Hello everyone, and welcome to Let's Talk Pricing, the official podcast of the Professional Pricing Society. I'm your host, Kevin Mitchell from PBS, and today I'm very,
very happy. I have the pleasure of speaking with someone who's not only a seasoned pricing professional, but is also a great partner of our organization and someone that we are going to see at PPS profitable in Dallas in May and that is Miss Deanne Hammer. Deanne is the Global pricing Operations Director for Safety and Industrial Business Group at 3 M Of course, 3 M, as we all know, makes everything and everything that goes into everything.
So Deanne has a very wide variety of experiences there. She has an MBA, she has ACPP, and 29 years of professional experience in marketing, product development, strategic and operational pricing, and probably a few other disciplines as well. So the end definitely brings an incredible depth of knowledge to our experiences and to every role that she's held. She's worked across both the industrial and healthcare manufacturing industries and proudly refers to herself as an accidental pricer.
Through it all, Deanne has made has remained committed to building resilient, high performance teams. I've had the pleasure of meeting many of her team members over the years and they rave about her. And she does all of this even in the face of rapid transformation
and change. So at our Sprint conference at PPS Profitable, we are going to hear from Deanne with a keynote address entitled price management, the Art of not setting it and forgetting it. And also Deanne is going to Co lead a one day full day CPP workshop with one of her team members, Antonella Sunito and that is entitled action practical pricing problems, a pricing escape room experience. So we are very, very excited to talk with Deanne Hammer today. So, Deanne, welcome to our podcast.
Hey, thanks, Kevin. Thanks for having me today. I'm really excited for Dallas, really excited to see all my friends in pricing, really excited about the topics that we're going to see at the conference and hoping everyone is just as excited as I am. Absolutely, Yeah, we are all very excited and we are definitely looking forward to seeing you there. So let's start with a couple big picture questions about what's going to happen in Dallas and the information we're going to get you there.
So we'll start with a look at your keynote once again, entitled Price Management, the Art of Not Setting It and Forgetting It. So I'm expecting some information on change and dynamism and taking into account all of the macroeconomic inside and outside externalities that are going on. But what inspired you to focus on the concept? Excuse me of price management over the life cycle of a product.
You know, Kevin here, you know, in my 29 years of working in this arena, I think it's one of those things that people kind of forget about. You know, it's really exciting to launch new products. You're doing a lot of market research, you're getting a lot of data because a new product and bringing that to life is really fun and, and new things are always shiny and, and it's, it's really, really fun.
Maybe isn't as fun as, you know, reaching back into the pricing closet, opening up the door and realizing it's full of stuff. You don't know where all this stuff came from and, and now you have like 2 hours to clean it. You're like I, I, I just don't want to. And you shut the door on that dirty pricing closet and you kind of walk away. So it's one of those spaces that we we all know about, right? Like we know it's there, but we don't really want to do it
right? It's, it's a lot of work and it's maybe not always recognized as a way to really make sure that you're getting all the revenue that you deserve. So I thought, hey, maybe it's time to talk about this a little bit more in depth and remind people at a time in in 2025 and how the year has started for many prices with the external
activity. Maybe it's one of those things that's maybe a little bit more comfortable right now because if it's pricing that you can do and you can actually find revenue and opportunities there for your firm. So yeah, I'm excited about it because it's the forgotten place for pricing sometimes. Yes, that's absolutely right. Sometimes we can be so distracted by what's new and what's novel, we can forget about the old so-called cash cows going back to our our Business School days from a
little while ago. But the things that really, really can have an impact on our companies that can allow us to exceed our expectations and move on there. So as you stated, yeah, new things are bright and shiny and attract a lot of attention. But sometimes it is the old so-called workhorses of the organization where there's really a lot of potential and a lot of opportunity for continued growth as we progress through the life cycle of the product.
