Listening to Your Market: The Key to Effective Pricing with Patrick Taylor

Patrick Taylor is a global business improvement expert with over 30 years of delivered value leveraging experience across all domains of pricing and margin improvement as well as commercial and financial processes.

In this episode, Patrick shares the critical aspects of effective pricing strategies and their impact on business profitability. He emphasizes the importance of understanding both the external market and customer needs when setting prices. He also advocates for the use of various data visualization tools, such as scatterplots and Pareto charts, to analyze pricing effectiveness and identify areas for improvement.

Why you have to check out today's podcast:

• Gain insights into customer-focused pricing and understand market conditions when setting prices to align pricing strategies with customer expectations.
• Learn about profitability metrics and delve into the significance of monitoring profitability by customer and product.
• Understand sales team dynamics to empower sales teams with the knowledge and tools needed to confidently sell at set prices.

"Listen to your customers, look at your market, look externally first on price."

- Patrick Taylor

Topics Covered:

01:14 - Patrick describing his journey into the pricing world

04:01 - Sharing his insights on how pricing has evolved over the years and his fundamental approach to it

07:22 - Emphasizing on the importance of focusing on customer value rather than getting overly caught up in tools like Excel or AI

08:54 - How to motivate executives to focus more on the value they deliver to customers and the decisions those customers have to make

11:58 - Aligning product offerings with customer needs and maximizing revenue opportunities

13:38 - How convincing a CEO to focus on pricing requires demonstrating that there is a real problem

17:34 - Highlighting the importance of using data-driven KPIs and charts to understand pricing behavior and sales performance and important thoughts about price variance

22:09 - What is it about the Pareto chart that he considers it when doing pricing

26:24 - Discussing the importance of focusing on margin dollars over margin percentages, especially when market conditions dictate pricing

29:14 - Patrick's best pricing advice

Key Takeaways:

"At the end of the day, from a pricing perspective, the customer only cares about two things. They care about the value they get relative to what they're buying and relative to the next best competitive alternative." - Patrick Taylor

"Putting that customer first is the number one thing you've got to do." - Patrick Taylor

"You can create the best model in the world, but if it doesn't work easily for your sales team to work, they can't communicate it to their customer; it's a problem." - Patrick Taylor

People/Resources Mentioned:

• Tom Nagle: https://impactpricing.com/podcast/604-insights-into-value-based-pricing-strategies-for-b2b-with-tom-nagle/
• Alteryx: https://www.alteryx.com
• Google: https://www.google.com/?client=safari
• Tableau: https://www.tableau.com
• Pros: https://pros.com

Connect with Patrick Taylor:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/patrickjtaylor/

Connect with Mark Stiving:

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