Kevin Mitchell is the President of The Professional Pricing Society (PPS), the worldwide professional organization dedicated to pricing training, education, and networking.
In this episode, Kevin shares what a pricing professional should be — one that is not only adept at pricing strategies but can articulate, communicate, and negotiate in and outside the organization.
He also talks about the pricing career path that the Professional Pricing Society provides in its pricing education. He doubles down on saying that every money that goes into what the company spends on and the revenue generated ties back to a pricing decision at one point in time.
That’s why it is best to learn and understand pricing so we can make the best decisions. Because this would impact the organization and the people who work hard to create value in the products and services available to the consumers.
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Why you have to check out today’s podcast:
- Find out how to be a great pricing professional with pricing leadership
- Learn about the pricing education Professional Pricing Society provides for someone in terms of forging a pricing career path
- Hear about the future of pricing considering the uncertainty that concerns us at this time
“Everything in your company, all the profitability, all of your salaries, all of your bosses’ salaries, every Dollar, Yen, Euro, Won that comes into your organization has a pricing decision attached to it.”
– Kevin Mitchell
Topics Covered:
01:49 – What made Kevin start a Pricing career
04:54 – Professional Pricing Society being a subscription company
06:19 – Who joins the Professional Pricing Society
08:09 – What is a pricing professional
11:22 – Two things that a company does in terms of R&D, product development, marketing
15:56 – How does PPS does education on pricing leadership
18:06 – Thoughts on the pricing landscape COVID and post COVID
25:19 – Changing names but keeping the value
26:43 – Best pricing advice that could impact your business
Key Takeaways:
“For a lot of individuals, pricing people, it’s our job to make sure that we keep the lights on and keep everything running. And we do that because a lot of people invest a lot of resources in creating whatever it is that our company does, it’s our job to make sure that we are adequately compensated for that.” – Kevin Mitchell
“The price is often the first impactful thing about a product or service. And it is our job to manage that.” – Kevin Mitchell
“To be a great pricing professional, you have to be an artist and also a scientist at certain levels. Certainly, you do need the mathematical, data, analysis background. But I think sometimes we can be lacking in communication, on the negotiation with others inside and outside of our company. I think both are very, very important about what we’re trying to get across.” – Kevin Mitchell
“All of the money that comes into any organization, and therefore all of our salaries, all of the benefits that we get, that’s all tied to a pricing decision at one point, and it’s just a matter of, are we going to have our influence in it or are we going to let the marketplace decide?” – Kevin Mitchell
“It’s so important that we should all be in the mind-frame that we’re going to learn as much about it as we can to make the best decisions for ourselves, for our companies, and for all of the people in our organizations who work so hard to create the value in the products and services that we deliver to the marketplace.” – Kevin Mitchell
People/ Resources mentioned:
Connect with Kevin Mitchell:
Connect with Mark Stiving:
- Email: [email protected]
Full Interview Transcript
(Note: This transcript was created with an AI transcription service. Please forgive any transcription or grammatical errors. We probably sounded better in real life.)
Kevin Mitchell
Everything in your company, all the profitability, all of your salaries, all of your bosses’ salaries. Every Dollar, Yen, Euro, Won that comes into your organization has a pricing decision attached to it
[Intro]
Mark Stiving
Welcome to Impact Pricing the podcast where we discuss pricing, value, and the associated relationship between them. I’m Mark Stiving. Today, our guest is Kevin Mitchell and here are three things you want to know about Kevin before we start. He is the president of the Professional Pricing Society. Not only does he know a lot about pricing but he also knows about running an association which fascinates me and he doesn’t like to brag about it but he’s actually made hundreds of dollars as an amateur musician. Welcome, Kevin.
Kevin Mitchell
Mark, thank you so much for the opportunity to talk with you today and yes, I’ve got great stories from my musical background, literally back in the day, dozens of CDs sold, hundreds of dollars may very famous in let’s say about two clubs in Atlanta, Georgia where I am right now if you go back in time a few years. Hey brother, thanks very much for the opportunity to talk with you today.
Mark Stiving
You’re still working, I thought you’d retired on that by now.
