Jeet Mukherjee is the Chief Strategy Officer at Holden Advisors. He is responsible for designing and executing the strategic vision for the company. His role includes developing intellectual property, new product offerings, and key partnerships for scalable growth and innovation across the business.
In this episode, Jeet delves into the nuanced strategies behind pricing power, featuring real-world examples, including iPhone and Intel’s successful utilization of pricing power.
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Why you have to check out today’s podcast:
- Discover the transformative power of value-based pricing gaining a profound understanding of its essence and significance
- Find out why many fail in selling from a value-based perspective and how you can break free from the conventional approaches that limit your pricing potential
- Uncover the nuances of driving pricing power, recognizing the pivotal role of context and the imperative need for precise segmentation
“As pricers, we need to have more confidence in our calculation of differential value in what we do to come up with our prices. And we should not be afraid to test and experiment, and change, and see, and track the difference in volumes we get and make adjustments. It’s okay.”
– Jeet Mukherjee
Topics Covered:
01:33 – Blessed to have worked with two pricing gurus and all praises to Tom Nagle
02:36 – Defining value-based pricing
03:30 – Describing his journey into pricing and what made him love it
06:38 – Why most don’t sell from a value-based perspective
08:48 – Pricing as a much bigger topic many struggle with
11:59 – Understanding pricing power
19:38 – What you can use to drive pricing power, having the right context to understand who’s got proper pricing power, and the need for precise segmentation
23:20 – Intel doing a great job in a push-pull marketing and building more brand equity
26:16 – Zappos nailing it in customer service
27:47 – Discussing price sensitivity in relation to pricing power [iPhone versus Samsung]
30:13 – Jeet’s best pricing advice
Key Takeaways:
“I think we’re changing the aperture and we’re going through this process of pricing power to define it and understand it, because we’re looking at it from more of a continuum.” – Jeet Mukherjee
“Pricing has to be looked at as dynamic value drivers over time.” – Jeet Mukherjee
“…you have to have that context to understand better who’s got the pricing power by being more precise on the segmentation, as well as being very precise on the region that you’re going to have a little bit of an anomaly.” – Jeet Mukherjee
People /Resources Mentioned:
- Tom Nagle: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thomas-tom-nagle-2bb2288/
- Reed Holden: https://www.linkedin.com/in/reed-holden-913ab69/
- Ingram Micro: https://www.ingrammicro.com/
- HP: https://www.hp.com/ph-en/home.html
- Dell: https://www.dell.com/en-us
- Microsoft: https://www.microsoft.com/
- Intel: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/homepage.html
- Zappos: https://www.zappos.com
- Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/
Connect with Jeet Mukherjee:
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeet-mukherjee-58462a1/
- Email: [email protected]
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.)
Jeet Mukherjee
We, as pricers, need to have more confidence in our calculation of differential value in what we do to come up with our prices. And we should not be afraid to test and experiment and change and see and track the difference in volumes we get and make adjustments. It’s okay.
[Intro]
Mark Stiving
Welcome to Impact Pricing, the podcast where we discuss pricing, value, and the volatile relationship between them. I’m Mark Stiving and our guest today is Jeet Mukherjee. And here are three things you want to know about Jeet before we start. He is the Chief Strategy Officer at Holden Advisors, which is way bigger than you can imagine, if you can imagine. He was the VP of Global Business Intelligence and Analytics at Ingram Micro, and he was a consultant at Monitor Group, which was the strategic pricing group. So I think what this means, and Jeet, you got to correct me on this. I think it means you’ve actually worked with two of pricing’s gurus, Reed Holden and Tom Nagle. Is that a true statement?
Jeet Mukherjee
That is very much a true statement,
Mark Stiving
Yes. Alright, welcome Jeet. And I got to say, I’ve never met Tom Nagle. Reed’s been on the podcast before, but I’ve never met Tom. What’s it like working with him?
