Jon Jennings is the founder and managing partner of Jennings Executive Search. Established in 2014. His vision was to shape a firm anchored in transparency and value creation.
In this episode, Jon discusses the strategies for hiring pricing professionals and building a dedicated pricing team that significantly contributes to a company’s strategic success.
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Why you have to check out today’s podcast:
- Discover how to effectively structure your pricing team and determine the optimal number of pricing professionals to hire based on your company’s size
- Explore crucial steps to assess pricing role offers, ensuring a thorough understanding and avoiding impulsive decisions
- Learn important factors to consider when hiring pricing professionals for high, mid, and entry-level pricing positions
“Once you can build those relationships with sales and the customers and understand what really makes them tick, it’s a lot easier to price to it, to add value.”
– Jon Jennings
Topics Covered:
01:38 – How he paved a path into pricing
04:04 – What great impact a little tweak in pricing can do
05:12 – At what point are they able to start helping clients fix their pricing
06:18 – When do private equity firms decide to hire pricing consultants and pricing professionals
09:21 – Designing a pricing structure for a $50M manufacturing company
12:49 – How many pricing professionals you should hire given the size of your company
15:41 – Opportunities for pricing roles these days
17:39 – The best thing to do when looking for pricing jobs
19:06 – Insights on writing your resume and putting it on LinkedIn
21:23 – Vetting pricing jobs before jumping in
24:22 – A chance to talk and vet for a thousand individuals for pricing roles
25:14 – What does Jon look for when vetting people for pricing roles
27:54 – The need to think outside of the box when you’re a pricing professional
28:40 – Jon’s best pricing advice
Key Takeaways:
When looking for job opportunities:
“Look through your network. Just like anything, take your time, take a breath, it’s going to be alright.” – Jon Jennings
“You don’t need to jump at the first thing; evaluate it based on the merit of the opportunity.” – Jon Jennings
When vetting a job offer or a candidate for a job:
“When it feels like they’re covering something up or not, just not telling me the whole truth, that’s when I get a little nervous.” – Jon Jennings
“They understand things connect, so that skillset tend, if they have some business acumen and a little bit of personality to go with it, they translate well to pricing.” – Jon Jennings
“I want to find people that like to break the wheel or build it, that’s our approach to the more mid level. And the lower level is people that are just high achievers and with a quantitative math brain.” – Jon Jennings
People/Resources Mentioned:
- Portco: https://www.portco.com
- GitHub: https://github.com
Connect with Jon Jennings:
- Website: https://jenningsexec.com/pricing-strategy/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonjennings/
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.)
Jon Jennings
Once you can build those relationships with sales and the customers and understand what really makes them tick, it’s a lot easier to price to it, to add value.
[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 dichotomous relationship between them. I’m Mark Stiving and our guest today is the one and only Jon Jennings. Here are three things you want to know about Jon before we start. He is the founding and managing partner of Jennings Executive Search. He has been a longtime sponsor of the Impact Pricing Podcast. Thank you. Jon. And he is raising two toddlers with one on the way. So I asked him what he’s doing for fun. He is like, he’s too busy. Jon, welcome.
Jon Jennings
Exactly. Thanks for having me, Mark.
Mark Stiving
Yeah, it’s going to be fun. Hey, I think I asked you this question a couple years ago when you were on, but I want to ask again. How did you get into price?
Jon Jennings
We started as a finance accounting firm. And we got bored. We started working a corporate development role for a large manufacturer in Atlanta. They referred us over to commercial strategy. And I got a call, I was like, can you work a pricing strategy role, which I was placed as a contract person years ago. So I was like, sure, I’ll take anything that looks interesting. And kind of, I went down the rabbit hole. They wanted someone out of McKinsey or Bain or one of the consultants, the shops they were spending millions of dollars with to bring in-house. And we just put resumes all over the ground. I couldn’t figure out all the different industries and strategies they had, capacity stuff and all these different things that we had to factor into that.