And even towards the end of a product's life cycle, there can still be great opportunities for profitability and growth and reinvestment in the next new product with gains that we can right there. So I think that that's a great point. So Deanne, I know that you make the case that while initial pricing decisions are often backed by deep research, a lot of analysis, a lot of thought, but price management after the launch is sometimes where a lot
of companies fall short. Can you talk about some of the risks associated with a set it and forget it pricing mind frame? Yes, I think some of the things are hard to see. So one of the things that I've noticed is that you are not really always able to measure productivity loss. And I think about like your sales teams are, are people that that are really trying to sell
your whole portfolio. And if they have to keep continuing to come in and ask for a discount or you know, a promotion because it's no longer competitive, that's taking their time when they could just be out selling, right? So your price value is off. And an individual portfolio owner might say, well, that's OK, it's just these 10 things. But if you look across your whole firm, it could be hundreds
of things. So, and usually then what kicks in is that psychology by that portfolio owner that says, but if I drop price all the time, then I have a volume hurdle to overcome, right? So they're thinking, why not just take new business at the lower price and leave my old business at the higher price because my margin is better, right? But they're not really digging
into the numbers. They don't really understand like how much is being sold at different price points because to be honest, it's a lot of work, right? And, and now that I've got, you know, 20-30 years of a life cycle going on, even all those changes that have created to the place that you're in is overwhelming. So when it becomes overwhelming, we, we just kind of again, shut that door, walk away. Maybe that's not so interesting. But really that productivity loss, you know, creating that
room for growth. I always say like, how can you extend the life cycle of a product? You could really extend the life site. It's not just about dropping price, it's about extending that life cycle, keeping people interested. It's also a brand. You could compromise your brand, right where you're saying, oh, well, you know, your, your widgets, they're overpriced by 20%. You're always trying to take advantage of of me as a
consumer, right? So be careful because you don't want to get a reputation for having pricing that's wrong and that makes it difficult to buy from you. And, and we all know, right, like Kevin, you're a consumer. I know, I know you're out there on Amazon. I know you're out there on different websites, right? You have favorite things you like to buy, right? And you all know that if the pricing was really wrong, you probably wouldn't buy those things on those websites
anymore. So think about that. You know what, when you're out there pricing and you're not managing your price, you're losing buyers and and you don't want to lose buyers because the lower your volume goes, that's going to also cost. That means your cost could go up, right? So be careful. Like think about like, think about like I just talked about four different things that can really make an impact on your profit and loss statement, right?
Like manufacturing, keeping your manufacturing facility full sales productivity and time, extending that life cycle, taking more share, those are all things that price management allows you to do with existing products that might be around a little while. They're vintage. They're vintage products. Kevin, we have to sell this. Understood. We like vintage products. That's great. We love vintage products, they're amazing. Definitely. And I like your statements there.
And the good thing about our part of the business world, the good thing about pricing and revenue management is that basically we should be central to a lot of different thought processes, a lot of different goals, a lot of different departments, internal factors, external factors, marketplace
factors and so on and so forth. And some of the things you mentioned there is if we are manufacturing and if we're keeping our plants open and running, that can also make us more efficient and give us a better opportunity to provide better service to our marketplaces. Also, it's very, very critical for businesses in tough times and so-called interesting times that if you are easy to do business with, then that is often a product attribute, a
feature, a benefit in itself. If you are difficult to do business with, then that is a very difficult thing to overcome. And you mentioned this also when you talk about we can't compromise our brand. So it's not only the physical product, but it might be the services, the delivery, everything that goes around your product. If that is not all in your favor, if that makes it hard to do business with, then that takes time and effort to overcome that.
In addition to, as you mentioned, the value of your sales person's time and effort, they've only got so many hours in a day that we cannot make more time. That's the one resource that is truly, truly limited for all of us. We are never going to have more than 24 hours in a day. And so if we can work with them to be as efficient, effective as they can, that's also another
benefit for everyone involved. So I love the statements there about how all of this can come from thinking about the product life cycle not being, you know, we'll set it and let it go through and, and forget it. And basically we have to remember to keep things up to date because that helps us to be better partners for our customers, for our internal teams, our external teams and so on and so forth there. And there's so much there that really catches my eye.