Jeet Mukherjee
Tom is fantastic. He is one of my favorite people. He is a wonderful human being. and he is what, he’s probably in his seventies now. He still runs and stays in shape. So knock on wood, he is doing great. He lives in Florida. When I met him, when he offered me a job after business school, we were all in Boston together, so, Reed and Tom, myself and others in the company. so those were great times. And both Reed and Tom have a background in economics. So the two of them together I think, produced some of the best content in pricing and value-based pricing ever. Because you’ve had the theoretical component through Tom and then you’ve got the realism and the marketing and the ability to actually implement methodically through Reed. and so the two of them were absolute powerhouses and I really enjoyed working with both of them.
Mark Stiving
Nice. Hey, I’ve been on a LinkedIn conversation with someone recently and you brought up the word, so let me just ask you, define the phrase value-based pricing.
Jeet Mukherjee
Sure. In my career after business school, because before that I was in engineering. So this is like my second career, I guess. And in learning that value-based pricing from Reed and from Tom, the theory is to be able to understand how our clients’ solutions, product, services and everything they do, how it creates value for their customers. And we do that by quantifying it and we quantify it relative to a competitor. and we do it by measuring how it impacts increase in revenue or decreases our clients’ cost or mitigates their risk. And we quantify that differential value and then we price within that zone of differential value. Basically, that’s what we focus on.
Mark Stiving
Nice, nice. So let me jump back, and maybe you’ve already answered this question, but how did you get into pricing in the first place?
Jeet Mukherjee
So, I had a professor in university, Dr. Hibbert. And Dr. Hibbert is a friend of Reed’s. So Dr. Hibbert runs marketing classes. And after one of the classes, professor Hibbert was like, hey, Jeet, you thinking about doing consulting? And I said, yeah, I’m interviewing with McKinsey and BCG and Deloitte, I think were the three. And he said, what about a small consulting firm? And at that point, I wasn’t thinking of any small consulting firms, and he said, I think you should meet my friend Reed. And I said, oh, really? I go, okay, sure. And so he put me in touch with Reed. Reed and I met, and I met with Reed for 20 minutes, and he offered me a job. And Reed is as, if most of you probably know Reed, he’s extremely charismatic.
So in that 20 minutes, he sold me on working on real problems and finding solutions hand in hand with not just him, but other partners in the organization other professors that Tom and he were working with to be able to solve client problems. And that, to me, was very different from what McKinsey was offering and others, because with those firms, it’s such a large firm, you have to kind of work your way up. And I really wanted to focus on solving problems, client problems. And so, he sold me in the first 20 minutes and that was it. I took the job.
Mark Stiving
Nice. And so why do you stay?
Jeet Mukherjee
To me, pricing is probably the most impactful profession especially in B2B that gets the least amount of attention. so it’s a combination of those two. As a consultant, you can see it as a two by two and on those two axes, it’s just amazing how little it’s focused on and looked at by organizations because I think it’s very easy, easy in quotes to come up with a number, right? If somebody says, hey, how much does this cost? You can just make one up. You can add up your cost, you can put a margin on it and go, ah, it seems similar or good. You can look at a competing alternative and go, hey, this other orange is selling for a buck less than half a mile away, so why don’t we just sell it for a half or sell it for a buck or sell it for a buck 10 and we’re good to go, right? So it’s a very easy thing to do to come up with a number. But people don’t realize all the different layers to pricing, which is much more of a broad corporate capability rather than coming up with one price point. And so for me, that’s what makes me stay, the impact it can create.
Mark Stiving
I just love that answer. I think it’s fabulous. so I want to ask this, this actually is a personal question for me. I’ve been debating lately on how to communicate that pricing is way bigger than pricing. And I say that in the sense that we spend a ton of time trying to understand how it is the customer’s value products. And once we understand that, that impacts what products we build and how we package them, and how we market them and how we sell them. In fact, Holden Advisors works a lot on the sales side of pricing. So how do we communicate that pricing is bigger than pricing?
