Dec 27, 2021
Scott Miller is an experienced pricing professional with over 12 years of proven leadership in achieving profit oriented sales growth through advanced pricing techniques. Currently, he works as the Vice President of Pricing at Fiserv. Scott guides the pricing team in developing creative proposals for clients on Fiserv sales of $3B annually. He successfully led and implemented profitable growth and pricing strategies in Fortune 500 companies across numerous industries.
In this episode, Scott shares insights in relation to his pricing journey, from the very start of being inspired by Neil Brisbane and now working as Fiserv’s VP of Pricing.
Why you have to check out today’s podcast:
- Discover how you can avoid cannibalization of your own sales in other regions as you start going global in business;
- Know why understanding the context – your customer, your competitors, and outside influences – is important in doing pricing decisions; and
- Learn more about formula-based pricing and its difference with cost plus pricing
“Understanding the context of the situation is key in making pricing decisions. Understand the customer's viewpoint, understand the competitors that are involved in that situation, even outside influences, as much as you can, a consultant or not. I think those are the key things, and I think those are what people should think about when they're pricing.”
– Scott Miller
Topics Covered:
01:24 – How Scott started his career in pricing and what he loves about it
4:11 – Talking about Scott’s exposure to different concepts, the rebates, and the relationship between pricing and the customers
8:29 – Leaving Motorola and working in Hollister
11:40 – Going back to Motorola in a global role, dealing with arbitrage, and taking the risk of currency fluctuations
15:55 – Scott’s new environment in Air Gas and the discussion about formula-based pricing’s difference to cost plus pricing
19:27 – Why do people consider the pass through of AWS costs? What should they consider in doing so?
24:10 – Starting his journey with Fiserv through LinkedIn
26:05 – Discussion about companies taking all their overhead costs which affect their product’s standard price
27:41 – “Understanding the context of the situation is key in making pricing decisions.”
Key Takeaways:
“We didn't have a ton of tricks. Mostly, it was just paying attention to our own selling price.” – Scott Miller
“We didn't deal with it [the risk of currency fluctuations] from the other side of trying to put the risk on the customers; we took the risk.” – Scott Miller
“The formula itself – coming up with something that's agreeable to both parties, you have to be kind of specific in how it ends out in the contract to make sure if for any reason that index goes negative on you, you’d want to make sure that that's not a price break. That this is only zero or up. It's not a ‘Now, we're going to start cutting costs because the index has went under.’ You have to be careful.” – Scott Miller
“Try to do it on a calendar date rather than like a 12-month from contract date, because you get into the business of constantly running these calculations. If you can get away with just doing it once a year, then maybe you're just looking at the labor cost once and the transportation costs depending on how you built those formulas. Otherwise, you're redoing it every time the contract comes due.” – Scott Miller
People / Resources Mentioned:
- Fiserv: https://www.fiserv.com/
Connect with Scott Miller:
Connect with Mark Stiving:
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stiving/
- Email: mark@impactpricing.com