Sebastian Wrobel is an energetic and passionate professional leader, helping companies achieve value and pricing excellence. Pushing digital transformation into lasting integration. Experienced in working closely with the C-suite and senior stakeholders to elaborate and drive major profit & growth optimisation plans. Building high performing teams by leveraging a collaborative and data driven leadership approach.
In this episode, Sebastian provides valuable insights on how to create the perfect title for a pricing book. The goal of which is to capture the attention of individuals driving pricing within a company.
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Why you have to check out today’s podcast:
- Understand the discovery process of value generation to come up with best pricing strategies
- Gain a deep understanding about value and pricing as Mark and Sebastian carefully examine various book titles on the subject
- Understand the discovery process around value and pricing
“Start your [pricing] journey wherever you are, and accelerate on your journey wherever you are. The investment is paying off, always.”
– Sebastian Wrobel
Topics Covered:
01:17 – A quick fun story on how he got lost for two days in the mountains
01:55 – What got him into pricing?
03:02 – Valugram as a company — what it does
07:30 – What most companies are missing out on in regard to value and pricing
08:04 – Understanding the ‘discovery process’
11:06 – Thoughts on value and pricing as understood by experts in their own fields
13:31 – Gaining business confidence
15:59 – Challenging the idea behind this title for a book: The Secret to Skyrocketing Profit
18:45 – Feedback on this title – Leveraging Value: CEO’s Blueprint for Driving Profits
22:40 – Will addressing CEOs in the book title encapsulates all other people who are driving pricing other than the CEOs?
24:53 – An analysis of the title – The Power of Value: The CEO’s Secret Weapon to Driving Profits
30:57 – Sebastian’s pricing advice
31:25 – How to connect with Sebastian
Key Takeaways:
“Value selling is not applicable to all products. Neither all client segments. Where it is applicable, you should do it properly.” – Sebastian Wrobel
“Gartner study shared that this is the critical aspect about winning deals, enabling buyers to make a decision in the right one.” – Sebastian Wrobel
“As pricing people, we tend to think in profits. But for me, leveraging value is more. Not only profit, but it’s about driving revenue, top line growth, and also customer loyalty.” – Sebastian Wrobel
Connect with Sebastian Wrobel:
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sebastian-w/
- Website: https://pricingworks.io/
- Website: https://www.valugram.com/
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.)
Sebastian Wrobel
Start your [pricing] journey wherever you are, and accelerate on your journey wherever you are. The investment is paying off, always.
[Intro]
Mark Stiving
Welcome to Impact Pricing, the podcast where we discuss pricing, value, and the inseparable relationship between them. I’m Mark Stiving, and our guest today is Sebastian Wrobel. Here are three things you want to know about Sebastian before we start. He is the CEO of Valugram. It’s a new startup and I can’t wait to hear what he’s doing. He’s a co-founder and managing director of Pricing Works, a consulting organization. He led pricing at Steelcase. I used to have a Steelcase desk when I was younger, and believe it or not, he got lost with his dad for two whole days. Okay, to be fair, it was in the mountains, but he had a search and rescue cub get him. That was amazing. Welcome Sebastian.
Sebastian Wrobel
Welcome Mark. Thanks for having me.
Mark Stiving
Oh, it’s always fun. So are you embarrassed to tell people that you got lost for two days?
Sebastian Wrobel
No. It’s basically one of the fun stories in my life, just because it was such an incredible event, first going to this mountain and then experiencing this circumstances of getting lost is something that you remember for lifetime, especially when when you arrive back and your mom is nearly killing your dad because he got lost with you as the son.
Mark Stiving
It was all his fault. I’m sure it’s all his fault. Okay. So quick reminder, you were on a couple years ago, but how did you get into pricing?
