Karan Sood had the privilege of overseeing revenue management for over $6 billion in revenue across a diverse range of industries during the past decade. Throughout this experience, he gained a deep understanding of the critical role that pricing plays in business success.
In this episode, Karan explains how to effectively map out touch points within organizations to help individuals understand the significant impact pricing can have on business success.
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Why you have to check out today’s podcast:
- Understand the challenges that come with the pricing role and learn how to strike a balance when interacting with other roles in the company for them to understand pricing’s role in business success
- Gain insights on how sales flow through pricing
- Learn how pricing intersects with strategy and marketing
“Map out your pricing touchpoints in marketing, supply chain, finance…everyone! And then figure out how your pricing should operate in the organization.”
– Karan Sood
Topics Covered:
01:29 – What led him to pricing and how that internship led him to one job after another
05:46 – Pricing as strategy and marketing
07:40 – Important thoughts on pricing underrepresentation
10:34 – Why there aren’t VP of Pricing titles in most organizations
11:34 – The friction role that go with pricing
13:44 – How does pricing relate with sales enablement?
21:53 – What happens when you’re mainly pricing and not enabling sales teams
24:56 – Likely reason for sales prevention team existing in the sales enablement team
25:43 – Causes of over-discounting and how not to fall into the trap
28:17 – Karan’s best pricing advice
Key Takeaways:
“Pricing sits at the heart of the organization.” – Karan Sood
“It’s [pricing] not guesswork, but it’s guesswork with a framework in a way that there’s no one perfect price.” – Karan Sood
“I don’t worry about that price per se anymore because I know with the right leverage with the customer and internally in the organization, I can move that needle.” – Karan Sood
Resources/People Mentioned:
- Philip Kotler: https://www.pkotler.org
- Robert Dolan: https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/profile.aspx?facId=6449
- Thomas Nagle: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thomas-tom-nagle-2bb2288/
- Yellow Pages: https://www.yellowpages.com
Connect with Karan Sood:
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/soodkaran/
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.)
Karan Sood
Map out your pricing touchpoints in marketing, supply chain, finance…everyone! And then figure out how your pricing should operate in the organization.
[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 enabled relationship between them. I’m Mark Stiving. Our guest today is Karan Sood, and here are three things you want to know about Karan before we start. He is currently director of sales operations at Rakuten Kobo. I hope I pronounced that correctly. He was the global director of pricing at Iovate Health Sciences, and he’s been in pricing at the Yellow Pages at Mitsubishi, at GM. He’s had a fabulous experience. Welcome, Karan.
Karan Sood
Thanks, Mark. Thanks for having me.
Mark Stiving
Hey, how did you get into pricing?
Karan Sood
Funny story dates back to 200. I was doing my MBA at the University of Windsor Head Canada, and we were supposed to find our first internship for the summer and beyond. And I did not find one. I did not find one for the longest time, new in the country still, finding my wheels. And then somehow one day General Motors stumbled in the university looking for interns because their choice of college, they were too late. A couple of us were interviewed and we were introduced for financial analyst jobs. And then we got it. And then when I read my cover letter, it said, my offer letter said Pricing analyst. And I was like, okay, pricing must be something that we do in financial analysis.
And that’s how I got my break in pricing, GM, worked there for almost a year and a half after that. And then one thing after another, I was looking for pricing, one job after another, then went on to work in Mitsubishi and then Yellow Pages. And as you said, Iovate and now. So it was a chance career. I was not looking for a job in pricing. It just happened to be, but I’m glad it took me into that path that has been very rewarding and a great learning experience. I’ve worked with several people in New York.
Mark Stiving
Nobody ever looks for a job in pricing or for their first job in pricing.
Karan Sood
Yeah. Like never, right. It didn’t exist. And now people say a lot about, hey, there’s a university degree in pricing and Tim’s worked on some stuff at universities and all that kind of fun stuff. But 2007, no. The only thing when I googled pricing after I got the job at that time was this one course at, I can’t remember if it was somewhere MIT or somewhere that was just an online course that was offered in pricing at that point. I’m like, okay, maybe I’ll read up on that. But that was it. Because no one went to school for the pricing of Philip Kottler’s book. Had like four pages on pricing in the marketing mix book, right? Like, so it was an eyeopener. Once you get in there and they’re like, hey, we’re going to talk about the pricing lifecycle. We are going to talk about part pricing, we are going to talk about engine pricing and so on and so forth. And it was fascinating and very archaic at the same time in automotive. So yeah, it was how I landed in pricing.
