B2B Reimagined

"The patient has to survive the procedure. We have to carry on our operations, serve our clients, send invoices, acquire new customers, while changing our pricing in the background. That's why I always say that pricing change is an evolution, not a revolution."   Maciej Kraus is a pricing guru, author, TED speaker, and frequent lecturer at Stanford University. We were thrilled to have him on to sh...

Listen to our first-ever live episode of the podcast, recorded at Zilliant MindShare 2024 , featuring a panel of leading pricing professionals. Pressure on pricing teams is greater than ever. But in times of great pressure, new ideas and ways of doing things emerge. Mo Beshir (Accenture), Rob Pedigo (Dawn Foods) and Lydia DiLiello (Capital Pricing Consultants) explore the 'how' and 'why' behind pr...

"Behind the term 'pricing tool' or 'pricing software' you can actually have very different things in mind. A competition monitoring tool, a margin improvement tool, an AI price optimization tool, a sales interface. So the first thing was, can we categorize the use cases that people have in mind behind 'pricing software'?" Malik Rajan is the founder of The Pricing Club. His mission is to foster a d...

"Well, if the other side just did their job better, we'd be in much better shape." Any B2B sellers or marketers heard this one before? Maybe you've said it? At some point in your career, you've likely experienced the tension between sales and marketing, two departments that in theory should always be on the same team.  Our guest today, Aggregate Insights CEO Brady Jensen, explains how the two side...

Dr. Rainer Schlamp, partner at EbelHofer Consultants, joins us to dissect an industry that often flies under the radar, but is essential to our everyday lives. The sanitary products industry is a complex and vibrant ecosystem weaving together producers, wholesalers, retail stores, contractors, and web shop consumers.    Often products are bundled and sold together as a total solution to fit archit...

"For me, the strange thing is companies are investing in transformation in all dimensions of their business, but barely in the one that has the biggest profit impact – pricing," says Sebastian Wrobel, cofounder and managing director of PricingWorks on today's episode.   Sebastian and host Barrett Thompson explore how smart B2B organizations include pricing transformation in their digital transform...

Profitability and customer experience are important. That's about as noncontroversial a statement as you can make in B2B. So, pricing – which is perhaps the biggest driver of both – should be at the heart of every B2B company, right?    "That is quite a controversial statement whenever I make it," said Karan Sood, pricing expert and today's guest on B2B Reimagined. "When I show people my spider ch...

What should come first: pricing technology or pricing strategy? Our guest today, PwC Partner Ron Otocki, makes a strong case for why the two should go hand-in-hand. Ron leans on his vast experience guiding companies through digital transformations to explain how pricing fits into larger transformative projects, and how the most successful pricing initiatives mix strategy and the right tools from t...

In the subscription economy, a company's product takes a backseat to its subscriber. What does this mean for a company's go-to-market strategy? For starters, value-added services and customer support become paramount.  In your everyday life, you most likely subscribe to various streaming services or office software tools. But subscription and usage-based models are expanding far beyond the consume...

Read enough headlines about generative AI and you will start to mull some big questions: Is it the next big paradigm shift? Is it a grave threat to the modern workforce? Can it be smarter than me? "It's about a six-month-old puppy at this point," says Lou Simon, vice president of Uptima Elevate and our guest on today's show. However, like a puppy, Lou expects generative AI tools like ChatGPT to le...

Price changes and churn threats occur throughout the customer journey. How your organization handles them determines how your customers will react: either positively or negatively. Do they stick with you and buy now? Or go elsewhere without a word? It's up to you.  This friendly debate between two passionate CX experts – Zilliant Sr. Director of Alliances, North America Karl Helfner and industry e...

Logik.io CEO Chris Shutts returns to the show, this time to connect with Pascal Yammine, chief executive officer of Zilliant. They discuss the transformational digital shift occurring in industries like traditional manufacturing, high-tech, software, and business services, driven by customer demand for self-service product discovery and buying.  Drawing on recent conversations with customers and p...

