Most companies make pricing an after thought.

Most companies also are never able to use pricing as the superpower it actually is.  

I have had the privilege of overseeing revenue management for over $6 billion in revenue across a diverse range of industries during the past decade. Throughout this experience, I've gained a deep understanding of the critical role that pricing plays in business success. 

I'm passionate about sharing my expertise and insights to help organizations harness the power of pricing strategies to improve profitability and overall performance.

Karan Sood

Pricing skills should be pie-shaped.


Most pricing professionals grow deep in only one or two areas.


The ones who rise will build a 4-layer toolkit.

Before we dive in, if this resonates, please like + share so more people in pricing see this.



1) Core Skill - Pricing: This is your foundation.

You need breadth across pricing models AND depth in how pricing actually works across industries. It’s not enough to just know one space.


You should know how to price a widget, a service contract… a subscription… a perpetual license… usage pricing… value-based vs. cost-plus.


Your pricing instinct comes from knowing many models - not just the one in your company. Talk to people outside of your core.



2) Essential Skills - Finance + Industry

Finance is non-negotiable. If you don’t know what’s inside a P&L, you should start now. You should be able to understand:

AR
BOM
payment terms
reserves
accruals
margin math contribution vs. gross…

You should be able to slay a P&L, 7 ways to Sunday.

Industry knowledge is the other essential. Knowing the market, competitors, and the value chain. It will let you speak with authority in any room.



3) Preferred - Soft Skills:

This is where careers are made. Don’t underestimate this. Don’t just be the excel ninja, that is tablestakes. 

Need to grow your Influence.
Be better at executive communication.
Stakeholder management.
Framing difficult conversations.
Reading a room full of execs. 
Know when to be firm and flexible.



4) Desirable - Cross-Functional Knowledge

This is your long-tail advantage. Know other areas of the business like:

Sales and Marketing
Operations
Contracts
Supply chain
Commercial terms
Basic legal understanding
Internal processes


You don’t need to master everything, but knowing how things actually work makes you a far more strategic partner.


Develop this skill set and your impact becomes impossible to ignore.


If you made it this far, please: 

👍🏼Like it or 
♻️share it with everyone
✉️ Send it to a peer.
💾 Save it for yourself

————————
Making conversations like this easier with PricingTribe.

Something pricing. Be a part of PricingTribe.

Stop obsessing over price. Your customers aren’t. More you obsess, more you fear.


Price is just one of the many triggers in a buying decision - and often not the biggest one.

Usually it’s the 3rd or the 4th factor.


Here’s one of my favourite research examples:


Alan Sawyer and Peter Dickson once stood in a supermarket aisle watching people shop.
They noted which items went into the cart… then asked those same shoppers the price of the item they just picked up.


The results?

- Half the shoppers were wrong.
- Most underestimated the price by ~15%.
- One-fifth couldn’t recall the price at all.


If people can’t recall the price of something they literally bought 30 seconds ago, what does that say?

You try, do you remember the price of the last item you purchased ?



It tells you this:

Price matters, but it rarely drives the entire decision. And only 15%~20% of customers are truly price sensitive.


Yet most companies behave like 100% of their customers are price sensitive - and they underprice themselves into the ground.


Yes, there are exceptions like commodities, hyper-competitive categories, and recessionary pressure. But even then, those conditions are temporary.



The fundamentals never change:
- Build a brand.
- Obsess over value.
- Obsess over quality.
- Obsess over delivery.
- Obsess over your customer.


Retail or B2B? Same principles apply.


Price is a signal. Value is the engine.

If this is useful:

✉️ send it to someone 
♻️ Repost it to your network
💾 Save it for the future.


————————-
Building PricingTribe. Ask me anything about the community.

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5 tips I gave the MBA and a Masters Class.


1) You can’t escape pricing. No matter what field you end up weather that’s finance, marketing, or product, you won’t be far from pricing. So empower yourself.


2) Remember nothing will increase profitability for any company you work for like pricing. So when asked for ideas for next year, remember ‘Pricing Optimization’.


3) Whatever pricing decision you make, do it ethically. Remember very fine line between what’s good for profit va what’s ethical and good for customers.


4) Build something. Anything. It has never been easier to build. Build a website, an app, a  newsletter. Whatever gives you an edge. Learn to use loveable and claude !


5) In a world of AI, cherish human connections. Network relentlessly !! I wish I did in univ, I thought that was a chore not worth the effort. I wish I listened…


6) Decide your future role now, don’t leave it for luck for after graduation. If you dream it up, then lot of forces will align to make it happen. 


7) Add people from your future domain now on LinkedIn. Chat, and meet them virtually. What’s the worse that can happen ? You got nothing to loose.