Mark Stiving
So why did you stay, out of curiosity? So you ended up at GM, you did your internship. So you tasted pricing, but you weren’t really a pricing person yet.
Karan Sood
No, I was not. And that’s another funny story. After GM I was looking for, and this was GM at the height of the 2007, 2008 auto downturn, right? So in 2008, the contract was no longer renewed. It was done. And then I was looking for my next role, and then I was like, no, I want to work in something flashy, strategy and marketing. That’s where I’m going to go. So I got to this marketing analyst role at Mitsubishi for the interview. Halfway through the interview, the interviewer stopped me and he was like, you know what, maybe this is not the role for you, but we have another role opening up because we are starting our part distribution center in Canada and we need a pricing analyst.
And I was like, maybe that was his polite way of saying that, hey, your interview didn’t go well, so let’s just call it a day. So like, okay, sure. And three days later he called me and the next day he brought me in front of the director for supply chain at that time. And I got the next pricing role. And I was like, you know what? It has to be some sort of serendipity that I got called in for an interview and they offered me a role that I didn’t want, so maybe I might as well try. So yeah, that’s how I landed the second role in pricing. And then after that I think it was a flywheel effect after that. Like, once you have the experience and it’s a niche and it felt like there were not a lot of roles, but the roles that were there were quite nice and had some good visibility and good elements to it. So I then stayed.
Mark Stiving
Okay. So let’s jump to a slightly different topic, but very related. You said when you went to get your second job, you really wanted to work in strategy and marketing. You have to admit that what you do today in pricing is a lot like strategy and marketing.
Karan Sood
It only came full circle back after a few years. I would say Yellow Pages after that was a good learning experience. Like it was six years and you’re in an industry that is declining. The print industry was declining. Online is increasing. And that time we sort of, got my cross-functional hat going in terms of like, hey, how do we work with marketing for new products? How do you work with the supply chain for older products that are discontinuing, how to make sure that we don’t print too much and we have the right size and everything. So it’s only then I realized over time how cross-functional this is. And now I say, a slightly controversial statement that people don’t like. Sometimes it triggers a lot of people. It’s like, hey, pricing sit at the heart of the organization in a way.
Because you remember like you got sales, you got a product. Product can only happen after you basically say that, hey, the value and the pricing equation will make sense. So let’s make the product. And then you go to finance to get the cost, which is again, is a very cross-functional area, right? And then you go to the supply chain to figure out your forecast and demand, which is again, a function of price. And then you go to sales who’s selling, which is again a function of price because you are going to give them the value story, you are going to give them the sales technique. So there’s marketing coming in and then, yeah, customer success. Like, it’s hard for me to not, at this point in my career, it’s hard for me to not pinpoint at any role in your organization and say, hey, let me figure out what the pricing touch point with that person is. Because I think that there’s always this, I can already figure out, like when there’s no touch point. So that is slightly controversial for people. Sometimes I think I’m a little cuckoo saying that, but I stand right.
Mark Stiving
So, although I might have described it slightly differently, I agree completely, but why is it that pricing is so underrepresented when it really and truly should be the heart of the company?
Karan Sood
I have two points that I think the academic research into pricing going into like 2000 wasn’t there. Didn’t happen in the nineties and eighties and the seventies and not a lot of research happened until Robert Dolan came out and said, hey, value-based selling is what we’re going to do and this is how value-based selling will work. You’re going to figure out what the total economic value is and perceived value is, and then we’re going to figure out a way to sell it and then increase your perceived value to the economic value. Same with Thomas Nagel and everyone. I think they came in a bit late and that sort of never created that base for marketing. There’s oodles of research on finance and product and marketing.
You can go open a journal back to 1925 and have lots of marketing research and everything. I think pricing didn’t happen because it was so cost-based. There was not this only like, okay, you can expedite this and you can do this. And so that happened. I think that probably didn’t give us the right base. And second I think is, which I think is the bigger reason, is pricing roles are tapping out a level below where they should in most organizations. And this is what I’ve seen so far.