Sebastian Wrobel
I got into pricing already 25 years ago, really in a moment where the company I was in was struggling with gray market activities and I was the only person that was interested in pricing at that time and I was considered. Sebastian, you did something with pricing once you go on this pricing project. So Steelcase was basically, you mentioned it, one of the companies that was my last one in pricing when I was still in the corporate world on the side of myself, driving the pricing within an organization, not from the consulting or external side. And there we achieved really big changes on the holistic journey about pricing, value selling, and also usage of machine learning and advanced analytics.
Mark Stiving
Nice.
Sebastian Wrobel
Got all passionate about this theme.
Mark Stiving
I tell you, once you get into it, people need you and it’s fascinating how much influence and how much impact we have.
Sebastian Wrobel
Yes, absolutely.
Mark Stiving
So nice. And then I did want to ask quickly about Valugram because last time we had you on, you didn’t have a company called Valugram. What do you guys do?
Sebastian Wrobel
Valuegram is a software startup that helps enable sales in value selling and value negotiations. It’s a software that helps companies leverage the internal tools that are usually not accessible to salespeople. In fact, in my career, I was not only in pricing, I was also in procurement. So I have experience in life how difficult it is as a salesperson to have all the information needed at hand when negotiating with procurement and while being in pricing we have developed tons of Excel tools to help salespeople to quantify the return on investment, to compare competition and knowing the where I’m better off than my competitor. The point is all the Excel tools and now in the consulting world, I hear also from other consultants, we have developed this economic value calculator for our client. Okay, so what it’s in, how do you make it accessible to sales or it’s Excel or have some downsides, right?
And effectively what we do with Valugram, we help leveraging existing Excel tools to one degree transferring into a real sales app that is available real time for value selling, value negotiations, and value pricing on this dimension of competitive benchmark on value communication, value quantification and the negotiation part. Interestingly, this is just one piece on a change management journey from cost-plus or competitive-based selling to true-value selling. And this is, I think, what we share in common. Value selling is not applicable to all products, neither all client segments. By the way it is applicable, you should do it properly where organizations struggle. That’s the experience currently.
Mark Stiving
Nice. Well, that sounds fascinating. And one of these days maybe we’ll do this podcast again and we’ll dive deep into that. I want to understand better what you’re doing. But I’m going to set up the rest of the podcast for our listeners for just a second. A month or so ago, I had posted on LinkedIn that I’m trying to write a new book and I’m trying to find a title for my new book. And in the post I wrote what it is that I was thinking about, the topic of the book was going to be, and oh my gosh, I’ve gotten so many great ideas and great thoughts about what the title might be. Now as a listener, you probably don’t care about the title of the book. I get it. But here’s what you could and probably should care about.
And that is why we’re writing this book and the overall topic, because this is all about communicating the importance of your role to your company, to other people. And so let me tell you the reason I want to write this book. And then Sebastian had so nicely said, hey, you want to talk about titles on your podcast? It’s like, okay, let’s try that and see how it comes out. So first off, here’s the reason for the book. When I tell people I’m a pricing expert, there is no doubt in my mind what goes through their head is, oh, so you put a number on a product, isn’t that what pricing is? But if you’re in pricing, you know that pricing is so much bigger than that. It’s a hundred a thousand times bigger than that. So how do you describe what pricing really is? And then we’ll go on to say, as pricing people, if there’s one thing that we understand better than probably anybody else in our company, it’s how is it that customers value our products?
And once we understand how customers value our products, we use that to set prices of course. But shouldn’t we use that to help sell value? And shouldn’t we use that to help create marketing messages about value that truly resonate with our customers? And shouldn’t we use that to build products that customers truly value? And so, in my mind, value is really the driver to most business decisions, and yet most businesses have no idea what value means to their customers. So I’m going to pause there for a second. Sebastian, did I say anything there that you disagree with or do you want to amplify on anything I just put out?
Sebastian Wrobel
No, I think I agree with all of what you said. I think I would amplify on the topic that to sell and determine the value, you need to understand what matters for your clients. And in my consulting experience, I have found out that very often it’s very intransparent to salespeople what is delivered and whether it’s of value or not. Discovery process is what many companies are missing out on.
Mark Stiving
Yeah. And so what do you mean when you say the word discovery?