"When people talk about the death of the channel, the death of distribution, I just sit back and go, 'Hold my beer – give me a whiteboard and I will explain to you how wrong you are.'"   Channelnomics CEO Larry Walsh is our guest today for a wide-ranging discussion on what the channel is and why it matters for B2B companies.   He shared how the pandemic exposed both the vitality of the channel and...

"The world is not constant and stable. So why should your pricing strategy be? You have to mimic the working world that you live in," said Argano Chief Strategy Officer Tim Harris on today's episode. Harris joined Barrett Thompson to continue the show's ongoing examination on how manufacturers are digitizing their commercial platforms in response to ongoing volatility and unpredictability. Argano...

"You need to combine the pricing brain and the pricing muscles…the bruscles of pricing." What does this mean? According to our guests from Accenture – Strategy Principal Director Daniel Lindner and Managing Director, Pricing and Commercial Strategy Daniel Antolin – it means embedding powerful pricing tools into your pricing strategy from the very start. When B2B pricing teams combine the thinking...

Slalom is a global consulting firm and one of the top Salesforce manufacturing partners in the world. Matt Baker and Calvin Chow from Slalom joined the show to help us continue our exploration of current manufacturing trends and commercial solutions. Learn why a major theme for 2023 is the concept of being nimble – in the areas of pricing, procurement, quoting, and response to macroeconomic change...

We take a break from our regularly scheduled programming to bring together both of our hosts for the first time. Lindsay and Barrett take a long look at the B2B landscape as 2023 is now underway, with considerable macroeconomic uncertainty persisting amid a new normal in B2B buyer expectations. How should companies adjust their pricing strategies as prices eventually come down? How can sales opera...

"It used to be that pricing was the most dangerous thing to change, and that if it were done wrong, customers would head out the door and never come back. As a result of the pandemic and the barrage of supply chain woes, material availability, order management, S&OP and demand planning, all that has changed. Historical supply and demand trends don't apply anymore." In this episode, Salesforce Vice...

"We have seen distributors really catching up as it relates to technology. Digitalization has been a key topic across the entire industry. Cloud seems to be the big equalizer, because the software can be staged at really low setup costs. There's not an innovation tax anymore that companies need to pay." SAP's Global VP of Wholesale Distribution Magnus Meier shared this sentiment and much more with...

Those working in and observing the building materials and construction industry have been through a rollercoaster ride. In 2020, plants and job sites shut down completely. Then, upon reopening, a surge in demand for new builds and remodels collided with shortages in many of the products necessary to satisfy it. Prices thus soared in 2022 but look to be on their way down as a potential recession lu...

"I'm a strong believer that pricing should be first before CPQ," says Accenture Managing Director Mo Beshir. "Everyone knows if I am doing a CPQ solution, I am looking at selling faster, selling better and selling more. What if I'm selling faster, better and more with the wrong price?" Mo joined Zilliant General Manager of Commercial Excellence Barrett Thompson for a deep dive into the maturation...

Senior Vice President of Products & Science Pete Eppele is back to go in depth on the chronic undermanagement of customer price agreements. Although often more than 50% of a B2B company's revenue is transacted via customer price agreements, this important price type tends to lack the attention it deserves.    When using manual tools to manage agreement prices and legacy ERPs to house agreement rec...

Get to know recently-appointed Zilliant Chief Executive Officer Pascal Yammine, who marks 60 days leading the company with his first appearance on the podcast. The former senior vice president and general manager of Salesforce Revenue Cloud brings a customer-focused background and 20 years of enterprise software leadership to Zilliant.   In this episode, Pascal joins Chief Marketing Officer Lindsa...

The newest addition to Zilliant's Quick Start Program, Quick Start for Revenue Operations & Intelligence, is now available. The purpose-built solution is designed to intelligently derive and deliver revenue-driving, account-specific actions to sales reps, eCommerce and marketing automation tools in as few as three weeks.   Returning guest Brian Hirt joins Barrett Thompson to answer questions on ho...

"There is no magic wand to digest all of the information that you have. The only way to actually have true control is by having data-driven platforms."   So says Gonzalo Benitez, pricing and data analytics manager at Rush Enterprises, on our latest episode. The heavy-duty truck parts industry has not been spared from the economic upheaval of the last two-plus years. Supply chain issues have caused...