Kevin Mitchell
I’m still working a little bit that’s been a special fund for special expenses somewhere that I’ve lost track of a long time ago.
Mark Stiving
Exactly, okay I think I know the answer to this question but I’m going to ask it anyway. How did you get into pricing?
Kevin Mitchell
That is a very good question. I guess none of us are born to be pricing people. I know that I’ve talked with Professional Pricing Society members from across the globe, some of us were interested in it, some of us were let’s say voluntarily told that they were their company’s new pricing person or new pricing department. For me, pricing actually is a bit of a family business. So, there’s a gentleman in Atlanta that a lot of us have heard of named Eric Mitchell who was a pricing practitioner 50 years ago way before pricing was cool. He worked for I’m thinking about when I was growing up. He worked for Ford, Xerox, and IBM and Intel, and some others when I was a small child, grew a little tired of corporate America, became a consultant, started writing books around the same time that some of the other visionaries in the pricing discipline were doing the same. I’m thinking around the same time is, Tom Nagle and Reed Holden and Kent Monroe and some others. They were all consultants and one day he was like, I’m tired of competing with you guys. You write me an article about elasticity, you write me an article about negotiations, you’re writing an article about analytics. I’m going to make a newsletter, bring everyone together and that is actually how Professional Pricing Society started. So, it would have been my job as a middle school and high school student when school was off during Christmas or during the summertime to build his database, to mail out early newsletters which I have great stories of carrying boxes of Kinkos, yellow canary newsletters, you know, uphill both ways in the snow in Atlanta, Georgia and Phoenix, Arizona. So, for me it is a bit of a family business, Eric Mitchell is still doing very well. He retired in 2008 and so, I’ve been back at PPS for almost 15 years now, 14 years since the end of those six beginning of those seven and so, yeah. So, if none of us are born to be pricing people I may have been in the position where I was pretty close. I grew up around hearing him talk about it. From going back to when I was a child and had been around PPS in its infancy and back now as we are continuing to grow. So, yeah, I had a lot of experience around pricing, a lot around sales and running in association and I’m very lucky in that Professional Pricing Society we have a great team. Obviously, we have great partners across the globe and get great opportunities to talk on podcasts like this, so thanks.
Mark Stiving
So, it’s interesting this morning I was thinking about the conversation that you and I are probably going to have and one of the things that I’d never thought of before in the world of associations is, running an association is a lot like running a subscription business. Because nowadays all of us in pricing, we’re thinking well, how do I help companies with subscriptions? I’ve got a new book out, it’s called Win, Keep, Grow. But I think you deal with the exact same issues. Do you think of the association like a subscription?
Kevin Mitchell
Absolutely, yeah, we have a few different revenue streams. One of them is that at our heart, we’re a membership society. So, of course, that’s a pure subscription model, we started with, you know, again, the canary yellow newsletter that has a 35, almost 40-year history now. And a lot of our revenue streams are built on kind of a subscription basis where basically with a fee, you can take all you want and take advantage of all of our offerings, be they electronic, things around our events, and things like that. So, it is interesting that a lot of the talk in the business world and pricing and revenue management is around subscriptions, or blank as a service, anything and everything as a service. So yeah, as an association, we’ve been in that vein for quite a while here. And yeah, that’s basically how we’ve been doing business.
Mark Stiving
Yeah, it’s pretty fascinating to see that. Let’s shift gears and talk about pricing, pricing people, pricing careers. But before, I know PPS, I’ve been a PPS many times, you’ve let me speak there a couple of times. I think I spoke when your dad was running it, many, many, many years ago. But what I was really curious about is, do you think most members are pricing professionals, or do you think there are people outside of pricing who want to know more about pricing?