It was a lot of fun. And ended up calling my brother, who was actually in pricing at Amazon at the time and started picking his brain and kind of fell in love with the space. I mean, one of the candidates that we had that ended up turning down the job went on to another place and made a nine-figure impact in her first year. And that was insane. And we kept up with her and she ended up being a client of ours. And we just kind of went from there as we kind of fell in love with the impact of the largest lever that you have, which is price. And started building teams and trying to learn more. I look back on some of our stuff from back then when we first started, like 17. and I cringe a little bit because we were kind of chasing our tail.
I didn’t know quite what we were doing, but over time we figured it out. And I got to learn from a lot of brilliant people, like people that listened to this show who were my candidates and we found that pricing people were very passionate. They love to talk about pricing. They talk about pricing strategy. So if we throw a lot of details about a role we’re working, Adam, they tend to want to engage. And so our response rates are through the roof. So that’s great for recruiters. and we get to just have interesting conversations on a daily basis about pricing strategies across every industry you can think of. And from the most sophisticated operations to where they got nothing and we’re helping them build it. So we kind of just fell in love with it from there. And it slowly built out the practice to where it’s a large, decent majority of what we do. from a revenue standpoint, it’s probably like 50/50 between that and consulting and other stuff. but yeah, we love it.
Mark Stiving
Nice. So before we hit the record button, you and I chatted a little bit how it’s nice that our jobs are such that we get to help people have impact in the world, but you can’t find many more roles than a pricing role that’s going to have a huge impact on a company and then therefore on a career.
Jon Jennings
Yeah,I was just interviewing a guy and he was telling me the story about his pricing journey at a company where he was able to, he’s kinda an economist by hobby and he kind of came up that way and he was able to kind of foresee some of this inflationary stuff. And he got this company ahead of it, ended up making a $70 million impact by adjusting price and being ahead of the inflation. and they had ended up having the most profitable year by a large, large margin. And he got a really nice bonus, which was 150% of the target. So he got an extra 15 grand for the $70 million impact. We always joke about putting in if I could just get 2% of the impact, you don’t have to pay me a base, just give me some health insurance and I’m off. I’ll be good. but yeah, it’s fascinating the impact with a little tweaking in the pricing arena can do.
Mark Stiving
Yeah. And companies ignore that so much. So, but what’s funny though is that you don’t get involved until a company has said, hey, we need to do something on pricing. Right? You don’t go out and tell a company, hey, your pricing is messed up. You got to go fix this.
Jon Jennings
That’s probably the next step. So we usually come in with consultants. So, there is a self-awareness of a potential problem or opportunity. And that’s when we come in to tell them and advise them on org charts and exactly how much this is going to cost and show them the talent and what they need to be able to pay and do to be able to really drive change. Because if you do pricing halfway, you might as well just not even do it. I think that if it fails, then it was just all wasted effort for the most part. And so that’s where we can get involved and give them a little bit of guidance. and usually I lean on the consultants because they bring a little bit more of an influence than a recruiter. But we get to sit on the sidelines and watch it happen over and over. So, and talk to the brilliant minds in space. Andwe try to use that to be able to advise our clients.
Mark Stiving
Nice. So you said you’ve been working a lot with private equity firms lately, and I’m just curious about how that’s going. When do private equity firms tend to want to engage you?
Jon Jennings
It’s usually a year or two in, and sometimes it’s on the front end. There’s always the period of adjustment when they acquire a business and they’re bringing them in, whether they’re and they’re kinda going through this acquisition strategy and then they want to optimize and they want to start to think about EBITDA or maybe it’s growth. and they start thinking about pricing and commercial strategy. A lot of, if they’re buying founder-owned businesses, usually not a lot of sophistication on the pricing side. Sometimes that’s not the case. Sometimes they have their golden goose guy that does 18 different jobs and one of them is pricing and he is really good at it. We’ve seen that. and now we’re just helping them take it to the next level. but a lot of times, especially manufacturing industries, they haven’t thought about it.