8) Add the 1% extra in your job search effort. That 1% could be finding a referral, messaging the hiring manager, sending a pain letter, sending your portfolio, connecting with an alumni….all these added up or even individually will make you stand out.


9) Cherish your time at the univ with your peers. Some of you will become lifelong friends. As gruesome and challening this time is, you will never be back in school once you are done. This will be it !! 


10) This holiday season use Keepa to save yourself some money on Amazon, buy airline tickets in incongito mode on android :D


Thank you to my alma matter and Dave Bussière  for bringing me back to the same halls and classrooms that I once roamed as a student. It was good to be back !! 


___________________
Building PricingTribe.

I didn’t say that. John did.
John who ? Baba yaga ?
(Had to ! IYKYK)

I love this quote.

Lot of products fall into this bucket. 

Apple, 
Coke, 
P&G, 
lululemon, 
starbucks, 
Air jordans, 
Sonos, 
Dyson,
Disney trips,

List goes on…


But honestly I have no idea about the origin of the author. Anyone has any idea about the John Harrison who said it ? 

——————————-
PricingTribe community is going live soon for Alpha founding cohort.

Starting or stepping into a new pricing role?
Don’t dream big. Dream small.

I know the instinct. You want to take on the biggest, baddest pricing problem.

Trust me - I’ve done it. And I won’t do it again. 

Here is the mistake pricing professionals make in new roles:

They aim for a big win too early when they have 0 credability.


But early in the role is about sustainability, credibility, and momentum. Your first few months should be about small wins.


Fix the things everyone ignored. Simple things like clear the backlog people were too lazy or too scared to touch.


These small wins do the heavy lifting. They show your execution power. The wins are small but so are the losses.



Small becomes smooth. Smooth becomes fast. Fast becomes trust.


And trust is the real skill in pricing. You are not going to go far without it.



Why does this matter?


Pricing is already a cross-discipline battlefield  with Sales, Product, Finance, Ops, Execs. Everyone has an opinion, and none of them match.


When you take on a big pricing overhaul too early, two things happen:


- Time to value increases.
-  Cost to value increases.


That’s when red flags appear. And when big projects fail, the losses get amplified.


The “I told you it wouldn’t work” rhetoric takes over. Your credibility takes a hit.



This is why I always advocate for small execution early on. Frequent, visible, low-risk impact before the big swings.


What do small wins look like?


- Fix clunky approval workflows
- Clean messy price lists
- Delete old SKUs or discount rules
- Tighten discount guardrails
- Run simple PVM or waterfall analyses
- Repair spreadsheets everyone fears
- Schedule 1:1s with Sales
- Shadow a few customer calls


Small actions. Big intent. Bigger impact.


Go small and go far !!
————-
PricingTribe community is live. Slowly onboarding founding members. If you applied, your invite will come soon in coming weeks keep an eye out for ‘PricingTribe’ in your emails.

5 fundamental questions in Pricing: 

1) What value are you creating? Economic/Emotional.

2) Who is it truly for? Your ideal ICP.

3) Why is it worth this price ? WTP.
 
4) What proof do you have that customer agree ? Research.

5) Who inside the company believes in this price enough to defend it? Person of Influence.


You can elasticity-model, price-index, A/B test and competitor-benchmark all day. You can debate pricing ownership till the cows come home. 

But if you answered one of those questions wrong, everything downstream is garbage. 


The real work in pricing is answering those 5 questions — clearly, consistently, and courageously in all rooms. 


This comes from 17 years of defending prices at all levels in all rooms. Its never easy to defend pricing when everyone can be better at pricing than you ! 

-------------
The goal of the PricingTribe community is to help you elevate your pricing effectiveness and bring like minded pricing professionals together.

It's not the CEO's responsibility to price. 

Just like its not their responsibility to create a product, or do marketing or take customer service calls. It's to support the creation of the best outcome. 

Too many people suggest CEO's role should be the final approver or should own pricing or team should roll up to CEO (good luck with that one). Maybe in niche cases, smaller companies. In most cases they won't have the bandwidth or the org structure to support it. 

CEO's role in pricing in opinion is to empower and to signal.  


Empowerment: 
To create the right atmosphere for pricing to thrive. Making sure product, finance, marketing and pricing are collaborating at the right phases in the right way. Making sure meaningful discussions are having, and right questions are getting asked. 

Even a simple questions like: 

- Has pricing seen this product ? 
- How will we communicate value ? 
- At what stage do we revaluate pricing ?
- What are the pricing KPI to monitor ? 
- Can product-finance-marketing bring aligned reco ? 

Those questions alone will arm teams with a lot of meaningful info and create space for dialogues. 

Signaling:
Second important part is "Signaling", internally and externally. 