But one of the things that we have talked about is the idea how, as you mentioned, price misalignment can chip away at your profitability. So what are some of the other key indicators that it may be time for a price redesign or to rethink what we initially would have considered when setting a price for a product or a service? So. I would say one of the biggest indicators for me is when your sales team continually asks you
to quote, right? So you know, and, and some businesses are really updated with new software, right, about doing that CPQ bid and quoting. If you're getting a lot of requests to quote at a price that's different than your current average selling price or different than your published price, when you and you accept those quotes, you're like, Oh
yes, we'll, we'll take that. And all of a sudden you see that you have a large percentage of your business going out through custom quoting or unique price points. That's maybe a sign that your price is not right, right there. There must be a competitive offering out there that makes your price too high. And maybe people love doing business with you. Like they feel really good. They like a lot of things about you, but your price for these particular items is not good enough.
So that they need to ask for that. That's usually the first indicator. The other thing that's maybe a silent indicator that I've discovered a lot of people, again, not a lot of time to look as you look at that churn, like all of a sudden that business was there and then all of a sudden you realize like maybe 90 days later, jeez, my sales are really down at that. Now you've had inventory, so you haven't the manufacturing plant maybe hasn't asked you like, hey, what's going on?
But all of a sudden it becomes very apparent that you've lost a lot of business. Now you now you have to actually figure out where did it go and who did it go to and why isn't it there anymore? And that actually takes even more energy, right? So I was telling people like, don't be afraid about price management because the energy it takes to find lost business and earn a customer back, it's double like it's way more than that, right?
And, and you know, I, I would rather have more fun doing pricing work then trying to figure out how to get business back from somebody because what if they find out, Oh, that competitive yours is also really nice. They have a lot of nice products and it's really easy to buy from. And you're like, shoot, now if I even actually do the right thing for pricing, I, it doesn't matter. Like they're, they're super happy over here with your friends, right, Your other
friends, that's your competitor. So it's really hard to win customers back. So be careful, be careful about thinking this isn't really that important and you can just kind of chip away and kind of do what I like to call it the management of the day versus the strategy of the year, right? So I would rather be strategic. I would rather put together a credible pricing strategy that the market accepts and is
willing to pay for. Then kind of like every day there's like a little fire burning and you have to manage, manage, manage. That's exhausting. It's not fun and we all know that pricing can be really fun. So I think it's a chance for you to have a lot of fun in that
price management space. And also because there's so many different levers that you get out of this that you can go to your management team, whether it's decreased management cost, you know, productivity growth, it really can give you that shining moment of adding value to your company and your pricing seat. Like there's so many levers to touch. You can bring make happiness such a big thing. And it's a really good feeling.
And I think people need to be drawn to that because sometimes we're struggling for, for certain things. This can be a really, I'm not going to say it's low hanging fruit, but really they can be a lot of substance there that can really bring value that makes your pricing department shine. Excellent points and I love your description about looking at exception management. If that becomes a full time job in itself, then really you're being in the old 5 levels of
pricing. You know you're never going to be above the firefighter. You're always putting out a fire. That doesn't give me time for strategic thought, that doesn't give you opportunities to move
forward. If that's taking all of your time and energy, all of your sales managers time and energy, all of your leadership's time and energy, then that's really suboptimal because not only does that basically take all of the emphasis away from things that you could be doing, but it's making you focus on kind of low activities and to less profitable work there if you're always doing something like that. So yes, definitely agree it's
going to be strategic. It's good to remember if prices are misaligned, let's not start replicating those errors over and over again. Let's try to fix them. That's going to give us the opportunity to move forward to save time and energy for all parties involved and allow us to do more strategic thinking down the line. So that is a great way to put that. So thank you very much for the explanation there and the end, of course, very much looking forward to seeing you again at
our Spring conference. And we are going to talk about some of your offerings and things like that later. But I do want to ask one question about some actionable tools and frameworks. So let's talk about some analytical methods to price variance policies. So without giving too much away, what is 1 practical take away that people, when they come to our conference, we're going to be in Dallas from Day 6 to night. Of course, we're looking forward to seeing you there.
Tell us a little bit about 1 great practical take away that you are going to hope people take back to their teams. You know, there there's going to be, you're right, Kevin. We have so many great tools. They're going to be really exciting. I think one of the tools that you're going to be able to take away from us is an easy and easier way. So I, I know a lot of us are really great with data, like we love it, right?