Sebastian Wrobel
Just let me make an example based on one of my projects. I had a client in the laboratory service industry, and what they usually were charging for was which type of laboratory testing they were providing to a client and whether it had to be delivered on rush or not. That was the basic principle, right? What is my input and output on this testing? The laboratory testings, for example, on certain meat testings or fruit vegetable testings are pretty standardized, whether it’s rush or not rush fee. Okay? Nothing very unique. What we did in planning a price adjustment, was the discussion.
What are they delivering to clients as well? And the issue how it came up was we had a very big key account client that was highly unprofitable, but a company was dependent on this client volume. And I got opposed by six people saying, we cannot increase the price to this client, uh, because they are so important. If they turn to competition, we are done. I said, okay, so let’s talk about what you deliver? What is happening there? So I went through a discovery process to understand how the service process looks to this client? And I discovered, first of all, I asked, okay, do they need something special? Oh yeah, we have a report just created individualized for them, and it’s integrated in the IT system. Oh, what is doing that? Yeah, they need it for the internal reporting and for the external audit and your individualization, what does it benefit?
Yeah, they save a lot of time. I said, oh, they save time. Who saves time there? This and this person. So, okay, what do you guess? How much time do they save per week? Let’s quantify it per year. And we said, okay, what do you believe? What is the person paid? And then we put just a price tag behind it, and said, oh, this is a value. Another one, oh yes, you need to deliver the samples to the client and pick up the samples. And we have adopted our routing to be the specific time of the client because they desired or asked for this to their convenience. I said, oh, to their convenience, what are you charging for that? You’re rooting for their convenience. Nothing. I said, okay, why? Yeah, it was already there 10 years ago. It was decided by the general manager. But have you ever challenged that? Is it still required today? And just going through what you deliver to your clients beyond your core product is sometimes a discovery that you find out there is much more value in what we are doing than we believe, and then to understand it and quantify makes the difference.
Mark Stiving
Yeah. I think that companies just do such a horrible job at understanding the value they’re actually delivering to their customers. I don’t think I’ve ever walked in the door of a company where they truly understood the answer to that question.
Sebastian Wrobel
I think there’s also one aspect in many of such companies, what I have recognized pricing and the understanding of value is determined by those, let’s say engineers, technicians, physicians, whoever is the expert in their domain, but they are not thinking about commercial topics and pricing. So I think yes, they probably did a better job, but not by intention, but without having the guidance how to do it better. I think your book might be a great discovery here.
Mark Stiving
Okay, so here’s what we’re going to do, I’m going to, by the way, I have business coaches, right? I think everybody should have coaches because it’s other people who can think about your business differently than you do and give you ideas. You never have to say yes to all of them. You get to choose what advice you’re going to take or not take. But to have a coach that cares about you and thinks about you is really valuable. And so what you’re going to hear are several different book titles that coaches and I have come up with, and you are allowed to make fun of them all you want, Sebastian, I don’t mind at all, but I’ll give you the very first one that we came up with and, and I fell in love with this title. We’re not going to use it for a bunch of reasons, but I fell in love with this title. It was called Ultimate Business Confidence Seven Secrets to Absolute Influence, Accelerating Sales and Immediate Profit Growth Completely Guaranteed
Sebastian Wrobel
Is it the title? More like an introduction.
Mark Stiving
Well, so if we take off the subtitle for a second and just call the title Ultimate Business Confidence. What I loved about that is that most CEOs or executives or people with P and L responsibility, they’re making decisions in the dark because they don’t really know, how do I decide which product to fund? How do I decide which market segment to go after? How do I decide? They don’t really know the answers to these questions. And here’s the answer to every one of those questions. What is your customer value? And as soon as you understand how customers think and what they value, it gives you confidence in the decisions you want to make.
