Vignesh Thiyagarajan – Becoming a Pricing Champion

Why you have to check out today’s podcast:  Learn what are the key things you have to learn to become a pricing champion  Know why listening to your market is a key thing to deliver value  Discover the critical role of a pricing manager     Vignesh Thiyagarajan has been a strategy and pricing manager at Sears Holding Corporation. And is now doing the same for a large German company named Trelleborg Sealing Solutions. He got his MBA from the Fisher College of Business at Ohio State University.  In this episode, Vignesh talks about how to become a pricing champion and the skills you need to employ to be able to help businesses determine and set competitive value-based prices to gain market share and achieve revenue goals.    “You need to truly understand the customers problems by just asking one question and let the customer talk and reinforce the pain point to the customer if you use that approach across every interaction that’d be phenomenal.” – Vignesh Thiyagarajan Topics Covered:    03:01– How Vignesh got into a pricing career, being in the retail industry then joining Sears    05:00 – Hi thoughts about people’s understanding and perception about pricing, is it still ‘the blind leading the blind’ scenario?     05:15 – Importance of influence in the pricing industry, being in the tipping point of pricing adoption     14:00 – How value-based pricing is transforming the B2B and B2C industry    16:20 – How data help you determine and calculate customer’s willingness to pay     20:23 – His strategy as a pricing manager, how he leads and influence his team?    25:03 – Vignesh’s pricing advice: “Always experiment and always learn. Never set and forget about it.”      Key Takeaways:    “Upstream possibilities of product development, and trying to increase the perceived value, and the different tactics or the marketing tactics to capture that will be dramatic. All the industry excites me.” – Vignesh Thiyagarajan    “What is value-based pricing. It is about truly bringing an optimization to deliver value, which means the customer should feel that.” – Vignesh Thiyagarajan    Connect with Vignesh Thiyagarajan:  mailto:[email protected]  LinkedIn    Connect with Mark Stiving  Email: [email protected]  LinkedIn  Twitter