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.