But one of the tools that we're going to give you is a way for you to put that data into a tool set that allows you to pull it out and talk to people that maybe aren't as detailed as we are in pricing, right? So some of that is like, how do I take, you know, 1000 things that really are exciting to us, like bring it forward and sell that story to a leader, right? That is a different thing. They I, I, I love a good spreadsheet, Kevin, you know, you know, I love a good
spreadsheet. I love good AII love some good software graphs. But we got to make sure that we're paying attention that when we when we find something, we can easily bring that forward to our leadership team and say, here's what this means. So, so yes, there's going to be tools there for you to use to, to figure out some challenges about like, hey, is, is my pricing right? Should I change my pricing? What does it mean?
Was this promotion successful? And at the same time, how to deliver that in a meaningful way to a leader who just wants to know, did I make money? Is it profitable? Should I do this again? Why or why not? Right. So that value selling, you're like, but you're, you become a salesperson in pricing, right? At some point, you got to sell the people who want to hear about what you can bring. So we're going to, we're going to teach how to be salespeople too.
And I know that sounds kind of scary. You should never be afraid in, in our workshops, Kevin. We're all, we're all friends and family and, and I promise you that you will be a superstar when you're selling your pricing story. So give it a chance. I'm going to, I'm putting all my money on all these pricers because they're you're, they're all great and they all have something to offer and I know they can do it. So. Very nice.
Yeah, I often tell pricing people, you know, our members from across the globe that yes, we are all sales people because you do have to sell these ideas inside your organization, outside your organization. And I love your description of even though we can be spreadsheet Wizards, Wizards with pricing optimization software. Analytical Wizards, statistical Wizards and so on and so forth
there. If you dump a lot of Greek letters and XS and YS and coefficients and things like that on senior leaders, it's just going to go right over their heads. And also when we think about that, we have to talk to people inside our organization in particular, in a language that they can understand. So with your leaders, yes, 32nd elevator speech, this is going to make money. This is how we're going to do it. AB and C boom, a first year MBA
who's a financial wizard. Feel free to talk spreadsheets with him or her. And of course, you're experienced salespeople. That's a completely different discussion. So I like how we have to be the artists and the scientists there depending on the market. We have to be well-rounded and be able to talk to people in a language that they can understand. And we have to know their goals and how we have that Venn diagram overlap with their goals as well and how we can be good
team members there. So that one is definitely not an either or. That one has to be an and you've got to be able to talk to to all of those groups. You do, you do. And I went and you know, Kevin, you're going to laugh because I always say like I it's like a, the classical visual of a psychologist office, right, where you have the couch. I would say like, welcome to the pricing couch because a lot of people want to feel good about your story, right? So we also become therapists.
So, so here we are. We're going to be here to help you like get those people to feel the safe, they're going to be safe and it's going to be OK. So, you know, we're going to get you a degree in pricing therapy. I like it. And yeah, being a therapist is a good one. And that's also another world that we have with our sales people as well. When we do have pricing changes and they of course think that the world is going to end, they're never going to get paid again.
There goes everything. And of course, we have to be the ones that say, OK, we're going to take a deep breath, we'll be your therapist here. We offer great products and services and value. Here's why. And we think that our marketplace is going to be appreciative of that and we're going to get through it and we're going to do great things. So I like how we have to be a therapist on a couple different levels there as well.
And so your workshop that you're going to Co lead with our friend Antonella Sunito is entitled actioning practical pricing problems, a pricing escape room experience. It's the first time that you're doing this workshop with this. So in addition to what you mentioned earlier, can you tell us a little bit about the escape room experience and another sneak peek at some other things that our attendees might gain from your full day CPP workshop? Sure.
So if you're someone who likes games, right, this this is the workshop for you. So some, you know, it's always great to listen and hear great information and take that in, but some people just really want to get into it and actually do things. So the escape room is designed to give you a game that's a pricing game, right? And a challenge and really for you to have to activate your skill set. So it's a timed event, right? Because there is going to be a winner.