Sebastian Wrobel
And it translates, if you manage also, then not only make the CEO understand it by the sales person being capable to enable the buyer to understand it, then it turns into success. The interesting comment I have, because you mentioned business confidence. In my experience, the capability to capture the price for the value delivered lies also in the area of confidence and competence. Confidence comes also from training, ability and skills at the negotiation table, which I have seen many companies are missing out on, equipping salespeople with those first insights and the capacity to translate it to the client to enable the buyer’s journey. By the way, a Gartner study shared that this is the critical aspect about winning deals, enabling buyers to make a decision in the right one.
Mark Stiving
Yeah. So I think it, the word confidence comes up a lot as I think about the types of things I do, and you probably feel it as well. And that we work with people and we give them the confidence to make decisions. And in fact, if you think about the inflation that we’ve been dealing with over the last few years, so many companies were afraid to raise prices because we haven’t done it in 40 years. What they really needed was confidence. It is okay to raise prices and how do we do that? So this word confidence, I fell in love with it, but then I sat down to try to outline the book and the book, I don’t want to write about confidence. I want to write about value. So I ended up nixing that title, that one doesn’t fit anymore. But I loved it at the time.
Sebastian Wrobel
Give me your next one.
Mark Stiving
Okay, here’s the next one, The Secret to Skyrocketing Profit. So that’s the title. Now I’m going to give you the subtitle , How Leaders Can Confidently Grow Their Companies Guarantee Product Success and Gain 17% More Margin Immediately. So one of my business coaches loves the rule of threes and says, hey, here are these three things we could put in the subtitle. And by the way, we deliver all these. You’re going to grow your company, you’re going to build better products, you’re going to get more margin. So we deliver on all of those.
Sebastian Wrobel
I would challenge one at least, I like the title. It’s more broad than value. But what I was struggling with, when you said you immediately achieve 17% of margin increase , because the word immediately is creating an expectation, I would claim no company, especially B2B business will deliver it. And even we consultants would fail on delivering it immediately.
Mark Stiving
I kind of agree with you on that one. This one business coach is like, no one cares if the number’s right, they care that you make the claim and it gets people’s attention. But I’m with you that I would be a little iffy about putting my name on the fact that I could deliver that every time.
Sebastian Wrobel
It’s interesting for me as a European, this sounds very American saying 17% or immediately, the big numbers. I think this would probably be a good title in the US. Not sure whether people in Europe would buy in instantly. Just considering the total differences.
Mark Stiving
I’m with you. And so now here’s some other feedback I got from that title. So if you just look at the title, the Secret to Skyrocketing Profit, I had several people say it sounds like an internet scam. So it’s one of those internet taglines you get in emails that say, here, open this email.
Sebastian Wrobel
Yes, I help you to generate a hundred leads a day that 10% turn into immediate orders.
Mark Stiving
Yes.
Sebastian Wrobel
To this degree, I would be sharing this one, but the question is, is there anything that you came up with next?
Mark Stiving
There is. Well, so the next one is the one that I put, I think I put this one on the comments in the LinkedIn. It’s not my most recent, but it’s one that I really like. And this one was Leveraging Value. So that’s the title. And then the subtitle would be the CEO’s Blueprint for Driving Profits. Now, just as a quick aside, my very first book was called Impact Pricing Your Blueprint to Driving Profits. And I liked that. I thought that was pretty good. It’s like, why don’t we just borrow that .So this one, Leveraging Value, the CEO’s Blueprint for Driving Profits. So first let me just pause. What do you think, what are the good things, the bad things?
Sebastian Wrobel
I like, first of all, the topic about leveraging value because it points out what it’s about. It’s about value and how to leverage it. And it implies that there’s a route to do this. So I like it a lot. And then I commented on your title, and I really like the idea about leveraging value. In terms of your audience, for me, as pricing people, we tend to think in profits, but for me, leveraging value is more, not only profit, but it’s about driving revenue, top line growth, but also customer loyalty. And I don’t know how to make this topic being part of it because, and this is the misconception. I’m a strong believer that if you are managing to first of all make your client understand the value you plan to deliver and you can quantify it, and lastly you deliver it, it will make your client loyal because they not only understood what is the value they will benefit from, but they also recognize that you are working against their aspiration, delivering the value. And ideally you also track record and monitor against it. And this is something that I think also more CEOs and salespeople would really buy in more if you want to sell the book to salespeople, not only CEOs, is about engaging with clients in a way of value generation that creates trust and lasting relations. And we know it’s much harder to find new clients than growing with an existing client base. And I think this is what might be part of the content, but this is what I would add in this dimension.