Kevin Mitchell
That’s a good question. And we do have a mixture, I would say that we probably have a majority being the first people who are pricing professionals who have pricing or revenue or margin, somewhere in their job title, or as one of their main company duties. But we do have people who, let’s say, are pricing adjacent, who might be in sales, marketing, finance, product management, who would consider pricing to be a part of their job, but maybe not their main job if you met them at a cocktail party and asked what they do. But since it’s a part of their job, of course, they do want to educate themselves, learn more about it, and basically become more expert in the areas that kind of have that Venn diagram overlap with what they would do on a daily basis. If I had to estimate, let’s say, two thirds, or 70%, or maybe even a little bit more people who would consider pricing as their main job or one of their main jobs, and maybe 30% 25, 30%, maybe a third, in that second category, there are people who have a different job function, but who have such a big overlap with pricing, or who work with pricing people closely in their organization, that they want to be up on the latest and greatest strategies, tactics and skillsets, and basically want to be in touch with everything that’s going on in our part of the business world there. So yeah, it’s a bit of a mixture a little bit more on the first side.
Mark Stiving
I think that makes a lot of sense to me. And so, here’s a hard question that I’ve always struggled with answering, and I’m going to give it to you, you’re at a cocktail party, and someone comes up to you and says, what do you do? And you actually answer, I’m a pricing professional. I guarantee you the next words out of their mouth are: What’s that? So, what’s that?
Kevin Mitchell
I would say it depends on the organization and the individual. But in some organizations, I might say, as a pricing professional, it’s my job to make sure that my company remains profitable or improves their margins, or basically does better in the big picture. And the reason for that is a lot of people can connect to that and say, ‘Okay, that makes sense.’ But also, being that pricing in combination with sales and marketing and finance, and these other parts of the organization. I mean, they become the engine that basically can drive the company, you know, 100% of everyone’s salary comes in conjunction with or gets connected to a pricing decision at some level. As far as things like research and development, you know, pricing and sales and marketing and finance and other groups would fund all of that. And we’re a part of that. So, I would say, for a lot of individuals, pricing people, it’s our job to make sure that we keep the lights on and keep everything running. And we do that because a lot of people invest a lot of resources in creating whatever it is that our company does, it’s our job to make sure that we are adequately compensated for that. So, it can, of course, it can depend. But another way might be to put it is that the price is often the first impactful thing about a product or service. And it is our job to manage that. That can lead you in a lot of different ways there. And basically, there are a lot of things around that where it is a bit of a head-scratcher if you meet someone at a cocktail party and say what you do, but with a little explanation there. Kind of tying it to the P&L, tying it to the operations or to the profitability of an organization. I think there are ways to get it across. And also, Mark, one thing that I often encourage pricing people to do, you know, the PPS members worldwide, the people that we see at our events is that we need to basically puff out our chest a little bit and be proud of what we do. Because there are a lot of organizations that have had great sales organizations that have had great products, and not done well and had to lay off people or underperformed, because they were not as stringent about their pricing regulations, and basically keeping things where they are, as they should have been. So, business literature is full of examples like that, companies that had great ideas, had great products, and are not around, because probably they didn’t have enough focus on that bottom line. And basically, that’s what we do.
Mark Stiving
Yes. long answer, but I still loved it.
Kevin Mitchell
Oh, sorry about my long answer there. I could have been long-winded on the topics.
Mark Stiving
What are the things I pulled out of what you said, which correlates with something I say a lot is, 99% of what a company does is to create value and pricing is the only thing that captures the value we create.
Kevin Mitchell
Absolutely. So that is right. Think of all the R&D, all of the product development, all of the marketing, all of the infrastructure around a company, yeah, your company has two things: to create products, services, a mixture thereof, that is marketable. And for pricing people, it’s our job to make sure that we are compensated on all of that value that is created, a good sort of way to explain it. Thank you.
Mark Stiving
Nice, nice. So, let’s talk about pricing education for a second. And before I toss you this big softball, let me explain to you what I think of is the three big areas that I think pricing people really need to be great at. And it probably goes with their careers. And I would say pricing analysts probably have to be great at data and understanding the mechanics or the data that’s going on. Then you get pricing directors, pricing managers, and they’re much more into pricing strategy, and trying to figure out what we should be doing, what’s possible. And then the hard skill that I think so few pricing people actually have is, let’s call it leadership, or influence or soft skills, however, you want to define that. And so, I’m going to toss that off to you and say, tell me what you think of those three things. Is that accurate?
