May 24, 2021
Jim Broderick is a seasoned Pricing Professional with 20+ years’ experience across Marketing, Product Management/Product Development, Finance, Operations, Data Analysis and Sales; he has a unique ability to view Pricing from all dimensions. He also created and led the Pricing Function at a $500M Manufacturer/Distributor and a $100M Professional Services Company. He works cross functionally to achieve support in building the pricing function, pricing initiatives and overall strategy at the same time he is responsible for price uplift in excess of $50M over a 15-year career.
In this episode, Jim shares how the different roles he tackled helped him work his way up to being a Pricing executive. How he greatly impacted his business in just over three years is one area he details the process in achieving it. He talks about how value pricing and value selling is at the heart of providing solutions to customers and impacting businesses.
Why you have to check out today’s podcast:
- Learn how you can institute a value-selling process with your salespeople so you know your customer’s pain points and find solutions to their problems
- Find out how to see price as a proactive lever rather than a reactive pain point
- Discover the pricing skills and action steps you ought to have and implement to massively impact a business
“You have to talk to your customers. You have to be out from behind the desk, work with the sales people, figure out what makes them tick. How can they drink the Kool Aid that you are pouring in? Because if you can't get to that level, again, all the analysis in the world, if you can't get it in front of the salespeople, in front of the customers, it's a waste of time.”
- Jim Broderick
Topics Covered:
01:20 - From being a carpenter to a VP of Pricing
02:39 - The affordability of school back then compared to this time
03:30 - How he started consulting with small businesses
04:12 - The role he started out in and how he worked his way up to an executive-level Pricing position
06:03 - How does Excel fare from all the other BI tools around today
06:55 - The same but different way of writing Math in Tableau or Excel
08:13 - How changing jobs is like learning a new language and how he uses that idea to solve problems
09:58 - More than value-based pricing, it’s value-based selling
11:05 - Seeing value-based pricing years before and how it was achievable
13:12 - Value drivers are not internal - they have to be external from customers
15:15 - What he does around value drivers in his own company
15:58 - Instituting a value-based pricing
16:51 - How he made a $125 million impact
20:02 - Instances where you leave money on the table by not communicating your value
21:09 - Thoughts on compensating salespeople for price increase
22:53 - Impacting business for over just three years
Key Takeaways:
“I like to say when I'm talking to people about Pricing, I'm in the middle of the Rubik's Cube. Everything else is rolling around me. And I'm in the middle of the Rubik's Cube keeping it all together and making sure that the colors are lining up.” - Jim Broderick
“I think I had the benefit of coming from a Sales background. Because you know, part of what we do is we have to sell our story. We have to sell to the business, why is it important to do things the way we do.” - Jim Broderick
“If you want to advance to the level of director, or above in the Pricing world, you have to put yourself in front of the business, you have to.” - Jim Broderick
“I have a saying that I repeat all the time to anyone who will listen to me, we can create the most Math-based, value-based, algorithmic-based price you can come up with, if Sales can't translate that and sell it, it's a waste of time.” - Jim Broderick
“Identifying value drivers, in a business, quantifying the value drivers, and then training your sales people to change the conversation from price to the value drivers that are important to that customer.” - Jim Broderick
“Value drivers cannot be internal; value drivers have to be external from the customer.” - Jim Broderick
“I think that the most important thing [impacting business] is that you have an executive team that sees price as a proactive lever, and not a reactive pain point.” - Jim Broderick
People/Resources Mentioned:
- Reed Holden: https://www.holdenadvisors.com/about/leadership/
Connect with Jim Broderick:
Connect with Mark Stiving:
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stiving/
- Email: mark@impactpricing.com