Mark Stiving
Okay. I like that way of thinking. And so here’s some thinking that I’ve been having recently. I’ve been thinking a lot that pricing has both short-term and long-term impacts. In fact, short-term impacts, we can have the fastest impact of any other department company, I mean, we can have immediate impact in profit and revenue, good or bad, right? And then we also have these really long-term impacts. And so I could see something like the CEO’s blueprint for driving long-term profits or sustainable profits or something like that and if I use that, it’s almost though, like, it ignores the short-term parts and I would want both short-term and long-term in there.
Sebastian Wrobel
Let me think about this.
Mark Stiving
You mean you don’t have all the answers immediately on top of your head?
Sebastian Wrobel
This one is tricky to make it catchy as in title, but definitely I would agree that it’s not only long term, but it’s short term.
Mark Stiving
Yeah. Let me ask you a specific question, I put the CEO’s blueprint and I intentionally chose the CEO mostly because I think CEOs of small and mid-size companies drive pricing. They have to be really involved. And I think that people who are P and L responsible for departments inside big companies would probably say, yes, I’m the CEO of my department. And so in my mind it says this, you want to read this book if you have P and L responsibility. I’m not really after salespeople only because my last book was Selling Value that was after salespeople. But this one I really want to talk to executives who are going to try to put it all together.
Sebastian Wrobel
Then CEOs make sense. The question would be, who is driving this kind of initiative? Because when it comes to P and L and profit, I see very often also CFOs helping initiating or accelerating such initiatives. Knowing also, this is at least my experience when looking at the European pricing community. Many experts are kind of rooted in finance and accounting or commercial excellence because there’s no job or education formally on pricing existing, not that I know beyond the certification from European pricing platform or Professional Pricing Society. But there is no formal education in pricing. And I have seen many financial leaders that were driving pricing initiatives. The question is, will they also consider this when your title is CEOs, you might miss this audience to a certain degree, not sure whether they consider them themselves.
Mark Stiving
Yeah, yeah. I think I should reach out to some people, some other executives besides CEOs and say, would this title turn you off or interest you because in a way, if I’m a CFO, I want to be a CEO. And so I probably want to know this, but I don’t know. I’ll have to ask, I’ll have to reach out to some and find out. Okay. Can I give you the last title that I’m working on? So this is my most recent, it’s the one I like the best so far. Although I did like leveraging value, I’ll say that. I didn’t tell you the comment I got from a bunch of people if they didn’t like the word leveraging.
It sounds too consultative, it wasn’t attention grabbing. And so now here’s the one that I’m leaning towards, as of now, and that is The Power of Value: The CEO’s Secret Weapon to Driving Profits.
Sebastian Wrobel
Sounds military.
Mark Stiving
What makes it sound? Oh, the weapon part.
Sebastian Wrobel
The secret weapon. But the power of value definitely sounds better than leveraging. You’re right. When comparing those to each other, I was thinking, accelerate value, but the power of value is like the power of 1%, right? This is very catchy and we talk as pricing concerns always about the power of price. I think it’s just a natural next step to talk about the power of value because it’s beyond, and it’s even bigger than the price itself. So I agree with that secret weapon. Definitely still, it’s a tool to discover and a concept to discover because I have seen people talking about value. Just recently, I was at a big automation fair in Munich, one of the world leading fairs. And I was discussing with a salesperson, they had nice stickers on the machines saying the clients will save that much energy, 50% or 40% improve ROI by 20%.
