Very good day everyone and welcome to the Let's Talk
Pricing podcast. I'm Kevin Mitchell from
Professional Pricing Society and this time we're going to do
things a little bit different. We are not going to have a
special guest this time and that is because I am just returning
from PPS Profitable. Our spring conference was May
6th through 9th in Dallas, and I'm going to do a quick recap
for those who were there, those who wanted to join us but we're
not able to, and those who are interested in what professional
pricing society does at our conferences.
So last week in Dallas, we had a wonderful time.
We had 9 CPP workshops. We had eight keynotes.
We had 16 breakouts. We had nine panels in town
halls, networking receptions and industry connections.
Luncheon, 3 French hands, 2 turtle doves, at least one ice
cold shower. If you were there, you know what
I'm talking about. And lots of formal and informal
networking in Dallas's finest restaurants and bars during the
event and after hours as well. For me and my team, it was
wonderful to see our members from across the globe who are
nice enough to join us. And it was a great opportunity
for us to all connect, to get some answers to the questions
that we are facing and really to bench work, to network, to get
educated, to get trained, to hear about the latest and
greatest, to hear about best practices, and really to get the
psychological group hug that comes along with our conferences
where you are amongst colleagues.
And we have fun taking over a medium large sized hotel for the
better part of a week. Also, I do want to acknowledge
that my team and I know that it takes a lot for our members, our
speakers, our sponsors and our staff to join us for this event.
Obviously, there's a lot going on from a macroeconomic
perspective right now. There's a lot going on from a
lot of different perspectives right now, and people are really
busy with their jobs and we realize it.
For quite a few of us, it's quite a sacrifice for you to
join us for our event. We are so thankful that you did,
and we hope that our event was a wonderful, great investment for
you and for your company. For me personally, I thoroughly
enjoyed reconnecting with old friends and colleagues, meeting
lots of new faces, and of course spending great time with PPS
members, our attendees, speakers, sponsors, the staff
there, and everything that was going on during our conference
week. If you attended our event, we'll
be sending you a recap very soon coming up as well, so make sure
to keep an eye out for that. Also, if you've not already done
so, if you did attend our event, make sure to fill out the
surveys that we send you because we build our programs based on
your feedback. And we want to make sure that
our events continue to be a wonderful opportunity for you to
again, connect with the pricing and revenue Management worldwide
communities and to learn strategies, tactics, best
practices and what's new for you and for your team.
So before I go into what a wonderful time that we had at
our event last week, I do want to share why we gather in
person. So PPS is for, by and about
pricing professionals, revenue management professionals, sales
enablement professionals and related fields all the time.
And our broad mission really is for those who are in these very
difficult jobs, we want to make sure that you have all of the
tools and all of the applications that you need in
order to do your jobs better, not only for yourselves and for
your careers, but for your companies as well.
So we are all about networking strategies, next steps,
benchmarking, learning from thought leaders, all of the
connections that you need. And since we are at the center
of this very important part of the pricing world, since we're
the Nexus of the revenue management space, our events are
the only place where everyone, where all of the practitioners,
all of the experts, all the senior managers and leaders, all
of the pricing software optimization companies, all of
the leading consultants, and everyone is welcome to come on
in and to join each other and to talk about what we do.
And to really come back from our events energized with a lot of
good actionable strategies and tactics that we can all use in
our jobs going forward. So at the PPS Profitable
conference, there were several new themes and several others
that we took very good deep dives into.
Of course, right now a lot of us are talking, a lot of us are
talking about tariffs, a lot of us are talking about economic
uncertainty. We also had lots of information
about problem solving, about value based pricing strategies,
about segmentation, about innovation, about revenue growth
management and a lot more. And we also talked a lot about
artificial intelligence. So in our discussions about AII
was really struck by the depth and the breadth and we had
people who were 0 all the way on one end to 100 all the way on
the other end. But we had a wide variety of
thoughts and opinions and information regarding people's
knowledge of, experience with, and comfort level for AI as it
relates to their roles. So I've met a lot of people who
don't use it at all or maybe use it to write emails.
Some of our member companies have told our people never to
use it. Others have told people build a
strategy with it and anything and everything in between.
So since AI is so important, since it's at the forefront of
what a lot of what we're thinking about and what we're
doing in our daily jobs, we will also have lots more information
available for you. I know a lot of you have talked
with me about the AI and pricing certification the Professional
Pricing Society offers. You can check our website For
more information there. And we will continue to have
lots of information about the issues, the challenges and the
opportunities that are facing you and your team.