If you watch closely, the best CEO's during annual and quarterly reports will communicate their pricing intent. What they intend to do on price. This allows them to signal where they are headed, and where they would like the customers to follow: 

External Simple signals like: 

- We are not going to compete on price. 
- We are going for aggressive market capture
- We are launching new value products
- Costs are rising, we may take price up

Those signals express pricing intent, to be read by the market and customers. It limits price wars often when executed correctly. Look at companies like Pepsi, Coke, Unilever, P&G, Ikea, McDonald's, etc and look up analyst transcripts. 

If you are looking to build pricing confidence, yes make it your mission to get alignment from CEO but don't make it your mission to have your roles roll up to CEO's. Well intentioned as it may be, you are better off being a better collaborator for the CEO. 

If you want to talk to other like minded pricing professionals on topics like this, the place to be 'PricingTribe Community'. Now slowly letting people in.

#Pricing Giving Wednesday Again !
Last time we made at least 8 connections. 
That's 7 more than my target. 

Help like this can be life changing. 

I still have an inbox full of people looking for new roles or candidates. 

You know where those roles exist. 

Some of you are hiring. 
Some of you have connections there.
Some of you have employee referrals.
Some of you have career advice. 

Here is a snippet what I have: 

- I-Hsuan  is hiring for a pricing analyst in US

- Umesh is looking for pricing candidates in India.

- Sahima is looking for 2 smart pricing specialists in UK

- Jonathan is hiring for a commercial finance and pricing analyst in Georgia US

- Other Jonathan is looking for a very smart SAAS Monetization Sr. manager

 

These roles have 100's of applicants. But I can help you get front of line. You just have to ask ! 


If you are looking for a role, tell me so I can make a connection. If you know of a role tell me, I have a inbox full of people looking for roles.  

Tell me openly here or privately in inbox. 


♻️ Repost it to your network
📧 Forward it to someone 
💾 Save it for the future. 

PS: Also, while you are here Steven Forth, and Mark Stiving and I are going on a webinar tomorrow to discuss the state of pricing in Q3. What happened ? What is happening to compute cost, what is happening with credit models, vibe coding...  

Join us or access recording. Link in comments later. 

-------------
Building PricingTribe. Founding members invite going out soon.

It was such an amazing day ! To walk the halls again with students who are currently going through the program, was a powerful reminder of the power of giving back to the very place that set us and me for success. If it wasn’t for Odette, I would have never started my career in pricing as a co-op and transformer it into something inpactful 17 years later. 

I wish this cohort of business students all the best for success in the program and in the career. My inbox and my network is always available.

It was an incredible full-circle moment as Karan Sood, an esteemed Odette MBA alumnus, returned to present to the current MBA cohort on Pricing Strategy! 

We are so thankful to Dave Bussière for arranging this visit and bringing Karan all the way from Toronto to share his expert knowledge on using pricing as a key lever for profit. Hearing directly from an alumnus who followed a path similar to ours is truly inspiring. Thank you, Karan, for investing your time in us!

#OdetteSchoolofBusiness #AlumniSuccess #PricingStrategy #BusinessInsights

#PricingTribe Community update. 
Behind the scenes.


Here is what goes behind the scenes of launching a community. So many things you learn were outside of my wheelhouse. 


- Creating the PricingTribe web front end

- Creating a robust backend to capture info

- Creating workflows to capture application

- Creating product offer, recreating it, and then again

- Creating all design elements from scratch

- Selecting a platform, only to scratch it

- Creating banners, layouts, visuals

- Creating meeting and event cadence

- Learning to use a community platform

- Selecting founding and beta members from 170+ applications

- Creating groups of people with similar goals. 

- Creating onboarding workflows etc...


List goes on and on... 


All so that members can have the best experience inside the community once they enter. Because I want to create a space that speaks to pricing professionals and built for them..  Community should revolve around the pricing professionals looking for transformation.. Its a place for them !


Founding members are getting the invites today. These members will help test out the process and systems for the rest of the members coming in soon in January. Everyone will be notified about application status soon. 


Ask me anything about the community..

-----------
Building PricingTribe.

#pricingtribe. How do you solve for this ?

In the end, the primary obstacle to deal success isn’t customer’s lack of appreciation for the “supplier’s value”; it’s customer’s inability to establish broad-based agreement on what they’re trying to solve.

Excerpt from ‘The Framemaking Sale’ by Brent Adamson and @karl schmidt .



Sometimes it’s not the value delivered, but more clarity on the customer side on what kind of value needs to be delivered.


————————
Building Pricingtribe.

Why is credit bases pricing confusing ?
Can Vibe coding really help pricing ? If how ? 
Compute cost is rising, so should your price ? 

Lots of questions. 

Luckily we have • Mark Stiving, Ph.D. . and Steven Forth  and this good looking man !!Available to answer today.