I’m in Canada, I can count the number of chief pricing officers that are there in one hand, maybe in a couple of fingers. If you expand that globally, the US has done pretty much a better job at having a sort of chief pricing evangelist in some cases. But I think most pricing roles are tapping out as senior manager, pricing reporting to someone in marketing or at best a director of pricing in some organization that also has a reporting structure that’s either we are reporting into finance or reporting into marketing or sometime even report into sales. So I think that creates a little bit of a lack of true ownership. Because when you don’t have an exec that fully understands the ins and outs of pricing and ins and outs of how it impacts the business, you’re not going to get a seat at the table. And that is definitely something I suffered early on in the career that, hey, how do I find that voice and find that muscle to go up against like C-suite? In fact, I’ve left my job because I didn’t agree with the C-suite on pricing strategy. I think that’s one of the bigger hurdles and I see that there’s good work we’ve done on that, but we still have a lot to do.
Mark Stiving
I find it fascinating that every department cares a lot about pricing, but nobody truly understands it well. Which is pretty fascinating, right? So as a pricing person, we have to make the VP of sales happy and we have to make the VP of product happy and we have to make the VP of marketing happy, right? And so it’s really challenging from that perspective. And yet we tend not to have the VP title or the chief pricing officer title.
Karan Sood
Because I feel like they think the role is not meaty enough in itself because when you talk about VP of pricing, it actually gives it a bad rep because VP of pricing is also VP of a lot of other things that happen in the organization. You got to talk about sales operations, sales enablement. If you don’t have a good sales enablement, the VP of pricing might be your sales enablement guy in terms of getting your value story and getting it to the customer, getting it to the right places — customer success. So I think that impacts that a little bit. So that’s my take on that.
Mark Stiving
Yeah, so I often think that when I tell people I’m a pricing expert, which by the way, I’ve stopped saying, right? But when I tell people I’m a pricing expert, they think, oh, you put a number on a product, right? And that’s what pricing is. And it turns out it is so much more than that. And so as long as people are thinking that small little thing, then why would you have a VP of someone putting a number on a product?
Karan Sood
Yeah. I think the number of times people have thought, I’m coming into a meeting, I’m going to open up a spreadsheet and sell C eight, I’m going to have a magic number that’s going to solve everyone’s problem. And I’m like, sorry to disappoint you, but I have a story to tell you. Right? So it’s that thing, right? Because pricing was always so cost-based early on for years, right? Like cost-based and you enter a cost into a spreadsheet, you’re going to enter a margin number and you’re going to get a price. That was what it was, right? So, and that created this bad rep that hey, it’s just going to be a financial number. We are just going to crunch some numbers and kind of come up with that story. And now I have to sort of dial everyone’s expectation that, hey, pricing analysis is part of it, but we got to figure out a whole lot of other stuff in terms of what are we selling? Where are we selling? And can we bear the cost of doing it? Can we do this? Do we have the demand to do it? Do we have the supply to do it? And then what are we putting into that value story? So it is very cross-function and it rub people off the wrong way. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I don’t think so. There’s more friction in my role than I’ve seen in any other role that I closely work with because it’s so cross-functional and it goes into like, when we go into meeting with marketing and saying, let’s talk about value stories, and they don’t feel like you’re stepping into their toes, even you go to finance and talk about cost structure to sort of, what kind of cost structure will support a new product, it again feels like you’re stepping into the toes which no one likes, right?
So it’s a very hard one to balance as to how to go about navigating this maze that people in pricing have to work with. I just came back from LA at the pricing summit USA this year. And I can tell you that was the number one reason in everyone’s mind front and center, that pricing has this friction role that is omni present at all times. Like how do you reduce this friction? And I think we have got a lot of work in that respect.
Mark Stiving
Yeah, very interesting. So you currently are in sales operations, you’re running a sales operations team. How do you tie together, how do you move from pricing to sales enablement and why does that make sense?
Karan Sood
So yeah, so at the end of the day, sales are what people sell, right? It’s something where you have created something that has some value and you have to figure out where you’re going to sell it. What price are you going to sell it in different channels? How are you going to basically maximize your willingness to pay in different channels, different geographies? And then you also have to sort of decide how much you’re going to sell and what kind of hurdles you’re going to have in each channel. So as a pricing guy, the number one thing we have to always figure out is, okay, what’s the price, what’s the story, where are we going to sell them? How much are we going to make? All of that has a sales touchpoint, right?
We understand that. And then, but there’s also a lot of operational touchpoints in there as well, right? Like supply chain comes in there, finance comes in there. So, I think it’s always required, right? Like, who’s taking the story, the sales story to the sales guys, if you don’t have a strong sales enablement team, then you will struggle. So I’ll tell you, going back to my day, Yellow Pages, we are going from a print environment to an online word, print directories to online, right? Like everyone we are discontinuing the use or minimizing the use of directories while still having them around to pay the bills. And then going into the online world where we are selling clicks and search and website products and then so on and so forth. And that was not a pricing exercise per se.