New things such as tariff effects, AI effects, and also
some of the old classic things around revenue growth
management, around teamwork, around analysis, around
strategies, around negotiating and all of the other skill sets
that we all need to develop in order to do even better at our
jobs for our companies. So we had a lot of things that
were unique and new. This was the biggest number of
panels that we have offered and this gave our members lots of
chances, lots of opportunities to address their issues,
questions and concerns with experts and thought leaders.
Also, we have a lot of peer learning that happens at our
event as well. Sometimes we learn almost as
much from each other and our questions and benchmarking as we
do from experts and people delivering presentations and
workshops. And we also had a very wide
variety of speakers and attendees from geographically
all over the world. I did not meet anyone from
Antarctica at this event, but I am pretty sure that we had the
other six continents represented.
People were from all over. From a business perspective, we
had people from lots of different industries, lots of
different verticals, lots of different management types,
ownership types and much more. Our event was split in half.
The first two days on Tuesday and Wednesday were for full day
CPP workshops. Thursday and Friday we're all
about conference keynotes, breakouts, networking panels,
town halls, and lots of other events there.
But there were a few standout sessions that I felt hit exactly
on the most important topics, the most important notes that
our members were looking for. And I'm very lucky because I get
to moderate great sessions throughout the four days.
At our event on Tuesday, I was very lucky and very fortunate to
moderate Stefan Leos Tuesday CPP workshop on value based pricing
and it was great. Stefan went over a lot of things
in his full day certified pricing professional workshop.
He talked about why your organization needs to develop
your pricing skills, how to do it, the effects of it, how you
can battle the inertia and the human change management issues
that always come up when you're trying to move, for example,
from a cost plus based pricing theory to more of a value based
pricing concept. And Stefan offered his workshop
lots of great information on how we can do that and gave us a lot
to think about and also took a lot of time to answer all of our
questions and concerns as well. And on Wednesday, I'm sorry,
also on Tuesday, unfortunately I could only be in one place at
one time. So I was not able to take
advantage of Tim Smith's CPP workshop on price structures,
models and markets. And also on Tuesday, we had
another standout workshop. Joanne Smith, no relation as far
as I can tell, LED a workshop on segmentation and had lots of
great insights there as well. I know through Joanne's books
and Tim's books and Stefan's books, they're all experts in
the field. And we had wonderful workshops
on the Tuesday for people either pursue pursuing the CPP or
looking to expand their skill sets as well.
And hey, that was all just on Tuesday, the very first day of
our event. On Tuesday night, we had a great
Cajun Creole New Orleans style dinner sponsored by our friends
at the team from Enable. And because I'm a big fan of
Cajun Creole food just between us, I had to run out and
immediately buy a bigger suit in order to get ready for the rest
of the conference. I think I was over served as far
as food was at that event, but it was a very, very nice way to
end out our first day. On Wednesday, the 2nd day of our
of our workshops, I had again the great pleasure of moderating
another wonderful workshop and that was Frederico Zornig's A
complete pricing journey. And Fred covered many critical
areas. He talked about analytics, about
team building, about negotiating, about corporate
strategy, about today's technology and its effects, and
really we had a great day again of opportunities and challenges,
addressed questions and answers, some group exercises and a
wonderful participation from his workshop as well.
We had a lot of people in there who asked questions and we had
very lively discussions throughout.
I heard quite a few people mentioned Deanne Hammer and
Antonella Sunito's workshop. Deanne and Anto are from the
Three M Company. Their workshop was Actioning
Practical Pricing Problems, a pricing escape room experience.
I heard people throughout the event talking about escaping
from the escape room or almost escaping from the escape room,
and apparently it was a wonderful opportunity to work on
some pricing problems as well. And Solani Vestati from Emory
University down the street from me here in Atlanta, GA, USA LED
a workshop on monetizing innovation.
One workshop that I took advantage of at a previous event
but missed this time was Lori Rubowski and Travis Umbleby from
Holden Advisors. They load a workshop on how to
equip your sales team to build pricing power.
Other workshops that we had with great information were Ryan
Davies and Gregor Bill Jart on core pricing skills.
And of course, our friends Juan Echeberry and Laurent Dysonia
LED ACPP workshop on revenue growth management.
And hey, all of that stuff happened at our event on Tuesday
and Wednesday. So this was before we even
started the conference. Keynotes, breakouts, panels in
town halls on Thursday morning. So the first half of our event
for CPP workshops for people working on the certification,
people looking for advanced training, lots of great
information there. I'm very lucky at our
conferences because on Thursday and Friday morning I get to
moderate the keynotes and introduce the sessions.