Kevin Mitchell
Definitely accurate. To be a great pricing professional, you have to be an artist and also a scientist at certain levels. Certainly, you do need the mathematical, data, analysis background. But I think and as you mentioned, as you touched on, sometimes we can be lacking on communication, on the negotiation with others inside and outside of our company. I think both are very, very important about what we’re trying to get across. It’s one thing if you present, let’s say, a 25-year veteran of your sales force with reams and reams of data, all the data might be correct, you may have pored over it, it could be absolutely correct. But in order to talk to him or her, you’re going to have to be able to communicate what has been going on what if anything we can do to improve, and what’s going to happen next. And so there does have to be that communication element, that sauce, skills element, the negotiation element, and also the managerial strategic leadership elements there. So, there are a few things that come in. And Mark, another way that I like to think about this is ideally, if you are a great pricing person, you may not be the most popular person in your organization. Sometimes there’s a little good cop/bad cop involved in there. But you should have great contacts and be able to have that nexus and touch a lot of different parts of your organization and be connected there. And so yes, analytical skills, data skills, strategic skills, managerial skills, communications, soft skills, negotiation, artists and scientists, a little of both, depending on the day might shift from 40, 61 way to 60, 40 the other way, but definitely have to have all of those parts there.
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Mark Stiving
So, I think of it almost as, I’m going to start as an analyst, I’m going to move up to a manager and eventually, I’m going to learn the leadership influence so that I can actually change the company. And so, I would think of that as a career path. Does that fit it all the way PPS does education?
Kevin Mitchell
It does. We are lucky in that with our depth and breadth. And I’m thinking about within the certified pricing professional designation within the CPP itself, there are six levels with dozens upon dozens of opportunities in each level. And they kind of go through a process like that, where core pricing skills and price setting, you know, what we would think of as maybe some of the more analytical skills, and then moving up to the managerial skills to negotiation, and then the strategy and things like that. So yes, we are built where there could be a progression there. And what we do for a lot of our big member companies, is we ask for their help in segmenting their large teams, and say, Okay, these people are new analysts, they have one- or two-years’ experience, here’s another group, that is not a manager track, they have a few more years of experience, they’re more involved with a lot of different moving parts in our organization. And here’s a part that is in senior management. And what we’ve done is design specific, very different training paths for each of those using our group of faculty. Our online courses are in-person workshops, when we get back to having in-person workshops, or virtual workshops now, so yes, absolutely. We have lots of opportunities. And there’s a lot of great literature out there. A lot of different organizations that do pricing, the Big Four accounting firms have pricing centers of excellence, there is a lot of pricing-specific consultancies and pricing software companies. And so, there’s a lot of information out there, not only for the analyst level for the data level, and around the managerial level, talking about strategy and negotiations and basically setting a frame for the business there. So yeah, a lot of opportunities around that. And definitely not one size fits all. Yeah, definitely
Mark Stiving
Yeah, definitely not. So, although I don’t really like talking about this whole COVID thing. Are there things around COVID, besides the fact that we don’t do in-person meetings anymore, or even not related to COVID but just other industry changes that you see driving our world of pricing?
Kevin Mitchell
Yeah, absolutely. And a lot of it is obviously, a lot of people are making decisions if I could steal a computer science electrical engineering term here. A lot of organizations in their purchasing supply chain organizations are acting more in serial now than in parallel, partially because of the pandemic, it can be harder, kind of to get through that train and get decisions made. So of course, that’s affected the way that pricing people have to work. in a lot of instances, I’m hearing from our member companies that the purchasing decision is a little bit more drawn out now. It could be because of some flight disconnects, where it’s not as easy to get 10 people in one room at one time, you might get eight of them on a Zoom, but the actual decision-maker may be distracted or maybe on a different call. Also, budgets are a little stretch right now, we still have economic uncertainty now, which of course affects pricing directly in a lot of different ways. So, it depends on your industry on your vertical to some extent. But certainly, the pandemic has affected the way that we do business. And I remember in one of our virtual meetings, we did a… one of our presenters had a quick live poll trivia question and asked, okay, compared to pre-pandemic, are you about the same as far as the amount of things going on? Are you much busier? Or are you less busy than you were a pre-pandemic, and overwhelmingly it was people responding that they were much busier now than they were pre-pandemic? There can be a little pressure on margins. And as you know, that means that the 1% that you can gain from pricing has a bigger effect. So, there may be more focus on the pricing organization internally from your own company with a little bit more stress externally from your customer base from your marketplace, because their budgets may be stretched, and they have a low economic uncertainty as well. So, pricing people right now, as far as their duties, a lot of them feel that they are getting a lot busier from both ends are getting more attention internally, a little bit more pressure externally, and looking to capitalize on the resources there. Some of us are in industries where we are a little bit busier or a lot busier post-pandemic. Some of us are in industries that have been badly hit because of the pandemic. But really, it doesn’t change a lot from a pricing person’s perspective about the nuts and bolts of your organization, those may not have changed as much as we would think in the past, let’s take 13 months since the pandemic started. So, a lot of it right now, what I’m hearing from pricing professionals worldwide, is we are surviving. And now we are getting back into a mind frame where we’re going to look at a thriving… we’re going to remember our company goals, our strategies, where we’re strong, where we’re not as strong. And we’re going to remember to get back our focus on what we’re trying to do there.