Jeet Mukherjee
Yeah, it’s hard, it really is hard because what you are basically trying to do is change somebody’s perception that’s been grounded for decades, essentially for their whole career. and to even talk about, even for us that we go in and when into prospective clients and we talk about the intersection of pricing and sales, and that’s where we live, that’s where we can add value. People usually kind of look at us like a little bit glossed over, like, what do you mean sales? , and then they kind of talk about how you can have the fanciest math and come up with a dollar amount of a hundred dollars, but giving it to sales to sell it for a hundred, they’re probably going to sell it for 40 because they’re not really enabled to sell it from a value-based perspective.
So there’s a gap that’s there so they can get their heads around it. But then that aperture that needs to open up because it’s not just sales, to your point, it’s also product development. I mean, when we look at our clients and we look at value drivers as an example, and how many different departments use value drivers besides pricing and marketing, very few do. So the use of value drivers outside of pricing and marketing and then some sales, it’s basically at zero and nobody does. So there’s a big gap in product development and also not just development of the product, but the release that you’re going to have of features and functionality compared to what competitors are doing, where the market’s going, what the customer needs are. All of those things, in my humble opinion, is a part of pricing that all those apertures need to open up. And, that’s always a difficult challenge, especially when somebody thinks pricing is part of finance or part of marketing, and you’re just coming up with a number and that’s it.
Mark Stiving
Yeah. So I find it pretty easy, I think, and I say that really cautiously, I find it pretty easy for people to say, hey, I need to learn more. I need to get better at pricing. But I don’t find it easy to say, hey, it’s really a much bigger topic than that. Because it’s like they don’t have a bucket to put it in once you make it bigger.
Jeet Mukherjee
Yeah. Frankly, I think the whole industry has struggled with it even when I was just at PPS and some of the most common questions at PPS are like, how do I get my boss to believe that we can do more than pricing operations, right? Because most of the time at PPS and other community sort of groups, you’re at that manager level or the director level, and they’re trying to make these pricing projects bigger because it’s more impactful than just their division or group. And they struggle with their bosses that they report into thinking about it in a much larger aperture. And it’s really that question, probably gets asked to me almost a hundred percent of the time at PPS every conference. That’s the most popular question I get asked. It’s hard.
Mark Stiving
Okay, go ahead and take a shot at answering it.
Jeet Mukherjee
For us, it’s being able to get the decision makers. So we do our best to go up in organization, and then we go out in organization in order to get everybody buy-in, we can’t have one buying center for a pricing project. if we do that, it’s effective, but we don’t get the best return. Where we’ve seen with clients, we get the best returns if we identify our buying center that’s bringing us in as our sponsor, and then we’re able to go wide, and then we’re able to go up. as soon as you go into that CXL level and you’re able to go wide from a breadth perspective, that’s when the returns really unlock themselves and it becomes 2X 3X 4X and more when that happens.
Mark Stiving
Yeah, that makes sense. Now you guys focus mostly on Fortune 1000 customers, or really big customers. So that’s really challenging. It’s much more challenging. I do a lot of sub $50 million work, and so therefore I’m dealing with CEOs and executives of companies to drive projects.
Jeet Mukherjee
Yeah. I think every company has its challenges, right? I mean, for you it’s easier. You’re already at the CXO level. You can go wide, you can go deep, you can do whatever you need to drive value. But sometimes from that perspective, it also becomes harder because you don’t have that scale sometimes to do all the different strategies that you may want to do and they should do over time, right? so there’s good and bad that’s there for us. We go a little higher, but once you get bigger, I mean, this already, you tend to have more politics, you tend to have blockers, you tend to have all these other things that prevent you from unlocking all the ROI. So you have to be careful in how you reach the CXO, how you go wide without really upsetting people and making sure they know that you’re in it with them to solve their problems. So there’s different flavors of good and bad that’s there with all of these opportunities and blindsides, which by the way, makes it a lot of fun. It’s not the same.
Mark Stiving
Exactly. Okay, so we’re over 10 minutes into this, and we haven’t even jumped into the topic that we were going to talk about today, and that is pricing power. So let’s start with the easy question, if that’s easy. What do you mean when you hear the words or say the words pricing power?
