Satish Dharmarajan is the Director of Pricing and Business Intelligence at Orkin, He is an Advisory Board Member at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, and has held analytics roles at Home Depot, Walgreens, and Whirlpool. Satish also acts in short films.

In this episode, Satish educates us on differentiating products/services from competitors of similar offerings as he stresses the importance of understanding the buyer’s journey along with the core problem that they want to solve.

 

Why you have to checkout today’s podcast:

• Learn the importance of knowing what the buyer's journey is and what state they are in as they come in to buy a product
• Find out how brands differentiate themselves from competitors when they all offer the same products/services
• Understand how customer-perceived value helps brands sell well even with competitors

 

“If you know your customer, you can price it right. If you know what they're looking for, you can have them pay what you want them to pay for your product or service.” 

– Satish Dharmarajan

 

Topics Covered:

01:50 – How Satish got into pricing

04:29 – Talking about getting to that ‘big place’ and the process that it involves in order to reach that

07:08 – The importance of knowing what the customer is specifically looking to solve

11:39 – Mark’s pigeon problem

12:40 – How brands differentiate themselves from competitors when they all offer the same products/services

17:54 – How customers choose where to buy between brands, and how pricing and packaging people should respond

20:59 – Appliance pricing at Home Depot; how customers care about price changes

23:34 – Looking at and analyzing competition; the importance of customer-perceived value

26:26 – Satish’s pricing advice

26:59 – Connect with Satish

 

Key Takeaways:

“That's basics of customer service, which is not too different if you were in the cellphone business, if you were in the internet business, or if you are doing anything else, selling anything else online. You would want to know what specifically that customer is looking to solve for.” – Satish Dharmarajan

“The way your products are arranged next to each other, could be used as a leverage for selling the same products at a different price point.” – Satish Dharmarajan

“As pricing professionals, you need to figure out what's the bare minimum, such that you can make sure that even the person who is coming in to replace a refrigerator is going to be willing to pay. But at the same time, it's not at a giveaway price where you're not making enough margins from the other consumers.” – Satish Dharmarajan

 

People / Resources Mentioned:

• Orkin: https://www.orkin.com/

 

Connect with Satish Dharmarajan:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/satishdrajan/
• Email: [email protected]

 

Connect with Mark Stiving:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stiving/
• Email: mailto:[email protected]