Pricing Systems Explained Simply with Lindsay Duran

Lindsay Duran is the Chief Marketing Officer at Zilliant. Over the course of her career, she focused on uncovering inefficient and sub-optimal processes and actively worked to solve those challenges with creativity, whether it's developing a new go-to-market methodology, revamping a marketing organization, or, in her current role, helping clients realize better financial results through artificial intelligence and sales rep enablement. In this episode, Lindsay talks about what Zilliant does in terms of providing a pricing system that helps you how to price your products, more effectively manage your customer price agreements, and point your salespeople to the actions that are going to drive the most revenue and margin growth and systematically do that.   Why you have to check out today’s podcast: Learn how Zilliant’s pricing system can calculate and measure price elasticity for the different segments to come up with price optimization for the goal you are trying to achieve for the said price Find out how to pinpoint the best selling price to charge given the complexity of pricing decision in every selling circumstance Find out the problems Zilliant can help you with to effectively and efficiently deal with pricing decisions that drive revenue growth   “Stop relying on spreadsheets. Spending your time manipulating data in spreadsheets and trying to execute price changes in spreadsheets is underselling the value of pricing professional.” - Lindsay Duran   Topics Covered: 01:30 - What led Lindsay into pricing 02:00 - The mix of roles she held at Zilliant 02:46 - Thoughts about ‘product marketing and product management people 03:06 - The bias to over discount 04:06 - What does Zilliant do? 07:45 - Elaborating on segmentation and willingness to pay of customers 10:27 - Giving her thoughts on price elasticity 14:48 - What is the digital transformation of sales 18:36 - Why do we still need salespeople in the online sales setting 21:07 - Salespeople and price negotiations 24:24 - Helping customers’ handling of thresholds and rules 30:03 - The problems Zilliant solves 30:42 - Lindsay’s one piece of pricing advice that will greatly impact your business   Key Takeaways: “What we do at Zilliant, as we help companies using software and using data, and Data Science, figure out what is the best price that they should charge in every selling circumstance. And then we help companies figure out how to manage all of the processes that go along with setting, updating, executing prices in the market.” - Lindsay Duran “For those that like to argue that price elasticity can't be measured, I would encourage everyone to raise their prices by 50, 100, 200% and see what happens to their volume. There is a point at which you are past the profit-maximizing price, and that your volume is going to drop off and go to zero if you are too far out of the market.”  - Lindsay Duran “Digital transformation is seeing it on two fronts. It's the shift to e-commerce and the need to provide salespeople with more Data-Science-driven guidance, to help them be more effective at their job and ultimately meet customer expectations.” - Lindsay Duran “It's really up to the strategy of the company as to how they want to handle those thresholds and rules and we're simply there to not tell them how to approach that but make that work systematically so that the outcome is what they've requested.” - Lindsay Duran “As much as you can rely on data and technology to do some of that very heavy lift, often not value add, but critical steps. You can spend more of your time on the actual pricing strategy portion of it and figuring out the opportunities where you have the biggest areas of impact and where you need to focus your time that isn't on all of that kind of manual data manipulation that so many people get mired in.” - Lindsay Duran   Connect with Lindsay Duran: LinkedIn E: [email protected]   Connect with Mark Stiving:  Email: [email protected] LinkedIn