Benchmarking Competitors' Prices: Is It Worth the Effort with Monica Sinha

Monica Sinha is a Price benchmarking Lead and Senior Manager at Capgemini. She has over 15 years of experience in the Finance sector which includes experience with the business finance team of Tech Mahindra, the commercial management office at Accenture, brokerage department at Karvy Computershare Pvt. Ltd., and corporate finance department at Tata Finance Ltd. In this episode, Monica shares how benchmarking increases your confidence in winning deals. And she also talks about when benchmarking truly becomes helpful -- that's when teams work together to truly connect with the customer to attain the best possible final price for a quote.     Why you have to check out today's podcast: Find out how benchmarking helps validate the final price Learn how benchmarking helps increase your chance of winning the deal Find out how you go through benchmarking the competitors' price and the nuances that are involved in it   "When you are in the pricing line, then I think you need to have a very holistic view. We just cannot go with taking the cost and add the margin, and derive the price out of it. You need to have the entire team aligned into one." - Monica Sinha   Topics Covered: 01:11 - How she landed into pricing 02:32 - Pricing compared to a recipe 03:46 - What benchmarking suggests 05:19 - Benchmarking as a validation check 08:18 - The way benchmarking is done and the nuances involved in it 13:03 - The challenges that come with benchmarking 16:08 - Doing post-mortem analysis to what led to a difference in price after benchmarking 17:21 - How to find out what price the competitor is charging 20:07 - The one thing that helps you win a deal 20:41 - How do we benchmark value-based pricing 23:14 - Monica's pricing advice that can significantly impact one's business   Key Takeaways: "It is so much of confidence, where benchmarking is there, where benchmarking is built to validate. And in fact, I would say that the chance of winning a deal increases by many notches." - Monica Sinha "Benchmark gives you a sense that yes, you are close to that price, or you're very far off, then probably there is some mistake that you're doing in estimation or something somewhere. So, let's just recheck how you're doing it. So benchmarking is a very good instrument to validate the final price that you're going to submit." - Monica Sinha "The one major thing that is very important is that if we have to really give a winnable price if we want to really understand what the value that the customer is looking for, what should be the correct price for it, then all of these team members, they need to align and work together. And they need to understand that they should have some connection along with the customer so that whatever the final price that they are coming up with is the price that should be ultimately quoted." - Monica Sinha   Connect with Monica Sinha: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/monica-sinha-46904041/ Email: [email protected]   Connect with Mark Stiving:  Email: [email protected] LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stiving/