Jeet Mukherjee
Yeah. I talked about this at PPS a couple of weeks ago or last week, which is that every year in the beginning or end of the year, beginning of the following year, I go out and I interview CXOs from my sort of contact base to understand what they’re fighting for that coming year. What do they think the market’s going to do? What are some of the challenges they have? And I just love it. I love chatting with people about all of these things. So it just becomes a great opportunity. And I learn a lot and I learn about all these different things. This time around this earlier in the year, all of them talked about gaining more pricing power this year in 2023. So I thought that was really interesting. So as you can imagine, one interview feeds the next, and that feeds the next.
So I started asking everybody what do you think about pricing power? And a hundred percent of my interviewees wanted more pricing, wanted to get pricing or maintain their pricing. So I just found it fascinating that everybody’s talking in my group, everybody was talking about pricing power. So I said let’s go ahead and how do you define pricing power? And they had a very difficult time defining, they talked about it as a subset of like market share. They talked about it from a brand perspective. They talked about it from a product differentiation. Hey, if your product is super differentiated, then you have pricing power. Hey, if you have a great big brand, then you’ve got pricing power. So they have all these different answers for what it is, but they all wanted it.
And then I asked the question about what would it mean if you got it? And they usually gave the famous Warren Buffet quote, right, that’s out there, which is a sign of a great company, being able to raise prices and not lose customers. Right? I’m paraphrasing a little bit. And I thought that was just fascinating. And I said is that really true? So as a value-based pricer, I’m putting different scenarios in play in my head and I’m thinking to myself, I think everybody would agree that Apple iPhones are pretty differentiated and they typically have good pricing power in the market, and they lead the pricing in that category. And I said, okay, what if they change prices to a hundred thousand dollars? Would they lose customers? Obviously, Mark, you make a lot of money, you’ll probably still continue using an Apple.
For somebody like me, I don’t think I can quite make that hundred thousand, therefore, you’re probably going to lose the customer. So I don’t think Warren Buffett, I would never say he’s incorrect in his statement, but maybe we can add it. And the way we added to that statement is your ability to create differential value over time and then be able to raise prices without losing customers. I think that has to go together. One of the things that I think we’ve made a mistake on with pricing, if I like to think back to when I started in the late nineties, early two thousands, is we think of pricing as one event, as like a pricing study, a pricing project. Once I set the price, I’m good, then comes the governance model and all this other stuff, sales and everything else, but pricing is looked at as one event to set the price.
And I think we’re changing the aperture and we’re going through this process of pricing power to define it and understand it, because we’re looking at it from more of a continuum. Pricing has to be looked at as dynamic value drivers over time. Short-term value drivers, long-term value drivers, so that the definition of value drivers need to start changing. And you have to also start including quantifiable and non-quantifiable value drivers, because you have to start positioning your company in a way that you have that pricing power in the future, and you work towards it. You can’t just assume that you have it or you don’t have it, and that’s all, you can’t do anything about it. So in addition to that definition of adding dynamic value drivers over time to create differentiation and then being able to raise prices without losing customers, I think it becomes critical in this space. So that’s a long way of saying that’s kind of how we’re defining.
Mark Stiving
Yeah. Okay. So, if I were to rephrase or comment, it would be in truth, the definition is kind of Warren Buffett’s definition that says, we want to be able to raise prices without losing customers. Doesn’t mean infinitely, let’s say 10%, right? If I could I raise prices 10% and not lose customers? And then the question becomes, well, how do you get to the point where you’re able to do that? Because that’s the end state. It doesn’t tell you how to do that. And so how, a lot of that’s the differentiation. A lot of that is, I mean, in the high tech space, it’s constantly changing. We’re constantly seeing innovation. And so if you’re not building new differentiation today, you’re going to be behind tomorrow.
