What is your new role?
As the Europe, Middle East, Africa & Latin America (EMEALA) Pricing Manager at Johnson Controls International I’m responsible for supporting the successful delivery of our Pricing Transformation program across the region, consisting of improving the company’s Pricing capabilities as well as achieving profitability targets across a wide product & service portfolio of intelligent building solutions & technologies.
What are you most excited about in this role?
Working across such a comprehensive portfolio of products, services & software across four continents offers many exciting opportunities to define a number of complete solutions, each with its own clear value proposition for their target market. These different value propositions are creating lots of opportunities to add value to the organization through refining our segmentation, re-thinking our pricing models and ensuring our Pricing Strategy aligns with our wider Corporate Strategy.
I’m also very excited to be working alongside an extremely enthusiastic and proactive team of Pricing, Strategy, Sales & Finance leaders at all levels of the organization to build a shared vision for the Pricing function, to be able to share my knowledge with those involved and to see the positive impact our Pricing Transformation is having.
What challenges are you anticipating?
Given the breadth of our product and service portfolio, getting to know in depth all of our offerings as a Pricing Manager is a challenge. However coming from an Engineering background & having worked in the Industrials sector all of my career, I’m learning quickly about each of our product lines and services.
When did you earn the CPP designation?
I became a Certified Pricing Professional in March 2019.
How is the CPP Designation helping in your new role?
The comprehensive CPP curriculum covers all aspects of Price Management in a very structured manner. This structure was very helpful in acquiring a ‘mental checklist’ of things to consider during Pricing Transformation work. I also found the self-select modules to be very insightful as the authors, mainly renowned Pricing Consultants, shared their best practices for specific industries and situations, such as recessions or accelerated growth phase. I currently use these best practices and ‘mental checklist’ in my current role.
If someone else were looking for a role similar to yours, what skills should they excel in?
Strong analytical & financial skills to be able to answer questions and draw insights from data, as well as work with large datasets is key. But equally important are non-technical skills, as knowing which questions to ask comes before looking for an answer and proposals which are generally based on complex analysis must be communicated in a clear, concise & compelling manner across all levels of the organization.
Therefore, I’d say communication & listening skills are extremely important. Critical thinking skills, being rational and being able to work at both the ‘strategic’ & ‘operational’ levels is also very useful. Additionally, it’s important to work well with Sales & P&L owners, to be seen as a trusted Business Partner, not an administrative role.
What Pricing function trends are you finding within the industry?
In the B2B Industrials sectors, I expect to see more high-end solution sellers offering subscription-based pricing models. The business case for sellers is often more attractive, as well as for buyers who value the flexibility, convenience, lower risk and lower cash requirements compared to upfront purchases. With global productivity improvement in these sectors estimated to be higher than global demand growth, a market ‘push’ towards servitization would support this trend also. The modern Pricing function can play an important role in this movement.