allowed me to have to work for a company that had a mission that I really, really understood and that I was really passionate about. And 2008-2009, when I was getting started, that’s when Tableau was really, really coming out. That’s when data lakes were starting to be more not just conceptual, but actually something you could live into. Cubes were becoming a lot better. So over time, again, I just had this inner drive because I wanted to help this mission. I wanted to help us become better for our customers, for our agencies, right? Because at the end of day, insurance, you’re trying to help people. We don’t ever want you to think about your insurance company, because the day you do is the day you’re in a car accident or something happens to your house. It’s not a good day, right?
Mark Stiving
And the day I pay my bill.
Kevin Coppinger
Today, you go on easy payments or just take it out of my account. I don’t care, right?
So, for us, we were trying to become better for our customers and our agencies, and again, I just love the mission. And then I’ll be honest, Mark. Again, I’m lucky more than I am good. All the companies I’ve worked for, Allstate, Eaton, Syngenta, Resideo, now Ferrellgas, the mission at hand, whether it be growing an analytics department, fixing pricing, helping understand a specialized corn breed – that’s what I did at Syngenta – the mission was inspiring enough to where I learned.
And you know, analytics is a buzzword and it has been for about, about 15 years, so there’s no shortage of information. And the good thing about most analytics professionals I found is that they’re open source. If I figured out how to code one chunk of data to move in a certain way to represent it in another way, I can guarantee you there’s another nerd out there that’s having the same problem. So, I’m going to share my information on a bunch of different message ports, because I want there. If I can help them along, I’m not just helping them but I’m helping another company become smarter.
That’s why I’m really in this thing, this analytic space. It’s because data is power. Pure and raw data is pure and raw power and it is scary and it needs to be a little bit controlled and molded a little bit. But if you can help a company, if you can help analyst hone that data better, they become smarter, their companies become smarter, and us – we, as consumers – will inevitably benefit if more companies start using their data to much more intelligent fashion.
Mark Stiving
Alright, Kevin, we’re going to have to wrap this up. I have a final question for you. What’s the one piece of pricing advice you would give our listeners that you think could have a big impact on their business?
Kevin Coppinger
That is a good one. Figure out who your top three competitors are and find their biggest weakness and their biggest strength when it comes to product offering and price. Everybody’s good at something. Everybody’s screwing something up. That competitive intelligence will, in my opinion, help you understand where your company and your products can fit, where they should fit, and then how to bridge that gap because there’s usually a gap, right? Because everybody wants to, they’re here and they want to go there. Well, to cross that bridge, you can’t just look at your own costs, you can’t just look at your own margins. You need to look at your customers. But I would hone it into what they’re good at and what they’re not good at because I can avoid what they’re good at and I can try to take advantage of what they’re not good at.
Mark Stiving
And I would add on top of that, take a look at your customers and choose the customers who appreciate what they’re not good at and you are good at.
Kevin Coppinger
Now that’s the giant piece because that’s okay, I know Mark’s not good at A, B, and C. How do I use that? I’ve got to go find customers who care about A, B, and C and try to bring them in.
Mark Stiving
Kevin, thank you so much for your time today. If anybody wants to contact you, how can they do that?
Kevin Coppinger
[email protected] or LinkedIn. I’m one of the many Kevin Coppinger, honestly. There’s me and a Chief of Police up somewhere in Boston. Those are usually the top search ones, but [email protected] is probably the best one. I will respond pretty quickly.
Mark Stiving
And we will likely spell your name correctly, so that’ll be easy to find.
Kevin Coppinger
I appreciate that.
Mark Stiving
Alright. Episode 154 is all done. Thank you for listening. If you enjoyed this, would you please leave us a rating and a review? They’re extremely valuable to us. And finally, if you have any questions or comments about the podcast or pricing in general, feel free to email me: [email protected].
Now, go make an impact.
Mark Stiving
Thanks again to Jennings Executive Search for sponsoring our podcast. If you’re looking to hire someone in pricing, I suggest you contact someone who knows pricing people. Contact Jennings Executive Search.