Jeet Mukherjee
That’s exactly right. And I think that’s the, so we built this little two by two that says, hey, if I put price on my ability to go get price, and then I put market share as proxies for pricing power, if you’re in the top right corner, typically you’ll have pricing power. So we kind of tested that model out with different verticals. And what we found was, if I look at the difference between number one and number two in just pure price power, there’s a 67% increase in profitability profit dollars between one and two. That’s how big it is, that’s how impactful. It’s because you’re measuring it and you have to understand that it could have a low price because you have a cost advantage and you could have a high market share strategy. Nothing wrong with that. So profit dollars become a good measurement of where you’re at based on those two assets.
And then if you take that and you go, okay, now it makes sense why everybody would want it, they fundamentally understand going out and getting it. But if you’re on the left side and your product’s not differentiated, what do you do? Then that part of the definition of continuously bringing that differentiation in the market becomes critical. But what also is important is most of our clients, and , I think you would probably agree with this, we’re in 2023, we’ve been schlepping value-based and differentiation for a long time now, most of our clients still think of differentiation as being product-based or service-based. They don’t think of it as everything that they can possibly do to help a customer out. So some people have great customer service, well, that’s not your product play. That could be part of your services, but traditionally they don’t define it like that. So the nuggets of differentiation exist in a lot of different ways in how you go help your customers. Then you don’t really quantify that differentiation. So if you’re on the left side of this two by two, I think that understanding of everything you do to add value for your customers need to be understood, need to be looked at to drive more differentiation, quantified and priced on. So you can start moving to that right side.
Mark Stiving
Yeah. So, I would interpret that as there’s a lot of different things you can use to help drive pricing power. We have to step back and say, what is it that you can use? Right? So, it could be brand, right? It could be market share, it could be, you brought up these numbers and what jumped into my head instantly was Apple. Android has 72% worldwide market share on mobile phones. And Apple makes 85% of the profit dollars.
Jeet Mukherjee
Yeah, that’s right.
Mark Stiving
So, according to market share, they’re not at the top, but according to profit dollars, they are far to the right.
Jeet Mukherjee
That’s right. It’s fascinating, right? And as I was doing, as I was playing around with the two by two, it was really interesting because you have to put that layer on top of the other… Are you looking at the US market, North America market worldwide? What are you looking at? Because there are those anomalies and differences that happen. then you look at products, right? One of the funny things I did was say, let’s do automotive because it’s fun to talk about cars, right? I said, let’s do auto, and I put all the brands on the two by two, and I’m like, wait, this doesn’t make any sense. It’s basically saying Ferrari has no pricing power. And then I realized your segmentation that you’re in, that you’re running the two by two for, has to be very precise.
Because I would not compare a Ferrari to a Toyota. That would be improper to make that it’s almost two different products, even though they’re both automotive. And so that became also a mistake that I made that I had to refine as we were doing more and more research, that you have to have that context to understand better who’s got the pricing power by being more precise on the segmentation, as well as being very precise on the region that you’re going to have a little bit of anomaly. But having said those two things, I agree, Apple is a beast by itself when it comes to understanding their pricing power.
Mark Stiving
Yeah. It’s pretty interesting. So what else do you think drives pricing power besides market share and brand, which we’ve talked about those two, and in my mind I have several thoughts, but I’d love to hear yours.
Jeet Mukherjee
So then if we go to the right side of the two by two where somebody’s able to get pricing, but they’re not up in the market share, that was an area where when I talked to a lot of companies, one of the things that I noticed is folks that don’t have good relationships or partnerships. So partnerships was one of the key things on that is somebody that’s able to drive up to execution basically increase their execution power in the market to go get market share. They’re really good at having relationships with suppliers, having relationships with distributors, having relationships with resellers, really controlling that value chain in a positive co-creative manner. Not controlling it like, I demand you to do something. If you don’t, you’re out. Some people play that game a little bit, but still the ones that we’ve found to be very, very successful, they’re able to have that partnership in their ecosystem to increase value to their customers because of that partnership and, and be able to go get those market share. So that’s definitely a large component of what we consult with our clients on if you’re in the bottom right portion of the world.
Mark Stiving
Do you have an example of a company that we might know?