Sure, pricing is one element of it. But that was a chain management and sales enablement exercise because you have these sales guy walking into a plumber’s office and saying, hey, guess what? We’re going to discontinue the directory in a couple of years and it’s going to decline like this, but we got you on this new online program that we want to sell you. And they’re like, hey, okay, I know nothing about online. I know everything about my product being front and center on the front page of a directory and that’s how I measure my calls. And then we basically move to the notion of, okay, let’s create value stories. So we went and created thousands of value stories for people who are buying online products, what kind of results they’re getting, how many calls they’re getting. So this is how granular we got in that sales enablement and sales operations world.
And there was that. So if you are a plumber, you got an online ad with us, we’ll tell you how many calls you’ll get. What will be the average duration of those calls? How many of those calls will close, let’s say 50% of the calls, if you get 10 calls, 50% of the calls will close. It’s five. And those five calls are worth $500 each to you. So that’s $2,500. And we create these value stories for everyone to take along with them. And that’s where pricing and sales enablement and marketing sort of come into play together as to create those value stories. Right? And you have to support, I think, sending your sales guys without any good sales enablement in sales operation and value management stories to this field is like sending a soldier to the battlefield without a rifle.
Like, how do you prevent that pushback? How do you support them? Because sales doesn’t end when you give someone a product to sell. That’s almost where it starts. So, I think sales enablement and operations play the key role. And we in sales operations feel we piggyback the whole process between sales and marketing and finance. Because you have directors coming from all places. You have directors coming from the execs and strategy and marketing. And now we got to take it all in and still try and balance what results we can deliver while still making sure that we have the product to deliver and the supply to deliver, who else is going to live in their world. Supply chain is not going to live in the sales world day in, day out. They’re in fact not even talking to the customer or anyone. It’s a sales guy and sales guy is the first line of feedback that comes back is to sales enablement as to what went wrong during the day, what went wrong during the month. And it’s our job to then take it to the rest of the organization and sort of craft the strategy, or narrative.
Mark Stiving
Love that answer. I’m going to say what you said in a different way and put it in a slightly different perspective, If I may. So when we’re in pricing, I always think that pricing’s job is really to make sure the company understands the value of the products, right? So who’s buying it and how much do they value it? And so if we can do that really well, then it turns out that we should be holding the hands of product management and product teams so they build products that actually have value. And we should be holding the hands of marketing so that when they put out marketing programs, they’re actually talking about value. And we should be holding the hands of salespeople so that when they go talk to customers, they’re able to communicate value. And so here’s these three big pieces where we’ve got to help the company. And what you just said to me is, hey, the sales side is so important, which it is, there’s no doubt. That I’m taking what I know right now and focusing it on sales and we’re going to let product and marketing struggle along, we’ll help them a little bit. But we’re focusing on sales right now.
Karan Sood
No, I wouldn’t, because you could have a second, I wouldn’t say that we would basically say, hey, sales is the most important part of the organization. But I think we are the conduit through which all of this flows through like marketing and everyone’s speaking a different language and everyone has a different understanding of what their goals and objectives are, right? Like, and to go from taking off a marketing objective and taking off a strategy or objective to actually operationalizing is where we sit in between. So I would never say that sales is more important. So let’s just make sure that we line up with sales.
Mark Stiving
I did not say sales was more important. I said sales was important and that you personally said, I’m going to focus on that piece of it.
Karan Sood
Yeah. So focus on that piece of it to make sure that it works with less friction. Because sales guys love to sell. They don’t want to be bothered with internal politics, what’s happening in the supply chain, or what’s happening in the market. They want to basically know, hey Karan, how can I sell more? How can you support me to sell more? How can you support me with pricing strategy in terms of making sure that I can walk, I can actually have some, let’s say, spine in my pricing. How do I have that and can you create that for me? And can you make sure that when I go sell and I close a deal at the right price that we all agreed to, then can you make sure that we actually have the product to support it?
So that’s where our sort of role lies in between. I feel like, and that I feel is a little bit better than just pricing, right? Because now you’ve got more skin in the game across different, because one of the things that happened when you are solely pricing is that you are either towards, if you’re a good pricing organization, you are the star of the organization where, product is going to create, be created, but you’re going to have pricing input to it. But in bad organizations, pricing is going to be in the end where they’re just going to come to pricing and say, hey, where’s my price sheet after everything has been done and done between product and finance and sales and everything’s going to be like, where’s my price sheet?