So we come in and partner with the private equity and a lot of times consulting firms, whether it’s on the front end, the consulting firm’s looking at them and talking to the private equity, we can’t really do much until you have an asset internally that can help us. Because we have to drive price through sales and you’ve got to have that internal structure. Otherwise we’re just going to staff fog, which a lot of these firms don’t do. and so that’s where we come in and we’re like, okay, we’ll put the right pricing talent in place. And then sometimes it’s offboarding. Sothey are kinda off ramping from an engagement standpoint, the consulting firm, and they need to build teams behind them. analytics, sometimes even software development or tools help all kinds of different roles. but we start with the pricing leader and then go down. so it’s all stages. but typically we’re coming in year two of private equity think five, six year cycles. Usually the pricing transformation doesn’t start right off the bat, but sometimes it does. but usually it’s one and a half to two and a half is where we’re coming in.
Mark Stiving
Yeah. And so they typically start by hiring a consultant to come in and do the job or focus on their pricing. What are the pricing needs? And then they bring you back in to say, hey as they leave, we need someone, or we need someone to help manage them and learn from them as they’re in the process.
Jon Jennings
Yeah. And sometimes it’s, they bring me in and then I can refer consultants or, I kind of, I’ve talked to some companies where a chief marketing officer is like, we need to do something here. And so I’ll get an expert in my network to say, okay, talk to this person. And then here’s why I think we need a leader. and here’s what the org chart can look like long term. And then here’s some options from a consulting standpoint. If you want to engage and spend a lot of money, or you want to do it homegrown, we’ll help them all the way through it. With providing some consulting advice not just ours, but we’ll lean on our network to help us. They kind of bake in their service with ours and vice versa sometimes just to be value-add to the client.
Mark Stiving
Nice. Okay. I’m going to ask a hard question, and I know your answer is going to be, it depends, but you’re not allowed to answer that way.
Jon Jennings
Okay, I need my coffee.
Mark Stiving
$50 million company, Portco, and you get to design the org structure around pricing. What does it look like?
Jon Jennings
What’s the industry? What are they making? Or what’s the service?
Mark Stiving
Something industrial. Okay. Some manufacturing company,
Jon Jennings
Let’s say they’re doing it, I don’t know. so they’re a manufacturer, they’re selling into distributors and wholesale, whatever there is. Okay. They’re not manufacturing and distributor, obviously there’s only 50 million. Yeah, you need one headcount. Depends, shoot, said it. So you need, you start out with, I would bring in a director pricing strategy or just pricing, whatever. And how many markets are you in? What’s the data environment look like? and assess it. And then probably needs an analyst or he or she needs an analyst and that’s about it. $50 million company and where are they sitting in the market? What, there’s a lot of factors, but for the most part, rule of thumb, you can probably get away with one jacket, all trades doing pricing. and you could probably bring in someone that’s just quantitatively brilliant, that has some experience from crafting strategies beyond cost-plus. And they could probably take your lift from one to five if on a scale of 10 which is a big impact.
And then from there, you decide if you want to continue to invest. But I would start with one and then see what the impact is. And that person’s job is going to make a business case if and a good rule of thumb, if you’re going to make a hire and you can make a business case of a 10 x of their salary is impact. That’s a pretty good opportunity to invest there. And if they can continue to make a 10X business case and it’s working and you have proof of concept, you keep rolling. Because they may take your business to the next level and you may be able to, not just, optimize EBITDA, but grow with pricing strategy. So that’d be my 2 cents.
Mark Stiving
That’s a great answer. And one of the things I love about industrial businesses is because the cost of goods sold and they’re doing cost-plus pricing, probably, I mean, there’s a physical cost of goods sold. It isn’t theoretical developer hours and software.