Mark Stiving
Yeah, I think that was a really interesting answer. Because I think there are both inside and outside pressures, the outside pressures, demand curves changed all over the place. And so, you don’t really know where you’re watching your own, you know, what’s the value changing in your marketplace? And then the uncertainty inside, we all work from home or taking care of our kids. For me, there’s so much going on. Okay, there’s just this uncertainty. So how do we deal with all that? So, tell me, what’s the future of pricing? What are you hearing from all the people you talk to? it?
Kevin Mitchell
That’s a very interesting question. Because what I’m hearing from a lot of people is that I would like to make a dichotomy if I could Mark, between the word the actual quote, pricing, unquote, and what pricing people actually do. And the reason for that dichotomy, is there are people that I’ve known for a very long time, who I know are primarily pricing people, but their actual job titles now may not reflect that. I mean, it might be a customer success team and customer improvement team, a margin improvement team, something in that, or they could be on a product marketing side or in a business unit. And so, what I’m seeing is a future of pricing is that people are getting more involved in pricing activities. We’ve been basically saying that, hey, we’re the best lever to pull if you want to increase your profitability, not only short-term, but medium-term, and long-term because we all have good memories. And so, I think a lot more people are getting involved in pricing activities. But that does not necessarily translate to a lot more people with the job titles, pricing analyst, pricing manager, pricing director, vice-president, and we hope to… pricing officer or senior VP of revenue management or some other titles like that. So, what we are seeing is that if we think of pure pricing people, if we think of an archery target, and the bull’s eye being people like you and I who have pricing as part of our company’s names. That bull’s eye, I would say is consistent. But what’s growing might be the sevens, eights, and nines around that bullseye, where a lot of people who are in product development groups, product management groups, and business units in marketing, and other fields are becoming more invested in the factors around pricing and the importance of prices. So, the future of pricing, right now we are in a state where of course, we’ve all seen the statistics where we create more data every 18 months that has existed in the history of mankind up until 18 months ago or something like that. So, there is a lot more emphasis on data availability, data analysis, making do with imperfect data, and things like that. There’s also instant information both from our company sides and from our customer side as well, which makes for a lot of interesting interactions and translations there. A lot of time I’m hearing now that once people finally contact your sales department, the deal is essentially already made. It’s just a negotiation around pricing because they’ve got instant research. We’re all good at doing searches and figuring out what something should be, what it should do, what it should cost, and so on. So, a lot more instant information, a lot more of a reliance on data. But despite that, there still is that emphasis on negotiations and soft selling skills both inside and outside of our own organizations there.
Mark Stiving
Yeah, I think it was a great answer. And I got to say about our company names. I don’t know about you, but I thought about changing my name to impact value, because it relates more to what I do. But it doesn’t have the same impact.
Kevin Mitchell
Pun intended.