Jeet Mukherjee
So I think there are companies that use the distribution world really well. So if you look at Ingram Micro. They’re 65, 70 billion, right worldwide, and they’re working with HPs of the world, Dells of the world, Intels of the world, all of those guys. And if I look, because I come from that ecosystem, if I look at the vendors that do really well, Microsoft being one of them as an example of it, they do a really good job of partnering with their business then reaching out to the resellers and partnering with their resellers. So their sales is not one-to-one between them and the customer. We think of it that way because we think that hey, everybody’s buying Microsoft at the consumer level, but their revenue and their profitability really goes high in a non-linear, in an exponential way. When you start thinking about their use of distribution and retail, they do a fantastic job of that, and they really are able to go and get those incremental market share by working with those partnerships.
Mark Stiving
Yeah, that’s almost, in a way you could say that’s understanding your value so well that you could sell it through a distribution channel.
Jeet Mukherjee
Oh yeah. Intel started that a long time ago with the push-pull, right? I mean, who has heard of Pentium chips or 486 or 386 inside of your computer boxes? We were back then illiterate about what computers were. Yet Intel did a great job of pushing and pulling marketing to make people understand the differentiation is in the chip, so you’re going to pay me for that differentiation. So we’re going to market the heck out of the consumer to know what kind of chip you have in your computer, which is brilliant back then,
Mark Stiving
I remember around 286 times I was terrified to buy a non-Intel processor. I wanted to because it was cheaper, but I was afraid to.
Jeet Mukherjee
Mark, I have a funny Intel story, which I always have, people ask me how do you define a brand? Because one of the things we have in our little pricing power concept that we’re building out is the power of your brand. And people ask me all the time, how do you define it? And I think the school of thought that I’ve always come from is, a brand is defined as how well you operate when things go back. And Intel is probably a really good example of it. Back in the Pentium days, I don’t know if you remember or not, they had a little problem with heat. So they were building up a lot of heat and Intel went out and I was working with them at that point. They went out and they basically flooded the market with money and said, we’re replacing everything, no problem.
And the problem was one of the biggest problems they had in their life, and they corrected it almost overnight. It wasn’t overnight of course, but they made it a priority and they reacted so quickly to the market. I think they build more brand equity that way than anything else. And it reminds me of the definition all the time. I think consumers are smart, they are caring, they are actually, they’ll give you a lot of rope if they feel like they have your back. If they feel like, hey, you are there to have my back, your brand power starts building up exponentially. And I think that’s what Intel was able to do through that crisis, is come back and say, I’m going to react quickly. I’m going to give it my all to make sure that I correct the problem. And I’m going to have empathy as I do so. And it was great. It worked out awesome.
Mark Stiving
Yeah. And that reminds me exactly of the Johnson and Johnson Tylenol story.
Jeet Mukherjee
Yeah. That was another one. That’s a good one too.
Mark Stiving
Yeah, they just did it. Unlike new Coke. How’s that?
Jeet Mukherjee
I forgot about new Coke . That’s funny.
Mark Stiving
Nice. Okay, so what else drives, I’ll toss some out to you. Let’s see what you think, right? So we already talked about the brand you talked about customer service, which I thought was really good. And, and I got to tell you, the first company that jumps to my mind when you say customer service is Zappos. Now, Zappos. Yeah. It’s an Amazon subsidiary, so you can’t really say what’s its financials are. But boy, I love that company and, if you ever get a chance to do a company tour in Vegas, go do it. It’s phenomenal.
Jeet Mukherjee
We had a couple of big events in Vegas and the Zappos CEO back then had come before Amazon had bought them. And the tour of their facility and everything it’s just phenomenal and it’s a great plugin for Amazon for sure to have them as part of their brand. I think very highly of them as well. I think it’s interesting and I’m speaking off the top of my head, as I don’t know how much pricing power they have and I don’t know how, and the reason is I don’t know how much they can price high and I don’t know what their other sources of revenue are. And I think that’s another way to think about it, if they could, that selling shoes, they can be selling whatever they need to at a competitive price, but they could be using the data and information in the backend as we know, right. In monetizing in different ways. I just don’t know that complexity because if you add that to their profitability and their market share, they could be at the top of the list month from a company perspective. So yeah, I should dig into that a little bit more.