Last change to register for webinar/recording: 


We are covering the biggest shifts hitting pricing teams right now:


- Token and credit based pricing in AI
- Vibe coding
- The major pricing moves in Q3
• The rising cost of compute

If pricing feels like it is changing faster than ever, that is because it is.


This session gets you caught up in under an hour.

We go live today at 12 noon EST. 

Last chance to register:

https://lnkd.in/gVszQyuw

Shantanu Basu

Arcserve

VP, Revenue Operations

SalesOps.io

Advising high-growth tech companies on commercial & Pricing processes, tools, and analytics

RevOps & Pricing Expert

Value Chain Mechanics

Working with startups and scaling B2B Tech firms to minimize CAC and maximize price-realization by aligning their internal & external GTM value-chain, and by designing & operationalizing market-oriented Packaging & Pricing.

Advised on GTM & Pricing strategy for an AI startup for SME manufacturing firms. 

Created a financial model, including a pricing structure, for an EV battery marketplace startup to use with investors for a successful & fully funded Series A+ round.

RevOps & Pricing Consultant

Energy Exemplar

Set up RevOps function from scratch for a globally distributed PE portco, delivered 10% increase in win-rate via an ICP based prioritization of the prospect universe (CaPDB), led the first data-driven GTM AOP by building cross-functional data analyses from scratch, and aligned processes & analytics across the buyer journey.

Dayforce

Led the GTM planning & Pricing team, reporting to the Chief Strategy Officer. Led the GTM and Pricing for AI Copilot. 

Increased TAM by 25% by redesigning Packaging, increased price realization by 5% and deal velocity by 8% by simplifying strategic & deal Pricing, and improved AE productivity by 12% by redesigning the pipeline flow & GTM tech-stack.

Head of Sales Planning, Ops & Pricing

Tanium

Led the GTM planning & Pricing team for a global $500M+ SaaS business, reporting to the CFO. Led the GTM and Pricing for new AI based IT & Cloud Risk Platform. 

Redesigned People, Process and Tech for GTM Operations & Pricing to be x-functionally aligned and complimentary versus being siloed. Managed the operationalization of the redesign, resulting in clearer forecast of ACV, increased deal velocity, higher price realization, lower friction in sales process, lower IT spend, smoother Channel operations, and higher visibility into CAC.

Intel Corporation

As COO for a global ~$1B revenue business, transformed the GTM & business operations for the Cloud Management & CyberSecurity business. 

Grew revenue 5% y-o-y in a supply constrained and volume-neutral market, improved culture scores 11 points y-o-y for >100 person organization and directed a >$100M budget. Revenue gains were driven by changes in Pricing, Channel Partner GTM motion and via tighter operational alignment across the GTM value-chain.

Chief of Staff, Head of Sales Planning, Operations & Pricing

Managed Product Marketing and all Sales facing operations for a startup business In China, with worldwide Channel customers for white-label hardware and software. Grew volume by 50% year-on-year for new product lines via Chinese ODMs and worldwide local-OEM customers by supporting geographically distributed sales, marketing and Partner Channel operations teams.

Head of Product Marketing, Pricing & Sales Enablement

Technical Product Manager

The George Washington University

Network Engineer

Halliburton

Led a team of oil well explorers and riggers on deep-sea oil rigs in the oil fields of Bombay High.

Logging & Perforating Engineer

You call me when you need a first-principles thinker, a hands-on operator, and a leader with success in building & leading global teams. Your commercial operations will be transformed to be simple, with broken down silos, and with strategic & operational alignment across all functions. All with an orientation to the customer buying-journey.

Only call me if you can handle radical candor, transparency, challenging of status quo, constructive criticism, and understand the value of 'disagree and commit'. 

Key results:
1. Built RevOps function from scratch and delivered 10% increase in deal-velocity and in win-rate within 6 months. 🧱 

2. Increased price realization by 5-15% for products & services, via direct & channel partners, at 3 scaling SaaS firms. 💰

3. Increased AE productivity 20-30% by redesigning the RevOps tech stack & Ops cadence at 2 scaling SaaS firms. 📈

4. Turned around a declining $1B revenue IT solutions business by transforming product positioning, ecosystem partnerships and operational rigor across all functions. ⚙️

5. Led business development and sales across the globe, including in China, India, Brazil, Russia, and EMEA. 🌏

Outside of work I share my love for sports by coaching competitive youth soccer ⚽️ teams and showing my sons how to love the juxtaposition of emotion & analytics inherent in sport (ask me about how both of them have now blown past me on the karting track 🏎).

Ask me about the lifelong lessons I learned by leading a team at age 22, as a deep-sea oil-rig engineer, detonating RDX explosives in the dark night during the monsoons in the middle of the Indian Ocean. 💥🌊⛈️

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Shantanu Basu

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