Mark Stiving
Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
Kevin Mitchell
That’s interesting. And within PPS, and one interesting thing about us and I have to admit, I don’t know why, but outside of North America, where the PPS but in North America, we’re just PPS are professional pricing society. And I think of it in a lot of ways and discussions with people about this. We know that if you’re Southern and have a strong appetite like I do, the KFC stands for Kentucky Fried Chicken, but they don’t want to emphasize fried anymore, even though we all still eat fried foods, because they want to branch out and have more grilled options and salads. And you know, 50 years from now, for all vegetarians, there still may be a KFC, we just won’t know what the F stands for. There’s not going to be a PPS and an impact value or an impact pricing, the term may shift over a little while, but more and more people will actually do pricing, they just may not think of it. People are still going to eat fried food. They just don’t want to be reminded about it and a lot of cases, and yeah, so KFC, PPS impact value. There may be a shift in the, let’s say nomenclature there. But at our heart, it’s still around, basically what we do and making sure that we’re compensated for the goods and services that we provide.
Mark Stiving
Yeah, nice. Okay, final tough question for you. What’s the one piece of pricing advice you’d give our listeners you’re thinking have a big impact on their business.
Kevin Mitchell
I want everyone, I want to remind everyone that everything in your company, all the profitability, all of your salaries, all of your bosses’ salaries, every Dollar, Yen, Euro, Won that comes into your organization has a pricing decision attached to it. It could be made by you and your team, it could be made more by your customers that could be made by the market in whole, but very simply your profits, which is where our salaries come from where we reinvest in our communities, where we reinvest in our research and development for the next line of products, all of that simply comes down to our profits, which is just your price times your quantity sold minus your costs at a very basic level. So, the price affects all of that it’s very important. We do not get the attention, the compensation, the recognition, the training, the development, the education that we need, despite our importance. So, we have a bit of an uphill battle there. But we as pricing people can still be proud of our effects on our organizations. I heard someone say that pricing saves jobs, which is one that I like a lot. And basically, all of the money that comes into any organization, and therefore all of our salaries, all of the benefits that we get, that’s all tied to a pricing decision at one point, and it’s just a matter of are we going to have our influence in it? Are we going to let the marketplace decide, we’re going to let the customers decide? In some cases, it might be the right choice. But it’s so important that we should all be in the mind-frame that we’re going to learn as much about it as we can in order to make the best decisions for ourselves, for our companies, for our organizations, and for all of the people in our organizations who work so hard to create the value in the products and services that we deliver to the marketplace.
Mark Stiving
Nice, nice. So, Kevin, I’m going to take your five-minute answer and I’m going to say it in one quick second.
Kevin Mitchell
Absolutely. Please do it.
Mark Stiving
Every piece of revenue is the result of a pricing decision.
Kevin Mitchell
100%. That is correct.
Mark Stiving
I love that answer. That was just awesome. That was awesome. All right. Kevin, thank you so much for your time today. If anybody wants to contact you, how can they do that?
Kevin Mitchell
Absolutely. Thanks very much, Mark, for the opportunity to talk with you as well, enjoyed the discussion. You can find me on LinkedIn Kevin Mitchell, you can also email me on [email protected]. And you can always check the Pricing Society website pricingsociety.com. Of course, they’re also for more information about our organization and please let us know what we can do for you.
Mark Stiving
All right, thanks, Kevin. And we’ll have your link to your LinkedIn page in our show notes so people can find it relatively easily.
Kevin Mitchell
Absolutely. I look forward to connecting with everyone.
Mark Stiving
Yeah, Episode 115 is all done. One of our listeners Scott Sinning recently wrote,
“Mark and his guests cover timely topics with an interesting and fun approach. I look forward to hearing diverse insights about pricing strategy to grow my knowledge as a pricing leader and advisor. I think it’s a ‘must listen’ for business leaders and pricing professionals who are serious about improving their profitability.”
Can I say thank you, Scott? In fact, I also sent him a signed copy of my new not yet released book — Win, Keep, Grow: How to Price and Package your Subscription Business. I’ll do the same for you if you’re in the US and you leave me a review, if you’re outside the US, I’ll put your name on a list and send you a digital version once it’s available to me. Besides leaving a review, please tell a friend. I am so grateful for all the help you listeners give. And finally, if you have any questions or comments about the podcast, or about pricing in general, feel free to email me at [email protected]. Now, go make an impact!
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Tags: Accelerate Your Subscription Business, ask a pricing expert, pricing metrics, pricing strategy
