Why It's Worth Paying for Pricing Consultants with Dick Sobel

Dick Sobel was with Emerson for 21 years where he mostly worked on pricing roles. Currently, he is the managing director of PricePoint Partners, a company that helps clients achieve significant gains in price realization and profitability with salesforce implementation utilizing cloud-based Acuity Margin Management BI software.

In this episode, Dick talks about the work they do at PricePoint Partners as he points out the importance of assessment and consulting in coming up with optimal solutions to clients' problems. He also touched on the topic of AI interference in the pricing world.

Why you have to check out today's podcast:

• Learn the work that PricePoint Partners does, the range of clients they serve, and how they could help your company in pricing
• Find out why you can't rely on AI alone in doing prices and why AI can do better in B2C than in B2B
• Find out why today is the best time to raise your prices

"Inflation's persistence is here to stay for a long time. And if you're not doing something right now, you are really missing out."

– Dick Sobel

Topics Covered:

01:49 – How Dick got into pricing

04:40 – How Emerson did pricing before, and how they moved to value pricing as time went by

06:50 – The work that PricePoint Partners does, and the range of clients that they support

08:21 – Is PricePoint Partners a software company, or a consulting company?

10:23 – What prompts companies to focus on pricing

13:19 – Does PricePoint Partners charge for assessment?

14:58 – Why assessment is an essential part in consulting, and why you should definitely pay for it

17:25 – Why you should be careful in using AI, and why pricing people and clients are still more comfortable

22:02 – Dick's pricing advice

23:32 – Connect with Dick Sobel

Key Takeaways:

"Somebody has to be in charge somewhere that can at least gather the crew together and make it [changes in pricing strategy] happen." – Dick Sobel

"At least for the people that I deal with, I don't feel comfortable having or I don't think they're even comfortable in having black box artificial intelligent price recommendations where "Okay, here's the price you should charge for this product, for this SKU". And it's given to the salespeople arbitrarily. There's got to be this human interface still. And so, yeah, you can look at it, but be careful." – Dick Sobel

"This idea of "Well, you know, we're just going to try to hold the line", you keep doing that, you won't have a business." – Dick Sobel

People / Resources Mentioned:

• Emerson: https://www.emerson.com/en-us/global
• PricePoint Partners: https://pricepointpartners.com/
• Resilience Capital: https://resiliencecapital.com/
• Salesforce: https://www.salesforce.com/ap/
• Vendavo: https://www.vendavo.com/

Connect with Dick Sobel:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/richardsobel/
• Email: rsobel@pricepointpartners.com

Connect with Mark Stiving:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stiving/
• Email: mark@impactpricing.com