Mark Stiving
Okay. Is, so one of the things, I, I talk about this concept a lot and, and I don’t find many other pricing people who do, and I think of it as will I versus which one, or you could call it relative value versus inherent value. And so it’s buyers who make decisions without considering competitive alternatives. And so we often see that in terms of, I want to buy an upgrade to a subscription that I already have. I want to buy an accessory to a product that I already have. And so those types of things, there’s a ton of pricing power there because there’s no competitive alternative.
Jeet Mukherjee
Yeah. From a theory perspective, we typically bucket that in price sensitivity. So if you have an experience with a brand or a solution, you have currently deployed your price sensitivity for the add-on your price sensitivity for the movement, whichever way you want to go, it much, much, much less, it’s harder to get a customer onto the platform than to move them in the platform. So that sensitivity is different. Now, you can also, as you probably know Mark, that sensitivity can change rapidly. If, as an example, you raise prices within three months bam, bam, bam, and it’s high enough, you’ll trigger their sensitivity. Even if you have a differential value, you’ll trigger it to go up and they’ll proactively look for alternatives, even at a negative differential value. They’ll go out, customers will go out and look for alternatives. So there’s a way to ruin that also, but you’re a hundred percent right, that movement, once they have experience with your brand, positive experience, of course is much less price sensitive and you have much more pricing power, to move that price.
Mark Stiving
Yeah. And I often think the Apple iPhone story is a lot like that because the switching costs are so high for me to go from iPhone to an Android phone. Yeah.
Jeet Mukherjee
I’m a happy Android guy, Samsung guy, while my whole family had been trying to get me to go to Apple, I was on Apple in the beginning and I said, no, thank you. Once they did something that I found to be very egregious, I moved to Samsung and I’ve been very happy ever since.
Mark Stiving
Android users love their androids, there’s no doubt. But it’s just hard to switch.
Jeet Mukherjee
Well, I think Apple did a great job of just creating that ecosystem and to make sure that it’s all connected, right? Nobody wants to lose their music, their text, their everything is connected into one platform and nobody wants to lose that.
Mark Stiving
Yeah. I mean, it’s funny, 12 years ago I switched to Max because of the fact that it worked with all of the rest of the stuff I had. Yeah. Better.
Jeet Mukherjee
So you’re a lost soul, you’re gone.
Mark Stiving
I’m done. Right. I just write them checks every year. So, Jeet, this has been a lot of fun. We are running out of time. Let me ask the final question.
Jeet Mukherjee
Yeah.
Mark Stiving
What is one piece of pricing advice you would give our listeners that you think could have a big impact on their business?
Jeet Mukherjee
That’s a great question. and as a consultant, I have to say it depends. But I will tell you, when I see my clients, I think my clients, they get scared to make price changes. And I think we as pricers, we need to have more confidence in our calculation of differential value in what we do to come up with our prices. And we should not be afraid to test and experiment and change and see and track the difference in volumes we get and make adjustments. It’s okay. And we often see people very scared to do so. And I think those are lost opportunities for us to learn and get better.
Mark Stiving
Yeah. It is pretty amazing how scared people are to play with price, to change price because it has an instantaneous effect. And if it goes bad, someone gets blamed.
Jeet Mukherjee
That’s right. And you often see people using egregious rationale, right? If you change it by a dollar, we’ll lose all our customers. You change this, we’ll lose everything. And those are kind of egregious comments. And just imagine being an analyst three, four years out of college. If somebody told me that I’d be scared, what, I wouldn’t want to take any chances. And I think that just, it really hinders our ability to grow and get better.
Mark Stiving
Yeah. Great. Jeet, thank you so much for your time today. If anybody wants to contact you, how can they do that?
Jeet Mukherjee
LinkedIn is perfect. Email’s great. It’s [email protected]. So either way works for me.
Mark Stiving
Alright. And we’ll have some of that in the show notes. 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, feel free to email me, [email protected]. Now, go make an impact!