Jon Jennings
And so a lot of times with these companies, it is just, okay, we need to understand a couple things. Because you’re not going to be value-based. So let’s say you’re selling sand, I don’t know, it’s a fairly commoditized business. but there’s market-based principles that you can use. so you got to understand your cost to serve. You have to understand your competitor’s cost to serve. Freight costs sometimes become a big thing. understanding where your customer’s shipping from. Then you understand your pricing power, what you’re competing against. just some blocking and tackling stuff that a lot of companies don’t understand. And being able to understand what your true price is whether the price advantage book, where it’s pocket price, waterfall. And also being able to map out kind of volume versus price and your most valuable customers and being able to understand who they are and how to drive more value to them and make them a priority.
And then the ones that have discounts, they’ve kind of beat you up on price. They’re not doing a ton of volume. You can beat them a little stronger with them. And just thinking through some basics can get you a long way when you haven’t done that before. so one person can do that depending on how many skews you have and you know how many different customer segments. but usually they can just find the low hanging fruit and start picking it off. and if there’s greater opportunity, then they can make a business case and see if they see if you want to hire somebody.
Mark Stiving
Nice. So let’s flip the question upside down now. What size company do you think should have a team of let’s say five pricing people?
Jon Jennings
I would say a billion dollars.
Mark Stiving
A billion dollars?
Jon Jennings
Something like that. Depending on industry, depending on the data environment how many SKUs. There’s a lot of tactical work that goes into it. and price setting. And there’s people that need help with these sophisticated contracts. You got to have some different role players. but for the most part, I would say a general thumb would be, would be five. But you start with hiring a really good leader. And then you can even have someone coming in as kind of a player coach. I would hire, if I’m, let’s say I’m a billion dollar manufacturer, I’m bringing in one really good director, senior director of pricing and giving the resource to hire one analyst on day one. and that’s where you start.
And then as far as what they need from there, if they want to invest in tools, bring in a developer in house to build it homegrown, or you want to invest in a consulting firm to help build something, I wouldn’t go get a billion dollars, go get a massive software system. Then, you see what kinda impact you can make and then you kind of build it from there. Sometimes a company will just throw a bunch of dollars at something and then they try to do it all at once. And I think with pricing, it’s, dip your toe in and just invest in the right people, the right firm that matches from a consulting standpoint, and then build from there. and if you hire someone, it’s a really good leader, they’re going to show you the path. and you’re not going to have to tell them, hey, you, here’s your org chart. Here’s how you’re going to do it. They’ll figure it out for you.
Mark Stiving
I love that answer. And one of the things that’s neat about pricing is that there, it’s never perfect, right? You’re always going to get better tomorrow. And so why think we’re going to hire everybody at once and go change the entire culture, right? Let’s do it a step at a time. One company that I’ve worked with in the past, Pros, had a fascinating business case where they didn’t sell you all their modules. If you want to go buy from Pros, you only get to buy one module and then you have to implement it, install it, prove that it works, and then you can go buy another module.
Jon Jennings
I like that.
Mark Stiving
And it just makes sense.
Jon Jennings
Yeah. It does. And some of these transformations, you do it all at once and sales is adjusting, it changes and it’s a lot of times I think the biggest skill set is change management from the leader. It is the biggest skill set needed which can be tough. So you have to have someone that can be really thinking about markets, thinking internally through all the various pricing, historical pricing data, and being able to influence an entire organization. And change the way they think about their business to a large degree.
Mark Stiving
Nice. Hey, talk to us about what’s the state or status of pricing positions? Are there more people looking for jobs or more jobs looking for people today?
Jon Jennings
I don’t know. That’s a bad answer. Bad, bad part. But it’s a balance. I mean, everywhere, everyone I know usually, I mean, people get laid off. Companies get sold, all kinds of things happen, but, and sometimes it takes a little while to find the right opportunity, but everyone that’s worth their salt they’d land on their feet. So I would say that during inflation, it was crazy. So I’m looking, everything’s about your perspective. So when everything was going nuts, everyone was hiring pricing, you couldn’t find enough people. and most people were behind and we’d help them try to catch up. But once they already lost and they’re just looking internally and they’re not thinking about the future. That was a crazy market. So now things have cooled off a little bit.
