Hiring demand is "very high" in six of the 10 markets where this skill is most common - metro New York, Chicago, Atlanta, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Boston - according to LinkedIn Talent Insights. Look beyond Silicon Valley, and pricing strategy is a winning skill throughout the United States. And in September 2018, he became vice president and head of pricing strategy at ServiceNow, a booming software-as-a-service company in Santa Clara, Calif., with a $31 billion market capitalization. In 2017, he had been recruited to a new job as chief pricing officer at an internet-of-things company, Hitachi Vantara. His ascent started at Workday, a human resources software company, where he arrived in 2016 to be its global deals management leader. Like a mountaineer fixing fresh ropes as the summit draws nearer, Saghatelian has been taking his skills to new opportunities, year by year. The age of real-time, data-driven pricing insights had arrived. By the time he wrapped up at the networking company in 2016, specialized pricing software from companies such as PROS, Vendavo and Zilliant commanded his close attention. "It drives high business impact, which drew me to the discipline." In his early years at Cisco, Excel spreadsheets carried the load. "Pricing is a combination of art and science," Saghatelian explains. When consulting work led to a new job in 2008, helping Cisco centralize its pricing initiatives, he jumped at the chance. He spent several years as a business-process consultant at Accenture, before earning an MBA from the University of Southern California's Marshall School. When Alex Saghatelian graduated from the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 1999, a career in pricing strategy wasn't on his horizon. Add up all the other pricing strategy specialists at J&J, Mok says, and "you're probably talking about more than a hundred people across the globe." It was just me." Now he's DePuy's senior director of pricing strategy and analytics, heading a team of 11. Seven years ago, when Mok joined DePuy, he says, "I was employee 001 in strategic pricing. But he's got high hopes for AI tools that can help DePuy Synthes do a better job of realigning the discount/list price boundaries, in ways that could benefit both his company and his customers. Traditional analytical tools struggle to make sense of all the "unstructured data" within each contract, Mok says. Rarely bought items that aren't covered by contracts may be purchased at full list price.Įach contract can have its own character, Mok says, and the boundary between what's on-contract and off-contract isn't set systematically. It's traditional, in his industry, to set up formal contracts with major customers, providing some level of volume discounts on frequently purchased items. Rigid rate cards seem clunky and old-fashioned identifying the winning deal has become a sport that anyone can play.Īt DePuy Synthes, an orthopedic devices unit of Johnson & Johnson, David Mok is using artificial intelligence to build the next generation of pricing systems. With innovators like American Airlines, Amazon and Uber leading the way, there's more room in both consumer and business markets to fine-tune prices as needed. "People don't get mad anymore if they discover that the passenger in the next seat on an airplane got a much cheaper ticket," says John Zhang, a marketing professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School. Second, the growing popularity of behavioral economics opens the way to experiment with bolder strategies that selectively target bargain hunters, switchers, loyalists and other types of customers that might be in the mix.įinally, the sorts of pricing zigzags that infuriated people in the early days of e-commerce now are seen as normal. Three big trends have propelled pricing experts out of the basement and into their companies' elegant corner officers.įirst, the rise of big data makes it easier to analyze potential customers in timely and highly segmented ways. now cite pricing strategy as an explicit or inferred skill on their profiles - and there's demand for more.Ī generation ago, pricing was just a "tactical afterthought" in companies' overall strategies, observes Jean-Pierre Dube, a marketing professor at the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business. Some 705,000 LinkedIn members in the U.S. Industries as diverse as automotive, construction and internet are hunting for these specialists. First by accident, and then by design, both men have migrated into a fast-paced new field: pricing strategy.Īn analysis by LinkedIn Talent Insights identifies pricing strategy as a skill attracting "very high hiring demand" in the U.S. But those beginnings barely hint at the careers they've created. Alex Saghatelian majored in business, with a concentration in accounting. David Mok is a former naval officer who found his way into marketing.
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