And so we start off Thursday. Sebastian Bach from Boston
Consulting Group BCG talked about how you can overcome
pricing complexity with AI, and Deanne Hammer talked about price
management. Adrian Gordon delivered a great
session about pricing segmentation using AI.
And Lynn Gwynn, a lot of us know Lynn from when he LED pricing
for one of the largest companies on the planet.
He talked about team building, how you can build a group of
great people to exceed your expectations and some of the
team building and networking and so-called soft skills that are
involved with doing great things within revenue management as
well. So we had wonderful, wonderful
keynotes in Thursday morning and Thursday afternoon.
I had the great pleasure of really just being a normal
attendee at our conference. And I saw breakout tracks by
Stephanie Gay from Deloitte. She talked about pricing
transformation. Anita Venur from Pros talked
about the customer life cycle. And also I attended Kartik
Doraswami. He talked about ascribing
commercial values. So we had a great variety of
topics in the breakouts as well. And we ended Thursday with the
keynote town halls where we had all of our keynote speakers and
you could get up close and discuss your issues with them,
your challenges, your opportunities.
And we ended the day with a wonderful reception.
I have pictures of several hundred of our members enjoying
good food and good drink in our exhibit hall and we had a great
day. And on Friday, we had even more
of insights. We had morning keynotes with
Philip Douse from Simon Kutcher. He talked about pricing models.
G Mukherjee, who is the author of Pricing with Confidence,
talked about how to protect your company in a tariff era.
And somehow he did this while wearing an amazing pink suit.
He said it was salmon, but I've got pictures and I'll let you
make the distinction for yourself, but I'm going to, I'm
going to stick with a very stylish pink suit.
So G, cheers to you for that one.
Tim Meeker from International Motors surprised us all with a
great podium stage dive before he started talking about agile
pricing principles. And Matt Nags, who came
partially dressed as Captain America, talked about defending
humanity in a world of AI. So again, in our keynotes, we
had a wide variety of thought leaders of perspectives and of
topics that address really what we're all talking about from a
revenue management perspective. And also on Friday in one of our
coffee breaks, we had our great prize giveaway where our exhibit
hall was packed. We had great prizes such as BBQ
grills, iPads, concert tickets, Mont Blanc pens, gift cards and
lots of other prizes from our exhibitors.
Once again, for some reason, I did not win any of the prizes.
I think it's a conspiracy. I need to check with someone in
charge about all of that. But hope everyone had a great
Friday. And As for me personally, my
Friday continued with a breakout session with Lay yen from
Emerson. He talked about machine learning
and new products, and then we had an experts panel with
Alfredo Amable, Ed Class, and Damiano Migliori.
We talked about everything including how tariffs are
affecting their respective businesses.
And on Friday, it's become a PPS classic where we end with a
Friday keynote. Town Hall, Philip Dallas and
Jeet Mukherjee and Matt Nags were all there.
And our friend Ed class raised a question, a great question that
started a debate amongst our panelists.
And so I'll ask you as well. If you only had to give one
answer, would you personally say that pricing is an art or a
science? I'd be interested in what people
think. I know that I have my opinions
there. But amongst our three panelists,
I think we had one artist, one scientist, and one who is still
thinking it over. I'm not going to tell you who's
who, but interested in what everyone else thinks about that.
So pricing, would you describe it if you only had to pick one
as either an art or a science? So again, great debates, great
topics throughout and for me, the end of our conference week
on Friday afternoon, it's always a little bittersweet and I
expect that it is for my team as well.
Obviously, we work for many, many months on our conferences,
but then it feels like as soon as we touchdown and as soon as
we get signed into our conference hotel the weekend
before the event to get everything ready, next thing we
know it is Friday afternoon and we're either booking flights
back or getting ready to board our flights back or planning on
spending the weekends wherever we are.
And really our conference room week flies by.
We're so busy. It's so great to connect with
everyone. I'm always a little sad because
it will be many months before we see very large groups of our
members in person again. But of course I can't wait to
see everyone again in Las Vegas for our American Fall profitable
conference October 21st to 24th in Las Vegas and for our
European EMEA based profitable event will be in Barcelona from
the 2nd to the 5th of December. So I look forward to seeing
everyone again in the second-half of the year.