Pricing teams aren’t growing quite as quickly, so we’re looking at it from that lens where I think if you took out the blip and you looked at pricing, jobs and talent, it’s kind of a, it’s more linear without the big jump that we saw with crazy inflation numbers. So I would say it’s pretty steady and healthy just like the rest of the job market. And I think with private equity, it being squeezed a little bit with cost of capital and they’re looking at a little bit more growth strategy and commercial optimization, they’re starting to lean a little heavier into pricing and more like kind of middle market PE, there’s not as much arbitrage as there used to be. We could buy slap bunch companies together and sell for something greater, then you’d have a little bit more of a sophisticated strategy. So you see the private equity investing and more commercially minded operating partners and even bringing in these roles that essentially are going across their port codes and evaluating the corporate strategy or the commercial strategy and kind of pushing pricing initiatives. so it’s definitely, there’s some shifts in the market. Some things have pulled back and other things have accelerated. So I think it’s pretty balanced.
Mark Stiving
Got it. And if you were a new, not a new pricing person, an experienced pricing person who just got laid off because the company was downsizing or they got rid of their pricing departments or whatever, what would you do? What approach would you take besides calling you?
Jon Jennings
Awesome. You break my answer. And I would say, look through your network. I mean, just like anything, take your time, take a breath, it’s going to be alright. You don’t need to jump at the first thing, evaluate it based on the merit of the opportunity. Every time I look at a pricing role, I want to vet it out fully. I don’t like to get burned where sometimes these pricing roles are a little bit of fool’s gold. There’s someone up top on the board that says they need to do it, but no one in the executive team’s really buying in. And there’s going through the motions. You sometimes see that in publicly traded companies, and then the wind shifts and they every quarter’s something different. Try to vet out the full scope of the opportunity. The right one will come. Just, I would say just farm your network, reach out to people you’ve worked with in the past. You don’t want to just blow everyone up, but just let everyone know you’re on the market and hit up some recruiters and network and jobs pop up, apply. But for the most part, hit your network and show impacts on your resume if you can versus, I like numbers, numbers, yeah. And how you’ve contributed to that. It’s not rocket science. Just be patient if you can, financially. You can wait three months. It’s okay. The right one will pop up. You don’t have to jump at the first one.
Mark Stiving
Talk to me real quickly about resumes versus LinkedIn. Does anybody write resumes anymore?
Jon Jennings
Oh, yeah. We don’t make our part, we do consulting across advisory and strategy for partner level stuff. So a lot of times we won’t make them write a resume at that level. but everything else, I mean, keep your CV updated and put it on LinkedIn. That helps me. But we have a lot of people in our database, so we’re kind of getting to that point. But The more you put on LinkedIn and keep an eye on that, I know you get a lot of spam on there. What we try to do as far as we do LinkedIn outreach is we throw a ton of details at people who will be reporting to all the different stuff. So, I’d say keep an eye on your inbox, even if you’re happy in the role.
It’s just I’ll give you data points and some intel in the market and it’s always something. You never know when the next tide’s going to turn. So keep it updated and do your resume. I mean, I’m not a one-page guy. Like, it doesn’t have to be one page. If you want to have some highlight reel one pager that’s cool. But also have your two to three-pager. It’s fine. If you’ve had a lot, if you had a long career and you’ve done a lot of cool things, put it all on there. I mean, I talked to a guy the other day, he did some merchant stuff and he has been pricing, you got to include on your resume. Because the company that’s hiring, they actually want to see someone that has been on the merchant side. It’s like, they’re going to negotiate. So, make sure to put it all on there because you never know which opportunity you’re going to need to pull that experience.
Mark Stiving
I say I haven’t done a resume in 15 years, and thankfully I never will again for the rest of my life. But that was, I just assumed they went away with LinkedIn.
