Stephan Liozu is the Founder of Value Innoruption Advisors, a boutique consulting firm specializing in disruptive approaches in value, pricing, and strategic management.  He helps leaders in organizations that want to get started in pricing by conducting assessments and building road maps. 

In this episode, learn all about value pricing and how to use the right pricing toolbox to come up with a price based on how much a customer believes a product is worth.  

 

Why you have to check out today’s podcast:

• Discover why value-based pricing is the most neglected step in understanding price 
• Learn how to communicate product value in value conversations with customers before products are made for better pricing 
• Find out the importance of having a pricing strategy to determine a product’s value 

 

“Critical problems are around value. Pricing comes later.”

– Stephan Liozu

 

Topics Covered:

01:01 - How Stephan got into Pricing: having been named ACP deployment officer for Owens Corning Europe taking care of the pricing module in SAP 

02:37 - The role of a chief value officer: Being the chief conductor of all the value and pricing activity in an organization.  

05:50 - The whole process of measuring value, creating, and capturing it using the dollarization methodology 

07:39 - Going through value creation: looking at the customer problem, do a better job of understanding the customer problem, uncovering it through market research, insights, and ethnographic research 

09:14 - ‘99% of businesses are there to create value, oftentimes they don't know what value really means.’ Stephan's thoughts on it. 

13:40 - Conversations put your customers at ease. Stephan's perspective about value conversation and the challenge that goes with it. 

16:30 - Why do companies don't understand what product value is? Stephan states the three reasons why. 

17:58 - Why is it important to ask the right questions?

19:18 - Customer segmentation is an often-neglected part of a value conversation. Another reason why companies don't think about value. 

19:54 - What Stephan is up to these days: leveraging technology to a lot of his work focusing on monetization of software and data. 

21:03 - Hardware product companies are giving away the software as a way to sell their hardware. We hear Stephan's idea about it. 

22:32 - Talking about cost and value in SaaS companies. The challenge of communicating the value of its product. 

24:49 - He couldn't care less about focusing more on the value of a product. His one pricing advice that could impact your business. 

 

Key Takeaways:

“Our competitors are also looking at the customer problem. So, we got to do a better job at understanding the customer problem, uncovering it through market research, insights, ethnographic research.” - Stephan Liozu 

“I wanted not to be a CPO chief pricing officer, I wanted to be a CVO chief value officer, because our critical problems are around value, you know, pricing comes later.” - Stephan Liozu 

“Psychologically it puts your customers at ease when you have a conversation, whether it's in creation mode, in quantification, validation, and communication.” - Stephan Liozu 

“To be doing the work in value, you have to have value conversations.” - Stephan Liozu 

“If we have to continue doing everything in finance around the product, then we're not going to achieve our goal to show the value of everything else we do in the bundle.” - Stephan Liozu

 

People / Resources Mentioned:

• Ron Baker: https://impactpricing.com/podcast/ep44-ronald-j-baker-trash-the-timesheet-exploring-opportunities-in-subscription-businesses/

 

Connect with Stephan Liozu:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephanliozu/
• Website: http://stephanliozu.com/

 

Connect with Mark Stiving:

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