Pricing People as Consultants: Creating and Selling Value in Organizations with Sagar Thakur

<p><strong>Sagar Thakur</strong> is the Business Planning & Pricing Strategy guy at <a href= "https://www.outreach.io/">Outreach</a>. He worked in SaaS Monetization Strategy at <a href= "https://www.vmware.com/">VMware</a>, and he plays way too many instruments.</p> <p>In this episode, Sagar talks about the challenges and opportunities of a pricing role as he explains why costs don’t drive pricing.</p> <p> </p> <p><strong>Why you have to check out today’s podcast:</strong></p> <ul> <li>Discover the challenges and opportunities of being a pricing person, and why it’s challenging but beneficial to have pricing departments as internal consultants</li> <li>Find out what the three-step process is on how to tie value creation and value capture process together</li> <li>Understand why prices aren’t based on costs but on value/the customers’ willingness to pay</li> </ul> <p> </p> <p align="center"><strong>“Don't start with pricing. Start with assessing value, quantifying it, understanding it, getting your handle on what value is with a specific feature or product, how it scales, how customers perceive it, where they start, where they end.”</strong></p> <p align="center"><em>–</em> <em>Sagar Thakur</em></p> <p><em> </em></p> <p><strong>Topics Covered:</strong></p> <p>01:07 – How Sagar got into pricing</p> <p>02:28 – The SaaS monetization strategy work he did in VMware</p> <p>03:48 – The tradeoff: Organizing product portfolio and applying different price metrics</p> <p>06:42 – What Sagar thinks are the challenges and opportunities of a pricing job</p> <p>13:11 – How do we build a pricing culture inside an organization? Is it really a pricing culture or is it a culture of value?</p> <p>16:00 – Pricing departments as internal consultants</p> <p>17:59 – Having the perception that price is based on costs</p> <p>21:09 – Sagar’s pricing advice</p> <p>21:57 – Pricing table topics game: “Costs don't drive pricing. Willingness to pay drives pricing.”</p> <p> </p> <p><strong>Key Takeaways:</strong></p> <p>“In general, simplicity is