I said, okay, could you explain to me how you precise it? What does it mean concretely? How do you calculate it for a client? Ah, you know, we remain here generically. I said, yeah, but how do you want to sell when you remain generic? So obviously value is in the mouth of many people, but really exploiting it or, or leveraging the power is something people struggle with. So it’s still a secret weapon. I agree. The question is about weapons, and this may be my pacifist personality. I always struggle with this kind of military association, but it’s definitely a secret tool, weapon, however we call it.
Mark Stiving
So I guess when I release the European version, I’ll call it the CEO’s Secret Tool to Driving Profits,
Sebastian Wrobel
But you know, the tool, it sounds too technical. It might appear the engineers and the technicians, people that are about tooling and screws and hammers. For me, it’s missing which, and also the weapon is missing that because leveraging the power of value, also leveraging the power of people because it’s not just about tooling and it’s not about just the concept, it’s the salespeople that need to bring it to the client. And what I’m missing is this human side of this. But let me think about it. It’s difficult to come up with something great instantly.
Mark Stiving
Oh, you have no idea how much time I and my coaches have spent thinking about these things. So I have no expectation that you’re going to come up with something quickly.
Sebastian Wrobel
What about lever? It’s something very simple. It’s like coming from leveraging, but it’s a lever, right? It’s not the only one to boost P and L, impact top line, bottom line.
Mark Stiving
So replacing secret weapon with lever, the CEO’s lever to driving profits
Sebastian Wrobel
Or the CEO’s secret lever to…
Mark Stiving
Secret lever. That’s not bad. There’s something there.
Sebastian Wrobel
You remember I shared also with you, I had a kind of very awesome, negatively connected version of leveraging value or the power value top and bottom line bleeding because this is the other reality, right? And it’s the extreme of it. I see companies, and I think many companies will pay the bill. I had recently had a discussion. Many companies because of the poor price, performance and maturity they’re running over the last year, a flat increase overall for all clients not considering their competitive position, nor the value proposition. And I think many clients or companies will face challenges right now when clients will come back and say, the price increase I have received from you the last two years is not reflecting our partnership or the value you deliver compared to your competition. I think there will be a bill to pay in some companies because we had this topic about reflation, and I think this is also not understanding value on both sides. I think this makes it urgent to act on this dimension. So probably what is missing in your title maybe, or the subtitle, I think is a statement that there’s a high level of urgency working on it.
Because for me, this is considering the last two years in behavior and companies and price increases, I was looking at many announcements about price increases. And I’ve seen a lot of stuff going on and it was very often too simplistic, not micros-segmented, not purely thought through, right? Just, let’s make it fast because our costs are raising 10% overall, 5% overall, 7% overall three times a year. And I think the companies pushed some clients of opening to competition much more seriously than they ever have been thinking about it. And I think this was a strategic mistake made. And I think the companies are really now in urgency to act upon value proposition, value selling and value pricing.
Yeah, it would be nice to add some kind of urgency short term. I’m going to have to think about that. But Sebastian, we are already over my normal time, so, we’re going to have to wrap this one up. Let me ask, regardless of what we talked about today, what is one piece of pricing advice you’d give our listeners that you think could have a big impact on their business?
Sebastian Wrobel
Don’t think whether it’s worth investing, do it. That’s the biggest advice. Do it. Start your journey wherever you are and accelerate on your journey wherever you are. The investment is always paying off.
Mark Stiving
And I assume you’re talking about pricing journey,
Sebastian Wrobel
Pricing, value journey.
Mark Stiving
Yes, absolutely. Sebastian, thank you so much for your time today. If anybody wants to contact you, how can they do that?
Sebastian Wrobel
Just go on our webpage pricingworks.io or valugram.com, but value just with the U, without the E. And then you can reach out to me and book a meeting.
Mark Stiving
Alright, and to our listeners, thank you so much for your time today. If you enjoyed this, would you please leave us a rating and a review? You can get instructions by going to ratethispodcast.com/impactpricing. And if you have any questions or comments about the podcast or pricing, feel free to email me, [email protected]. Now go make an impact.