Jon Jennings
If I’m spending some for a job, I want a PDF, word doc to throw in there with them. We still linked their LinkedIn account too. So I had someone the other day who was like, you have my resume. I was like, no, I don’t like LinkedIn. Like, well, just put it, same thing. Just change the format just so we can send the doc. It’s still common practice.
Mark Stiving
Nice. Okay. I actually, that was an aside for me because I wanted to go back to something else you said, whichI don’t even know how you do this, but you said that you should vet the opportunity, make sure it isn’t a fly by night, some board member said, hey, let’s go try this. How do you do that?
Jon Jennings
Follow the money?
Mark Stiving
How do you do that and how do you think someone else should do that?
Jon Jennings
It’s a lot easier for me to do it than if you’re interviewing for a job. So having a third party is nice if you trust them. But I try to follow the money and it’s on the intake call, I can tell if someone, if they’re serious about the transformation, if they’re investing dollars, like if they’re saying, hey, look, we’ve earmarked a budget of $5 million and we’re thinking about consulting firms, tools, they can come in, they can have a headcount on day one, then we can build from there. I’m like, okay, that’s a good foundation. That means they’re serious. When I hear we just want to bring in one person and then kind of, they get really clammy when you talk about adding a head count.
And then you start talking about the buy-in, okay, who’s the VP of finances? How do they work? How do they work in the past? And you start getting answers of, well, they actually report into this person and they control pricing power, but we have to influence and we have to do it this way. That starts to be some red flags where it’s like, okay, well, are they on the same page? Have we had a discussion internally about it? And I started asking kind of tougher questions and digging a little deeper. and then from there, it’s not perfect, but you can kind of read the room a little bit on and what have they done in the past? And sometimes the story is, we brought this person in and they couldn’t drive the change.
And I look at the background of the person they brought in, and if it’s a good match and they’ve had success in their past, then I’m like, okay, well maybe, the problem wasn’t the individual. so you kinda have to infer and go with your gut. You’re going to talk to these people and they get excited about all the stuff you’re talking about as far as what you can drive. or they look into just checking boxes and always follow the money is my… It’s never, it’s imperfect. But as a recruiter, I think that’s my responsibility, to be a conduit of information between two parties, vice versa. And if we can increase our bandwidth to that information, then that’s fantastic. so, when we vet a client, we do the same thing.
When we vet a candidate we want to know all the dirt, and the more the company tells me, and the more the candidate tells me, the better I can do my job. It’s like, I’m your, almost like I’m your attorney, tell me everything and then we will help solve the problem versus trying to sugarcoat it. And when a company tells me about all the dirt, all the bad stuff, I start to get really comfortable and it’s all rainbows and butterflies. I’m like, this is new. but I like when it’s like, here’s all our problems and this person will pose a little bit of an issue and this person is more agreeable to this and seems excited. So when I start, they tell me where the bodies are buried and the landmines are, I’m like, okay, now we can navigate it. When it feels like they’re covering something up or not, just not telling me the whole truth, that’s when I get a little nervous.
Mark Stiving
Okay. So I dearly love that answer. And as you’re giving me the answer, here’s what’s going through my head. I’ve probably had a half dozen jobs in my entire career. You’ve probably talked with a thousand companies and seen what works and what doesn’t work in your career. In fact, how many companies do you think you’ve talked with? Is it probably way more than a thousand?
Jon Jennings
Oh, yeah. Who knows? I wish I had that metric. That’d be fantastic. Let’s see. And when we say company, I mean, I said I had one job, one price leader job. I vetted 83 people all from, well, not all from different companies, some of them from the same. That’s always, it’s always fun to get the story from people that sit next to each other for the same kinda perspective reporting to the same boss doing the same stuff. but yeah, I’ve got, let’s see, yeah, probably maybe even tens of thousands of individuals at various companies across the country, big and small.
Mark Stiving
And what’s fascinating about that is you’ve got the experience and the knowledge to know how to ask questions, to know what to look for. And those of us who have just done a few handful of searches for ourselves, we aren’t experts at that.