For me personally, I always come back from our conference happy,
energized, excited, and really looking forward to hearing more
about the opportunities and the challenges that our members are
facing and looking forward to even more expertise in the
months ahead. Coming from thought leaders,
from expert, from leading academics, leading pricing
practitioners and more. I'm very, very thankful that
everyone took the time and the effort to join our event, to
network, to learn, to reconnect with old friends and colleagues,
to meet new faces in our very, very important part of the
business world. Our jobs are not easy and
they're getting more complicated and in many cases more difficult
all of the time. So we want to make sure that
you're able to stay current with all of the information you need
in order to exceed expectations to continue to survive and drive
and do great things for your personal career and for your
company as well. So make sure to check out coming
your way very, very soon. We'll have a full agenda for our
fall events again, Las Vegas in October, October 21st to 24th in
Barcelona from the 2nd to the 5th of December.
We will have a lot more information for you and your
team, the availability to earn certified pricing professional
credits in our workshops and to take advantage of key keynotes,
breakouts, town halls, panels, networking, receptions, special
lunches and much, much more at our events coming up.
And before signing off, I want to make sure to thank a few
people, a few groups and a few people who really worked
overtime in order to make our event the great event that it
was last week in Dallas. So I do want to recognize our
sponsors, particularly our key supporters like the teams from
Pros from Simon Kutcher from BCG, Boston Consulting Group,
Zilliant, Enable, Flint, Fox Price FX, Vendavo, Vistar, Price
Beam, Vistex, 3C, Software Holding Advisors, Iris Pricing
Solutions, Canadian Qantas E Clerks, and the William E Simon
School of Business Administration at the University
of Rochester Wig Lab Pricing, Ravenera, Synchron and Price
Edge. Also, we were very lucky and
very excited to have several new sponsors who joined us.
So to the teams from Web Data guru, from Revenue Management
Labs and from Jennings executive search teams, thank you so much
for joining us and we appreciate all that you did.
And of course, I do want to give a special thanks again to my
team who worked very early morning, noon and night on our
event, not only for our time on site at our conference last
week, but also in the weeks and months leading up to our event
to make sure that everything is perfect or as close to perfect
as it can be. So to the PPS team, to our
meetings teams, to our board members, to Winnetta Jones, to
Johnny Haskins Junior, to Alex McFall, Darnell Shepherd, Angie
Jackson, Sharika Span, Maria Reynolds, Tina Darenzis, Chris
Buckingham, Sharon C, Amanda Peters, Tara Copeland, April
Leftwich, Susan Korac and everyone else who was around our
event. Our board members, Lynn Gwynn,
Patients Mutiso and Zan Chamberlain.
Zan Chamberlain. Sorry everyone, thank you so
much for joining our event and making it so special.
It was a wonderful time. I can't wait to see everyone
again. And hey, here's to the next
time. So looking forward to a great
second-half of the year coming up.
I'm looking forward to seeing everyone in Las Vegas and or
Barcelona. Make sure to check out pricing
society.com or just reach out to me for questions about some of
our other offerings. We have lots of special training
courses on tariffs and how to deal with them and their
effects. We have a special certification
on artificial intelligence, AI and its intersection with
pricing, how you handle the latest tools, how you handle the
latest technology, and how you can continue to move forward
there. If you and, or your team are
interested in the Certified Pricing professional
designation, then of course you can reach out to me and I would
be happy to either answer any questions or connect you with my
team who can get you the information there as well.
And also for your teams that work in sales and marketing and
finance and product management and operations or other fields
where they may touch upon pricing, even if they don't
consider themselves pricers or revenue managers themselves.
You can also check out our offerings for the Certificate of
profitability education, the CPE as in Edward, which has
information about what people in related fields and pricing
adjacent fields need to know about pricing, but maybe without
all of the extra Greek letters and analytics that go into the
CPP itself. So my team and I thank you for
your partnership. We look forward to seeing you
again soon. And once again, you can reach
out to me with any questions, but really my team and I love
the opportunity to work with you and your team on everything that
you need in order to move forward and to continue to do
any better. So check our website,
pricingsociety.com For more information or to stay plugged
in. And you can also connect with us
on LinkedIn. You'll find the PPS group or you
can search Kevin Mitchell. I'm sure you'll find me.
And also make sure to download the 365 A.
It's available in both ALE and Google.
Of course, it's completely free and it's got lots of information
for you as well. So everyone, thanks so much for
tuning in to the Let's Talk Pricing podcast.
Once again, this is Kevin Mitchell signing off and we will
have lots more information coming up for you soon.
Make sure to check out our podcast and webinars wherever
you get that information. And I look forward to talking
with everyone and seeing everyone again soon.
Thank you so much, have a great day.
Bye.