And I think that is the bad word that we don’t want. We want a world where pricing can have more say in all of these places. And I feel like a sales operation is a good way to sort of have that way with different people. And I think that helped tremendously in knowing what sales wants, understanding what they want, what they can sell, what the capabilities are, and then working with the rest of the organization to make sure that we all align on what we are doing, in terms of pricing, sales, pricing, discounting, channel strategy.
Mark Stiving
I have to ask this question because you may have said this, or you’ve hinted at this. Are you still running pricing inside your company? And if so, I think that’s amazingly brilliant to have pricing inside sales enablement. Because what that says is that salespeople will listen to you more because you’re there to serve them. And the rest of the company will actually listen to you more ’cause you’re closer to the customer and you’re not just this guy out in the middle saying, hey, I’m in pricing.
Karan Sood
Yeah. And that’s why I say right, like pricing teams need to get to open up the horizon of what they’re dealing with. And I think when you are only doing pricing, that’s where you get that bad rep that hits pricing because I’ve worked purely pricing teams and guess what the feedback was, pricing doesn’t know the customer, pricing doesn’t know the competition, pricing get on a sales call with me and sells. And I’m like, we took into account a lot of that when we were pricing a product, but maybe we still need to do a better job. But it was only when I started to get closer and closer to sales in a way, and a lot of people don’t like that because they think I’m sleeping with the enemy, but actually I’m not. I’m actually getting more out of that relationship than I’ve ever in my career.
Because now pricing knows that okay, I’m a key part of theirs, it’s no longer like, hey, a price sheet person, it’s actually someone who’s crafting the strategy. I’m the one who’s going to make their life easier. And the way I do that is actually in my product lifecycle, in a product roadmap and how we create products, we make it a point early on at the same time when we are deciding the product, what are we going to make? What is the price we’re going to charge, what’s the consumer research behind it? What willingness to pay and what conjoint and everything. We did that. And at the same time we try to get some feedback from sales guys that say, hey guys, this is what’s going to be created. This is going to be the value. This is how it’s going to come out. This is the price that goes, this is the tentative price that you might see.
Tell us what’s your first thought? And that doesn’t mean they get to lower the prices because that’s still my own, that’s my own, that’s my idea of responsibility, but at least I know what the pushback will be when I go to market with them. So I can prepare for that early on. Because a lot of people think when I see I start talking to sales, hey, they’re just going to ask them to decrease the product, but actually sales guys don’t want to decrease that. I think there’s a bad notion out there that sales just want to decrease the price. Yeah, sure. Like, some sales guys always want to decrease the price because that’s the lowest common denominator that you can work with the customer. But I think most often they just want to sell. And if they can maximize their value and their commission, their compensation based on that they’ll do anything to make it happen.
And that’s where I think a lot of people go around. So we bring them into that conversation. We get their feedback, we try and incorporate that back into the product feed to basically say, hey guys, this is what the feedback from the feed list, how can we either incorporate it or if you don’t want to incorporate, how do we talk about it in terms that they understand? And then they can actually talk to the customer and say, hey guys, this is why we didn’t do that, what you asked for. So yeah, so we actually own pricing inside sales instead of operation here.
Mark Stiving
That’s pretty cool. Fantastic.
Karan Sood
Yeah, it’s been fantastic.
Mark Stiving
That’s really cool. So I’m going to make a quick observation just because I think it’s funny. You’ve probably heard pricing teams called the sales prevention team. And so now we have the sales prevention team inside the sales enablement team.
Karan Sood
Yeah. It’s funny, right? This was always the case, right? Pricing is a no person. They can go on the call, they can talk to the customer and that’s where it came from because they were like, hey, if you are just going to object to anything that I’ve done, the only way to to prevent that is you should have talked to me before. And I’m like, sure, let’s do that now. We’re going to talk to you before so we understand your issues and that when you go to market, we can actually give you the ammunition to actually attack that. Whether that’s customer intel, whether there’s competition intel, whether that’s just analytics, we’ll give it to you.
Mark Stiving
Yep. Cool. I often say the words, if your salespeople ask for discounts too often it’s because you haven’t given them the tools, knowledge, and confidence that they can win at the prices you think they should be winning at.