So if you're competitive, this could be for you. And so the other and you're going to get new tools. So even if you're really an experienced pricer, this is really a chance to be on a team, play a pricing game. You might get a you, you can always walk away with something. You're going to get at least a couple of tidbits, but you're not going to be sitting in the room listening to me talk. No, you're not going to be sitting in the room listening to
antebellum talk. We're going to give you a little, a little starter and then we're going to start the clock and you're going to be working on solving a pricing problem. So I, I think for people that enjoy games, they like complex problem solving. They, they, they're competitive. This is going to be an all day fun fest. And by the way, I'm going to give you a sticker. So look, I want a sticker that says you escaped the pricing room and some people might not
escape. Kevin, you, you have to know like, like what, what if you don't solve the problem? You don't get to open the next door to go into the next room. We're going to help you. No worry. There's no judgement. It's only fun. But I but I think it's going to be a lot of fun for people that just like to activate and do things in a way to learn it in that style. So we hope you can join us because I think it's going to be really fun. Definitely. That does sound like that's
going to be a lot of fun. And of course, as pricing people, as revenue managers, we often like games. That may be a choice, but all of us have to love game theory and kind of the implications in the aspects there because that's just so critical to what we do. I know that we were all taught in microeconomics one O 1, the horrible 45° downward sloping price versus sales curve where, Oh yeah, I dropped my price 10%, therefore automatically I'm going to sell 10% more widgets.
Of course, we in the real world know. Yeah. Once you do that, your competitors going to have a response, your markets going to have a response. And that could go up, down or sideways depending on a lot of market factors, many of which are well beyond your control. So yeah, game theory.
I feel like you're already in the game because we have some of these like what I'm going to call like external factor cards that could just get played in the middle of your in the middle of your game and you have to switch it off. Like that could happen. It could happen, Kevin. And then and then stuff happens and you got to change your direction, right? Absolutely.
Yeah, that is intriguing and that sounds like a great real life current very pertinent example as as we are talking now where we really do not know what's going to happen in the hours, days, weeks, months ahead. There will be opportunities. There will be opportunities for us to not set our prices and forget them because we will have to be dynamic. We will have to change as the
market conditions change. And also it is really an opportunity for us, as you've mentioned before, by being on the front foot here that allows us to focus our energies better, our leadership's energies better, our sales team's energies better, instead of chasing exceptions and doing exception management worried about we're discounting all the time. Therefore, our price is really just this mythological number that doesn't exist anywhere.
But really we have a lot of opportunities to take advantage of that and to move forward there. And Deanne, I know that we could talk forever on this topic, but I believe that we are running pretty near on our our schedule time here. We are really, really thrilled that you are going to be on our program in Dallas.
For those of us who have not been to 1 of Deanne's presentations yet, her experience with Three M, again, a company that makes everything and everything that goes into everything, her experience, really she is one of our most highly rated speakers that we've had. And we're really, really excited about your presentations coming up with us. So thanks again for sharing your preview with us today. We're really, really looking
forward to seeing you. And with that, definitely take advantage of Deanne's workshop with Antonella Sunito. And we are really looking forward to seeing you in Dallas for PBS profitable from May 6th to May 9th. And Deanne, thank you so much. Any final words for our audience as we begin to run up against the clock? My fault there. Oh, no. Well, thanks for having me, Kevin.
I really appreciate it. And I would say if you're listening to this and you haven't signed up, I, I know Kevin will let you sign up. I know Kevin will let you attend. So while you might have missed the early bird pricing, the value is still there. So sign up, get to Dallas. I, I mean, it's going to be so fun. You don't want you, you have to be there. So please join us. We'd love to have you all and see you all in person. So we'll see you there soon. Excellent.
Thank you, Deanne. So of course, you can check out our schedules, our conference brochures, more information about our event, about Deanne hammerherself@pricingsociety.com. Deanne, very much looking forward to you and for our people listening in, looking forward to seeing you as well. You can always reach out to me with questions about anything that PPS has to offer. And with that, everyone, please keep an eye out for other Let's Talk pricing podcasts.
Thanks for listening. We will see you very soon in Dallas. Thank you so much.