Price Modes: Something You've Never Heard Of, But Need To with Brooks Hamilton

Brooks Hamilton is the Vice President of Services at Zilliant.  He is responsible for Services sales, the technical team, engagement methodology, partner enablement, and training across multiple countries as well as assist building Zilliant's brand via industry speaking engagements. Zilliant is a global company with blue-chip customers around the world. In this episode, Brooks shares how tariffs can make changes on your cost basis and impact your company’s bottom line. That’s why companies who respond quickly in their pricing and have a better understanding of their pricing and tools fare better than those who are not. He also talks about price modes and how clarity and knowledge about it can turn more revenues for your company.   Why you have to check out today’s podcast: Find out why you should care about tariff pricing and what you can do to protect your company’s bottom line Learn and understand pricing mode to turn more profit dollars for your company Understand how pricing culture affects the usage of pricing mode to effect changes in price the best way possible   “Pricing clarity to understand the different mechanisms, to understand who owns them, and the decision-making process that's behind them. So that each level of that process is solving the approach in the best way possible.” - Brooks Hamilton   Topics Covered: 01:37 - How Brooks’ career in Pricing started 03:32 - What is a tariff 05:03 - How tariffs impact cost basis and a company’s revenue 06:03 - Important questions you ask yourself when faced with a tariff concern 07:55 - Contributing factors that can help in the decision to increase price brought about by a tariff 09:15 - Why Zilliant cares about tariff pricing 10:35 - What plagues organizations of all sizes 10:57 - What are a price mode and the mechanisms that go with it 12:04 - What is a great aspect of a price mode for a pricing organization 14:59 - How to use price modes to 16:35 - How the number of price modes used depends on pricing culture 17:17 - Taking a look at an organization’s pricing culture to see how it affects the usage of price modes 19:09 - What is considered as one mode and a price envelope 19:41 - The challenge we see in organizations when it comes to price modes 21:01 - What are the things we need to know for any given price mode 22:05 - Who has the authorization to make the change 23:52 - Understanding price mode and getting into a mode shift 26:43 - Brooks’ best pricing advice that greatly impacts your business   Key Takeaways: “You may be able to provide some air cover, some pricing air cover for you and the competitor. But that's largely going to be based upon whether or not you are a price leader or perceived price follower in the market. And it may also be one where a competitor is poised to make a bit of a move during that time to try to gain additional market share.” - Brooks Hamilton “We know that those customers who can or organizations who can respond quickly, who both have an understanding of their pricing as well as tools to rapidly change their pricing are going to fare better in an environment where tariffs are changing quickly as opposed to those where they're not able to move as nimbly.” - Brooks Hamilton “So, when we engage with a customer, the one thing we want to make sure we do is we establish a common understanding of the mechanisms that a customer uses to price. So, what I mean by a mechanism is having a product price that's available to all reference or downstream prices.” - Brooks Hamilton “I think a great aspect of a price mode for a pricing organization is to first have a really clear understanding of what are the price modes that we use, how much of my revenue do I have going through these various price modes, and then really importantly, who makes the decisions behind the prices for each of those modes.” - Brooks Hamilton “Every organization has price modes, whether they recognize them or not. And the more common challenge that we see is organizations having great clarity behind the price modes that they use in the role that they play, and having a really good understanding of how they make decisions around them, what portion of their business is associated with it, and which tools they use to inform those decisions, as opposed to the exact setup and structure of those modes themselves.”  - Brooks Hamilton   Connect with Brooks Hamilton: LinkedIn Email: [email protected]   Connect with Mark Stiving:  Email: [email protected] LinkedIn