Jon Jennings
So, we have this thing that a buddy of mine who’s a former BCG consultant coined for me where it’s a fittest athlete. Because we kinda look at the different levels. When you’re at the top level, you’re trying to find a leader. We want to find people that have made impacts, and we want them to tell those stories, and then we want to fit it in within the culture, within the individuals they’re going to be having to drive change to and how their personality and their skills translate to that. But as you start going down the org chart, it’s hard to have clarity because people have less experience, so you’re having to go vet on other things. So I like to see, let’s say we’re hiring a senior analyst. What I want to see is their, what they do outside of work to get on GitHub and do modeling and whatever they’re trying to get side hustles going.
I always like to see someone with a side hustle. I talked to one person that was going to an Ivy League and then decided to pursue golf and transferred schools and pursued a golf career, ended up being professional golfer, but he modeled out his entire golf teams all their metrics, and really was just brilliant modeler and ended up the golf career, didn’t quite go and then got into an analyst role and then navigated over toward commercial strategy and pricing. and was kind of thinking three dimensionally about it early in his career. But that’s the type of pedigree I look for. And then I placed an individual. She was an actuary and kind of just burned out. And I talked to her and she loved the idea of pricing, just her eyes lit up.
She knew economics really well. She understood elasticity models and I had her do a case study for a client of mine and interview, and she nailed it, and she’s a rockstar. So we try to go in and I see a lot of people about engineering. They understand things connect, so that skillset tends, if they have some business acumen and a little bit of personality to go with it they translate well to pricing. I don’t know, that’s more tactical pricing roles. I don’t want to put someone in these positions where they just have understood a system and how it works and how to keep the wheel going. I want to find people that like to break the wheel or build it. And so, that’s our approach to the more mid. And lower level, is people that are just high achievers and with a quantitative math brain.
Mark Stiving
Yeah. One of the things I find is that oftentimes pricing people, if you’ve been in the same company for a long time, you think that pricing is what that company does, and you really do have to break it. You got to think outside that box.
Jon Jennings
And sometimes I talked to an individual just the other day, I think he was like 17 years, or it was 12 years at one company most of his career, but he was, he kept breaking it. and so I was like, okay. And a lot of times these companies change so much that they’re not even the same company in 10 years and they got acquired and so many things change. but for the most part, if you are in just one environment where it’s, you’re only seeing a narrow view of one type of strategy and it’s sometimes hard to pivot.
Mark Stiving
Yeah. John, this has been fascinating as always but we’re going to have to wrap it up. Last question for you. What’s the one piece of pricing advice you want to give our listeners today that you think could have a big impact on their business?
Jon Jennings
Understand your customer. Going on right along with sales. I think I’ve said this before on your podcast, but that really is understanding their motivations and where you’re positioned in the market because you probably have a lot of different segments. And once you can build those relationships with sales and the customers and understand what really makes them tick, it’s a lot easier to price to it, to add value, to change, hey, we’re going to add a little more sophistication to the way we provide this service. We’ve got, let’s build this app out and make it really easy for them. And now you can price that. If you can understand that, then you can reverse engineer prices into different value drivers you can create.
Mark Stiving
Okay. I’m going to make a quick observation. Your advice was to understand your customers and our entire conversation was about how you understand your customers . So nice job, Jon.
Jon Jennings
Thanks, Mark.
Mark Stiving
Sowe’re going to have to wrap it up to our listeners. Thank you so much for your time. If anyone enjoyed this please leave us a rating and review. And also, Jon, if anybody wants to contact you, how can they do that?
Jon Jennings
Find us on LinkedIn, Jennings Executive Search. You can go to our website, jenningsexec.com. Send us an email. We got phone numbers on there, and if anyone wants to send over a resume, we’ll throw it in the database and have a call at some point in time. But most likely, I know you’re out there, but don’t be afraid to reach out.
Mark Stiving
Nice. And by the way, there’s also a link to Jennings Executive Search on the homepage at Impact pricing. Finally, to my listeners, if you have any questions or comments about this 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.