Karan Sood
Yeah. A hundred percent. I sort of think of it as a flow chart. If something is not working right and you’re over discounting, it’s either your product doesn’t have the value, right? Or you’re lacking value statements that they can actually link with the product or sometimes it is overpriced to value, which can happen. I’ve worked in cases in the past where we were overpriced to the value we deliver and we sort of had to buy and burden and say, hey guys, okay, maybe this is a reality check. The value is not here, it’s here. So our willingness to pay needs to be somewhere around here as well so that we can actually make it all work because sometimes and that’s where it is, is like we can’t sit in our Eiffel tower and say, hey, prices can only go up and this is the way price at the end of the day is like. I guess a lot of people will get triggered when I say this, it’s guesswork with framework.
It’s not guesswork, but it’s guesswork with framework in a way that yeah, there’s no one perfect price. If you can tell me a product that had one perfect price and I will tell you, hey, why they’re underpriced or overpriced. But you need the framework to measure that, to basically make sure that hey, whatever you have in price, either it’s working or it’s not working. And how do you have the framework to support that is all of the pricing team’s responsibility. Like I used to, there was a time when I would sweat before a product launch like six, seven years ago. I’m like, hey, holy, we did all the research and everything is fine, but research and reality could be so much different. And I used to be threatened about it, hey, did we underprice it? if we underprice, now I don’t care about that anymore.
I’m like, hey, we’re going to launch in the market with the price, now, we can gauge a response. If we feel like we have a product life cycle, we have a price and I have a pricing lifecycle. And if we feel like, hey, we are underpriced, we’re going to take our prices where we think the value is, over time. If we think we are overpriced, we’ll gauge that and we’ll figure out what to do. Either that’s basically repricing or that basically adding more value to the product so that it matches up. Or is that targeted promotions or targeted some other tactic that we would need to do. And by the way, I hate this company in general though, in B2B, not in B2C and B2B. Totally different topic. So I don’t worry about that price per se anymore because I know with the right leverage with the customer and internally in the organization, I can move that needle.
Mark Stiving
Nice. Karan, we are running out of time. This has just been absolutely fascinating, but, let me ask the final question. What is one piece of pricing advice you would give our listeners that you think could have a big impact on their business?
Karan Sood
Start talking. The number one thing I didn’t do for the first five years of my career, six years of my career, was I did not talk to other people. I sat in my Eiffel tower doing my price sheets and doing my analysis and waited till the last moment to show it in a boardroom in an Excel file. And, people would take it with a grain of salt and be like, hey, sure this is nice. Okay, this looks like this is a good price. Okay, we’ll talk about it. Blow up your pricing process. Just blow it up. If you inherited a pricing team, if you’re a pricing manager or if you inherited a pricing team and you said, hey, there are issues with pricing from the start of history, fix them now. Blow it all up and say, hey, map out all your touch points with your organization.
And don’t come back and say, hey, there’s actually no touchpoint. There’s only a sales touchpoint. No, this is just not possible. Map out your pricing, touchpoints in marketing, supply chain, finance, everyone, and then figure out how your pricing should operate in the organization. Then start building a reputation with that one influential leader in the org. Find that one influential leader that actually talks about margin, talks about doing the right thing and does not always just talk about more sales. Find that person and then try and hitch your right to that person. Get them to read more value stories, get them to understand more pricing and it will do wonders to how you increase your visibility in the organization.
Mark Stiving
Yeah. Absolutely fascinating advice. I have to say that an early mentor of mine, he came in and took over the pricing team that I was part of and I watched him go have one-on-one meetings with pretty much everybody in the company. Didn’t matter who it was. Right. And he’s going to learn from them and figure out what their goals are and how we can help them achieve their goals. And it was the most wonderful experience because he talked to me about that constantly.
Karan Sood
Oh yeah, that’s what I say. Go find your touch points and when you find the touchpoint, they’ll go figure out how exactly pricing can help. And we do this almost every day. We have one-on-one and almost everyone in the organization all the time.
Mark Stiving
Yeah. Nice. Karan, thank you so much for your time today. If anybody wants to contact you, how can they do that?
Karan Sood
The best way to contact me right now is through LinkedIn. I post and publish a lot of stuff on LinkedIn, on pricing. I try to basically give out everything that I’ve learned over the years. So that is basically the best way to learn to get in touch with me right now. So I’m trying to build my own audience there. So, happy to have people reach out to me.
Mark Stiving
Excellent. And to our listeners, thank you for your time. If you enjoyed this, would you please leave us a rating and a review and 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.
